ReadWriteWeb

There's a new tool that online marketers, brand managers and social media experts should be aware of: Research.ly, a new social search platform for researching Twitter conversations and tracking the associated analytics. But this is not your average Twitter analytics tool.

Research.ly uses parent company PeopleBrowsr's proprietary server technology to surface a historical analysis of Tweets, going back three years, thanks to its access to Twitter's full feed, a data stream often referred to as the "Twitter firehose." Not only that, but Research.ly has built custom indexes on top of this database of Tweets, including indexes for things like gender, sentiment, location, degrees of separation and more.

The big news on the Web this morning is Twitter's announcement of the Tweet Button - an official version of popular buttons seen on countless blogs and websites. Twitter has been working on developing its own button for some time now and has employed the help of TweetMeme, makers of the widely used "retweet button," to work out the kinks for its new system. Interestingly enough, however, TweetMeme seems to be making a significant gear shift today, as they have announced a new real-time Twitter analytics product, DataSift.

Yusuf Mehdi, Senior Vice President of Microsoft's Bing search engine announced today the launch of a new social portal that will produce real-time results from both Facebook and Twitter. The site, which will be live later today, will be found at bing.com/social and will be "the first search experience integrating the full Facebook firehose," according to Microsoft.

Facebook plans to announce the availability of a firehose of user data at its F8 developers conference in April, we believe based on research. Such an offering could be similar to the firehose that Twitter has shared with large partners and select small developers building the famous Twitter ecosystem of 3rd party applications around the web. A Facebook representative did not offer a denial, saying only that the company would not comment on speculation.

The huge social network was once private by default, then made controversial changes in December that pushed hundreds of millions of users toward publishing their information in public and now appears aimed to complete the about-face at its F8 developer conference by offering up public user data in a huge river that outside parties can consume, analyze and build on top of.

At LeWeb today, Ryan Sarver, Twitter's Director of Platform, took the state during the morning session. He stressed that Twitter needs the developer ecosystem if it wants to continue to grow. Sarver also announced that Twitter will give all developers access to the full firehose feed in early 2010. In addition, Twitter will also soon launch a new developer site, increase the rate limit for services that use OAuth and launch a new API for browser-less apps.