I’ve read lots of commentary on the Topsy purchase by Apple. I like TechCrunch‘s pointer to Topsy’s patents as just part of the puzzle. What nobody seems to be mentioning is that this is a smart and relatively cheap way for Apple to buy a huge tweet store that they can display on their own sites and apps. It isn’t just the archive of tweets that matters. Topsy has the infrastructure in place to manage the Twitter firehose of all tweets. The Topsy team can build other datamining engines on top of it that can then deliver tweets for display. That is an end-to-end solution that anyone doing Social TV in a big way must have.

The answer is in the Topsy Terms of Service:

As between you and Topsy, all Content, is the exclusive property of Topsy or its content suppliers and is protected by U.S. and international copyright laws. As between you and Topsy, the compilation (meaning the collection, arrangement, and assembly) of all Content is the exclusive property of Topsy and is also protected by U.S. and international copyright laws. The Content may be used as a resource. Any other use, including the reproduction, modification, distribution, transmission, republication, display, or performance, of the Content is strictly prohibited.

If you buy Twitter data from Topsy, Gnip, or any other data reseller, you have the right to analyze all you want, but you can’t display the tweets on your own site. That is considered resyndication or republication by Twitter and is explicitly forbidden. The answer is to just buy Topsy. As the new owner of the Twitter database collected from Twitter, Apple is now allowed to display tweets in its other products. I can think of one prime application for all these tweets, Social TV. I expect that to be the punchline of most acquisitions in the Twitter space over the next year.

Every time I get my hair cut, my barber asks the same question, “What’s the next big thing?” What he means is when is the economy going to boom again over some new technology. Living and working in Lexington, Mass., which straddles Route 128′s hottest tech segment makes everyone in my town tech dependent, or at least tech aware. I haven’t seen anything that qualified as a true tech boom since the dotcom. The components that will facilitate the next wave, however, have been obvious. Web 2.0 added easy to create, long-term social interaction through FaceBook, Twitter, and other social sharing services. Tablets, smartphones, and big screen TVs built out the next user interface platform. Most of all, the millennial generation will drive the next wave in a different direction than previous booms. The defining characteristics of millennial users are a cross-device, cloud based, always available expectation of technology overlayed by the social, familial and work connections available through social networks.

After reading Social TV by Mike Proulx and Stacey Sherpatin, I can see how all these ingredients can come together to create a tech boom. A true tech wave causes people to fundamentally change how they use and interact with information. The first PCs eliminated layers of manual paper pushing, and allowed for a generation of knowledge workers. The Internet gave us email and made books, newspapers, music, and other forms of digitized information free for the finding. Social TV will do more than let everyone tweet about the Oscars or American Idol while they are on. They will allow your eyeballs to become the personalized target of show producers and advertisers. TV is about to go from broadcast and narrow cast to an individualized entertainment experience for each user, with a layer of your own family and friends wrapped around it.

I’d like to come back to sections of this book for detailed discussion. For now let me urge you to order a copy and start watching the #SocialTV tag. It doesn’t get a high level of tweets yet, but it is early enough in this trend that you can get a clear view of the people who are starting to drive this.

I want to learn more about #SocialTV. This post by @140dev is a great start.