Tag Archives: analytics

Data Grants from Twitter

There is a lot of fuss these days because of the newest announcement made by Twitter on February 5. They encourage research institutions to apply until March 15 in what seem to be a scientific lottery, for a chance to the access of twitter’s data sets. Around 500 million Tweets are sent out each day and if they were to be scientifically quantified, studies like where the flu may hit,  health-related information or events like ringing in the new year could be analyzed from a statistical point of view and outcomes could be predicted.

Twitter acknowledges the difficulties that researchers have to face when they have to collect data from the platform and therefore it named this project the Twitter Data Grants, aiming for a better connection between research institutions or academics and the data they need. Also, along with the data itself, the company will offer for the selected institutions the possibility of collaboration with their own engineers and researchers, all this, with the help of Gnip one of the most important Twitter’s certified data reseller partner.

What are you looking at?

When you open a new website, what do you first look at? Do you think is the same thing that i look at, or any other person? You may be tempted to say no, that we are different persons with different interest so we don’t look at the same things but science research tends to disagree with that affirmation.

Recently, more and more companies that study visitors behavior on web sites appeared, and one of them, EyeQuant, also affiliated with Google has just published the results of a study in which 46 subjects were requested to browse over 200 sites. The result came as a surprise, in the benefit of the company because it turns out what people are really interested in. First of all against the popular belief people aren’t that interested in faces or large font writings but rather in small sets of text and instruments that are available on the first page.

Also another interesting idea came out from the analysis of sites that were offering something free. Although economically it’s almost impossible to beat something free, it seems like people are not that interested in big adverts of free stuff.

So, in conclusion here is some important information that you shouldn’t skip if you plan on launching your own internet company. We’re not saying that otherwise you will fail but it’s always better to know your customers a little bit better than they know themselves!