Over the years, DataSift has grown into the Big Data company whose raison d'être is to empower organizations to harness the power of Human Data in real-time. Below is a brief story of how we go to here...
Back in 2007, the main source of news + content was consumed through individual RSS feeds. Nick Halstead, frustrated with this status quo set out to build technology to automatically categorize millions of RSS feeds.
Ahead of its time, fav.or.it tracked 'social signals' - explicit 'liking' and implicit data about time viewing articles - to rank popularity of content. Then fed back this data into algorithms on what content to share with other users.
With Twitter’s growth in popularity, the company was quick to realize the value of the links share on the micro-blogging platform. By applying fav.or.it’s technology to Twitter it became - TweetMeme.
TweetMeme’s news aggregator experienced an explosive growth to tens of millions of users within less than a year.
TweetMeme’s popularity proved that the world needed a new to easily re-share content from Twitter - Tweetmeme’s Retweet button was born.
The company automated understanding the contents of the tweets thus automating the categorization of tens of millions of links per day. It also was the first one to use the idea of social authority. And the Retweet button was installed on more than half a million websites around the world.
Soon, the company realized that TweetMeme’s technology was proving extremely valuable to businesses that wanted to curate content about themselves. TweetMeme then exchanged the Retweet button for long-term access to Twitter’s firehose.
And Nick made a decision to build the ultimate engine for programmatically understanding what is being said within social data streams.
This engine today is DataSift.