Twitter for Data Mining and Information Gathering

Twitter is a power research tool.People increasingly use Twitter to share advice, opinions, news, moods, concerns, facts, rumors, and everything else imaginable. Much of that data is public and available for mining.

Here’s how to use Twitter to gather useful information about topics, companies, and individuals. I’ll cover native Twitter features, as well as third-party tools with catchy names, such as 5and2fish, Twitter Venn, TwitterFriends, PeopleBrowsr , Twitturly, Twitter Spectrum, and others.

Most of the techniques mentioned here don’t require you to be a registered Twitter user. If you use Twitter, consider what data tidbits you release there, and whether you need to be more careful.

People don’t tend to be so careful or post in such a considered manner when using Twitter as the tidbits posted are so short and off-the-cuff.

This leads to an interesting source of information for people like us doing research about an individual or organization. You can really get a good gauge on the publics feelings for a certain topic too by searching Twitter for relevant keywords.

As you gather information on Twitter, be mindful of others attempting to manipulate you into arriving at their conclusions by feeding you misinformation. Cross-check data and understand its sources.

Information security professionals can use this tool for information gathering during the stage1 of an attack phase.