Twitter Files for IPO

A company that is serving as the data backbone for a lot of big data programs, Twitter announced via tweet that they are moving to take the company public with a planned IPO.

With a service estimated to have well over 200 million users, and over 100,000 new accounts created per day, the social media giant has become a data behemoth, putting out an estimated 58 million tweets per day on virtually every topic under the sun. There isn’t a modern company in the world that doesn’t have their eye on what is being said about them in the Twitter space.

But Twitter’s usefulness is proving to run much deeper than a big data customer sentiment tool. In a recent article, Ken Krugler wrote in Datanami about the Durkheim Project, which uses Twitter (and other social media) data combined with predictive analytics to calculate suicide risk levels for the military.

Other unique use cases include using Twitter data as a sensor for the creation of real time criminal activity maps, and even climate disaster indicators. In the blink of an eye, the delivery network of 140 characters has proven to be a boon for society, with many applications of the technology still to be found.

Having exploded on the scene, and dragging huge amounts of data behind it, Twitter has become one of the premier big data innovators in the space. The company has been key contributors to key projects in the big data arena, including Apache Hadoop, HBase, BookKeeper, Mahout, and Pig, and have become a wellspring of technology for the open source community, releasing such things as Scalding, Mesos, hRaven, Storm and more.

Last week the company released a new open source data platform the call “Summingbird,” that Datanami editor Alex Woodie wrote, “glues the batch-oriented processing of Hadoop with the real-time event processing of its own Storm framework.”

Regarding the IPO, there are no indicators yet on the valuation of the company, though some recent estimates have the company at approximately $10 billion. Goldman Sachs will be the lead underwriter for the IPO, with other underwriters to be names as the S-1 filing is made public.

Related items:

Twitter Conjures Up a Hadoop-Storm Hybrid, Ponders IPO 

Reducing Suicide Rates with Predictive Analytics 

The Five Types of Hadoop Data