Photo: Spencer E. Holtaway/Flickr
Clients of Gnip, a social data analytics company, can now mine every tweet ever sent to better help them better understand their customers.That's because Twitter today gave Gnip, which it bought for an estimated $134 million last year, full access to its nine-year (and counting!) archive of tweets. Quoting Carl Sagan, Twitter claimed that being able to mine the entire history of tweets will help companies, brands, and other interested parties "understand the present."Why should you care if the likes of Amazon, IBM, Microsoft (which are all Gnip clients) have access to a bunch of old tweets? Gnip Product Manager Adam Tornes told TechCrunch that its clients' single most requested feature was to be able to search the entire archive to better guide their decision-making. (Previously, clients were only able to search tweets going back 30 days.) It's not hard to imagine political campaigns sifting through an opponent's entire archive of tweets looking for a "gotcha" moment, or for companies developing a wearable device to gauge consumer sentiment on the Apple Watch.