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Austin-based data aggregation service Infochimps released several major sets of data extracted from the Twitter API today, as well as Infochimp's first application and API based on one of these datasets.

Updating the "Twitter census" data it released in November 2009, the datasets and histograms Infochimps made available today include ones that track Twitter users by follower count and by profile page color (used to make the visualization below).

"My background is in Artificial Intelligence and my last business was building predictive data. Most of our customers were oil companies, and you can hold that against me if you like. But my pitch back then was 'just give me enough data, I'll figure out something.' And often enough I did figure out something."

That's how Houston-based 80Legs CEO Shion Deysarkar describes his background. Tonight his Web-crawling-as-a-service company will put up for sale tens of millions of data points extracted from public social networks and other websites. He says it's only a matter of time until everyone's doing it and he wants to be one of the good guys. "You can figure something out from just about anything," he says. That's the kind of geek Shion Deysarkar is.

MySpace has taken a bold step and allowed a large quantity of bulk user data to be put up for sale on startup data marketplace InfoChimps. Data offered includes user playlists, mood updates, mobile updates, photos, vents, reviews, blog posts, names and zipcodes. Friend lists are not included. Remember, Facebook and Twitter may be the name of the game these days in tech circles, but MySpace still sees 1 billion user status updates posted every month. Those updates will now be available for bulk analysis.

This user data is intended for crunching by everyone from academic researchers to music industry information scientists. Will people buy the data and make interesting use of it? Will MySpace users be ok with that? Is this something Facebook and Twitter ought to do? The MySpace announcement raises a number of interesting questions.

Dominic Pouzin is a worldly, smart guy. After doing school and internships in France, the UK, South Korea and India, he moved to Atlanta where he took a job in the NBC (Nuclear, Bacteriological, Chemical) protection field. "I designed statistical models, programmed robots, and implemented access control stations for nuclear plants," Pouzin says on LinkedIn.

He left that field to become a software engineer at Microsoft and this week launches his own startup company with a collection of former Microsoft co-workers. The new company is called Data Applied and offers very affordable "data mining in the cloud" - it applies automated algorithms to large sets of data in order to extract patterns, preconditions and outliers.

An Interview With TweetDeck Founder Iain Dodsworth

A small startup company called InfoChimps released for sale yesterday three very large sets of data extracted from 500 million Twitter messages. Included in the offering are the senders and recipients of 1 billion @ messages, Retweets and Favorites. We wrote in-depth about the release late last night. This morning we interviewed Iain Dodsworth, creator of the most popular Twitter client, TweetDeck, about the value he might find in that data and the direction he's aiming to take TweetDeck in the future.

Data extracted from 500 million Twitter messages was released today by a tiny Texas startup company that forward-looking geeks have been watching for a year. Austin-based Infochimps announced this afternoon that it is now selling two important and very large sets of Twitter data. Limited samples of the data are available for free and a third, most important, set of data still won't be ready for a few more hours.

"What we want is to see people use this to build web apps," Infochimps co-founder Flip Kromer told us today. "You take this data, mash it up with any other very large corpus of data with timestamps - and you've got a web app."