Twitter gives companies access to its full archives

Twitter has just launched a new tool called "Full-Archive Search API," which gives brands access to every public tweet ever made from the microblogging site's inception nine years ago. If you recall, the company also opened up its archives to research institutions last year. That project was launched for science, though -- this one was obviously created for business. The new tool was developed by Gnip, a long-time Twitter data partner that the company acquired in 2014 in order to sell data directly to advertisers and brand managers.

Full-Archive Search API gives Gnip's customers the power to look up public tweets -- any of the 500 billion or so available -- instantly. They can use it to quickly search for context when responding to customers on Twitter. And they can use it to analyze tweets to see what's the most effective way to get your attention when launching a product or an advertising campaign. As for how this development will affect you, it just means you have to be even more vigilant and scrutinize trends more closely if you hate being manipulated by corporations.