Imagine you run a consumer electronics company. You just launched a game-changing new smartphone that will make or break your company. Two weeks after the launch, you’re hearing stories about your new phone burning users while they’re using it. You see the odd Tweet here and there but aren’t sure what the scale of this problem is or how you should respond. You make a panicked call to the company who monitors social media for you and they tell you that they can start tracking for this going forward but since they only get a realtime stream of Twitter data, there’s nothing they can do to get the last 14 days worth of Tweets.

They would love to help, but there’s nothing they can do about it. In a realtime world, once the stream of Tweets has passed, they’re gone.

Until today, this was how the world worked.

via Gnip Blog.