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Twitter to sell old tweets to marketers

SAN FRANCISCO, March 2 (UPI) -- Twitter says it will open its archives and sell billions of old messages to U.S. companies wanting to mine them for valuable marketing data.

A company called DataSift has forged an agreement with the social network to gain access to tweets going back to January 2010, CNN reported Thursday.

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"Twitter has really become an incredibly valuable information source," DataSift CEO Rob Bailey said. "There are a flood of companies wanting to get more use from it."

DataSift said it is launching a cloud-based service to allow other companies to analyze those two years worth of tweets to gather more information about their customers.

Customers will be able to "unlock trends from public tweets" and "access the full Twitter firehose," DataSift said on its Web site.

DataSift said it will be sharing part of the revenue from customers using the data it retrieves for them with Twitter.

Because Twitter is a public forum, privacy advocates may have difficulty raising objections, experts say, and DataSift said it was not worried.

"We welcome the privacy debate," Bailey, who is based in San Francisco, said.

Twitter has not commenting publicly about the new partnership, CNN reported.

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