Infochimps, a startup aiming to organize all of the world's free and commercial datasets, has opened a host of new features for Twitter developers to tap. The company, which has collected and analyzed about four years' worth of data from Twitter's application programming interface, is allowing other parties to stand on its shoulders and pull up stats about any Twitter user's influence or word preferences through a new set of APIs.
One API will let you see all of the public conversations or interactions between any two Twitter users. Another one, called Trstrank, applies a Google PageRank-like algorithm to Twitter users to measure their influence. A third one, Wordbag, which lets you analyze words that are unique to any user.
Infochimps is charging different rates for access to the APIs depending on how much developers access them. It's free up to 100,000 API calls per month and the highest price tier is $4,000 a month with up to 15 million API calls.
Another company that specifically focuses on Twitter and its influencers, Klout, has a similar model of charging based on API usage. Twitter has also used this particular business model before, charging third-party developers for deeper access to its real-time data feed.
But Infochimps, which launched at the DEMO conference coproduced by VentureBeat, has a different aim in trying to manage the world's datasets. Twitter is only one of its sources. Another API the company is releasing today, for example, returns U.S. Census-collected demographics for the zip code of any given IP address.