Twitter working to deliver real-time analytics

Twitter’s recent revelation that its new URL shortener will include analytics was greeted with huge enthusiasm. Now Twitter has given a bit more away, by saying that it is developing “large-scale real time analytics”.

The announcement by Twitter is relatively low key – posted on the engineering blog and explaining the relatively technical aspects of an open source database known as Apache Cassandra.

Initially Twitter had planned to use the Cassandra database to store tweets, but this plan has been dropped (in part due to the recent spate of outages).

Now, Twitter says: “Our analytics, operations and infrastructure teams are working on a system that uses cassandra for large-scale real time analytics for use both internally and externally.”

According to Read Write Web, Twitter has been playing down the significance of the development, but you can understand the excitement. Any brand or agency using Twitter in their marketing is really hungry for this data – although the fact that it is going to all be out in the open could make for some interesting situations with regard to how it is interpreted.