Stndrd_@ Twitter Data Dump: InfoChimps Puts 1B Connections Up for Sale. Data extracted from 500 million Twitter messages was released today by a tiny Texas startup company that forward-looking geeks have been watching for a year. Austin-based Infochimps announced this afternoon that it is now selling two important and very large sets of Twitter data. Limited samples of the data are available for free and a third, most important, set of data still won't be ready for a few more hours. "What we want is to see people use this to build web apps," Infochimps co-founder Flip Kromer told us today.
"You take this data, mash it up with any other very large corpus of data with timestamps - and you've got a web app. " This is particular, extracted data though - not the full text of Tweets. "We're trying to be careful," Kromer says, "we are not yet exposing the contents of tweets. " This is a very big move because most developers struggle to get access to a large quantity of data from Twitter. Here's what InfoChimps is putting on sale: Data as a Pot of Gold Use Cases. Portable Contacts. 5 Reasons Why Facebook + OpenID is Good News - ReadWriteWeb. Facebook has joined the OpenID Foundation, something that many OpenID advocates have hoped would happen for some time.
The two systems of logging in to distributed websites, OpenID and Facebook Connect, have been characterized as rivals - OpenID being the high-minded but socially awkward one who doesn't get invited to parties despite being a really good person and Facebook Connect being the rich preppy popular kid from the 80's movie who's a bully but is good at sports. Now they've joined forces, on some level. Cynics immediately said it would make no difference, that their cynicism remained unchanged, or that Facebook was likely to "pull a Microsoft" and try to destroy OpenID. We disagree. Both systems, OpenID and Facebook Connect, claim to offer a number of benefits: That's what this is all about, here's why we think tonight's news is important. 1. Users shouldn't have to choose between logging in someplace with an OpenID log-in or with Facebook Connect. 2. 3. 4. 5.
Microsoft Joining DataPortability.org - ReadWriteWeb.