As data scientists, we get great intuitions from simple things like counting numbers and basic arithmetics. Yet, in the days of Big Data, these seemingly simple tasks aren't simple. Even counting Twitter mentions requires a huge amount of work to build a robust database system and analytic engine. We want to make this easy for everyone else. Therefore, we'd like to make our data publicly available for academic research to the extent permitted by Twitter Terms of Service.
There are many Twitter research groups and each of them collect and analyze data in its own way. The difficulty of data verification has casted suspicion on Twitter research. Thus, we'd like to provide an open, reliable and unbiased data source for research statistics. For any statistics we present, we can back it up with the exact tweet IDs and algorithms for independent verification.
We do have the capacity to track a lot more things. Please contact us and tell us how great your idea is.