DataSift

About DataSift

DataSift operated as a platform for processing and analyzing human-generated data, enabling businesses to extract insights from a multitude of online sources. The company was founded in the United Kingdom in 2010 by Nick Halstead, a serial entrepreneur who previously founded TweetMeme and invented the concept of the retweet button. Halstead's experience with the rapid growth of social media and its impact on organizations directly informed the creation of a platform designed to manage and capitalize on the insights within this data.

The firm's core business centered on providing developers and enterprises with access to real-time and historical data from social networks like Twitter and Facebook, alongside blogs, news sites, and forums. Its business model was based on cloud-based pricing with pay-as-you-go and subscription options, catering to a wide range of clients from individuals to large enterprises, including social media monitoring firms, business intelligence companies, and financial services organizations. DataSift empowered these clients to aggregate, filter, and channel vast streams of public social conversations into their own business intelligence tools and data warehouses for analysis. A key aspect of its service was its partnership with major social platforms, which granted it licensed access to commercial data streams.

The platform's main offering was its ability to process billions of daily online interactions through a powerful filtering engine. A distinctive feature was the proprietary Curated Stream Definition Language (CSDL), which allowed users to create highly complex and specific filters based on metadata such as location, gender, sentiment, and language. DataSift also provided tools like 'Query Builder,' a visual interface for creating filters without needing programming skills, and 'Push,' a system to deliver the processed data directly into clients' existing applications and databases like MongoDB and Amazon S3. The company focused heavily on privacy, using anonymization and aggregation techniques to protect user identities while still providing valuable intelligence. In March 2018, DataSift was acquired by Meltwater, a media intelligence company, and its technology was subsequently integrated into Meltwater's platform.