Christina Warren bricht es bei Mashable am Beispiel von Twitter herunter: (…) question that cuts to the core of the conversation surrounding social media measurements: Who has access to the data?

Variante 1: Zugang zur API

In the case of Twitter, the company offers free access to its API for developers. The API can provide access and insight into information about tweets, replies and keyword searches, but as developers who work with Twitter — or any large scale social network — know, that data isn’t always 100% reliable. Unreliable data is a problem when talking about measurements and analytics, where the data is helping to influence decisions related to social media marketing strategies and allocations of resources.

Variante 2: Zugang zu den Rohdaten

Ein Unternehmen mit einem solchen Zugang ist DataSift. Dazu gibt es ein Interview von Robert Scoble vom August 2010. Es ist jedoch nicht das einzige:

One of the companies that has access to Twitter’s data firehose is Gnip. As we discussed in November, Twitter has entered into a partnership with Gnip that allows the social data provider to resell access to the Twitter firehose. (…) For measuring services that can’t afford (or aren’t willing to pay) to pay for full access, the alternative remains using the API, which can yield inconsistent results. Even worse, rate limits within the API make grabbing information for more active accounts almost inherently incomplete. To be clear, I’m not criticizing Gnip or its pricing model. Rather, I want to highlight the realities about data access.

Die Daten vieler anderer Plattformen sind jedoch noch beschränkter oder gar nicht zugänglich. Gerade die deutschen Unternehmen geben sich hier sehr scheu. Wer immerhin offene APIs hat, sammelt Martin Weigert bei netzwertig.

Fazit von Christina Warren:

We’re just scraping the service of what social media monitoring, measurement and management tools can do. To get to the next level, it’s important that we all question who has access to the firehose.