Salesforce.com signs up Twitter firehose

Salesforce.com has inked a new deal with Twitter to hook up the micro-blog's “firehose” of all public tweets to its social media monitoring tool Radian6.

The cloudy software purveyor acquired Radian6 in early 2011. At the time Radian6 had an agreement with Twitter, but Ross J. Piper, a Senior Vice President for enterprise strategy at salesforce.com, told The Register that document had lapsed. Terms of the new deal have not been revealed.

The two parties are spruiking the new deal as a “Global Strategic Alliance”, but Piper said the deal is essentially business as usual, but with new letterhead on the contracts now that Radian6 is under salesforce.com's wing. Speaking at the company's Cloudforce event in Sydney, Piper added that salesforce is happy to have extended the deal, as Twitter is apparently very selective in terms of who it signs for firehose access.

Piper said salesforce.com customers are keen to have firehose access to so they can spot grumpy customers and get back to them in their preferred medium. One presentation at Cloudforce Sydney, from game developer Activsion, outlined how it spots YouTube videos of in-game glitches posted by gamers, and responds on the site.

“Gamers aren't going to us a call centre,” Piper said. ”It's about serving the gamers in the medium they want.” A connection to the Twitter firehose means salesforce can help customers figure out when Twitter users want that kind of intervention. ®