Several days ago we wrote that Twitter’s analytics team was about to launch a new project. Twitter VP of Communications Sean Garrett denied there was anything earth-shaking going on.
“I wish we were launching something worth ‘all this whoop-la,’ but this is an update to an existing analytics product that very few people see.”
However, a post on an official Twitter blog seems to give the lie to that statement.
According to the post, by Twitter engineer Ryan King on the Twitter Engineering Blog this evening:
“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.”
In other words, Twitter is in fact working on an important analytics product that will launch to the public soon. This blog post bolsters the Tweets we referenced in our earlier article.
Cassadra is an Apache “open source distributed database.” A “change in strategy,” as King describes it, means Twitter will not use Cassandra to store Tweets as it planned. Now it’s going to be used for the real-time analytics that we reported on.
Not a big deal? Nah, it’s a big deal. To paraphrase Marshal Kirkpatrick, “Twitter is launching a public analytics product for the countless business customers who will line up to use it.”
So, with all due respect to the VP, we’re going to stick to our guns.
