Twitter has announced that it’s going to make the last two years of tweets available to companies for market research purposes. From today, anyone can trawl through lunch choices and Follow Fridays dating back as far as January 2010, which Twitter reckons will help companies plan their marketing campaigns. It’s a pretty nifty idea, and shows just how far the micro-blogging service has come since the days when no one was quite sure how it was going to make any money. Privacy campaigners, though, aren’t enamoured by the idea…

At the moment, your everyday, common-or-garden Twitter user can only search the past week of tweets. The first company to offer the two-year service, though, is UK data firm Datasift, which will apparently filter through the 250 million tweets pumped out by the website’s users every day, analysing them not just for their content, but things like sentiment (whether they’re positive or negative), location, and even how much influence the tweeter has – and all for the bargain price of £635 a month (no word on how much of that goes back to Twitter, but presumably a fair whack). Apparently 1,000 companies have already joined Datasift’s waiting list.

Data privacy activist Gus Hosein, executive director of Privacy International, isn’t happy. He said it’s a ‘radical shift in the wrong direction. Twitter has turned a social network that was meant to promote real-time global conversation into a vast market-research enterprise with unwilling, unpaid participants.’

That’s one way of looking at it. But while MT doesn’t deny that there is something faintly creepy about the idea, we’d also argue that Twitter has bills to pay and servers to keep running (rumour has it Justin Bieber alone uses up 3% of the service’s infrastructure). While its ‘promoted tweets’ (ads, essentially) have helped the company to finance its stratospheric growth, the more cash it can get its hands (or wings) on without having to resort to intrusive ads or – worse! – a paywall, the happier its users will be.

Elsewhere in social meeja, two of the internet’s biggest players are at war over claims of patent infringement. According to The New York Times, Yahoo is threatening to sue Facebook patents behind the social network’s advertising, privacy control, messaging and news feed systems. It may be yet another war in the battle of the technology companies (we have it on good authority that the people of Silicon Valley find it hard to get to sleep without the background noise of Apple and Google bickering). But it’s hard not to attribute this slightly to Yahoo’s financial desperation. A word to the wise: Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg does not an easy opponent make. Remember what happened to the Winklevoss twins...

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