I'm about to have to manage our company's transition to GNIP for Twitter data and it's not going to be pretty. I've used DataSift for about a year now and can confirm GNIP is way behind feature wise (though DataSift can be quite quite clunky as well). I sure wish they would have bought DataSift instead.<p>Having had a bunch of experience now with "historical query" use cases, I had considered trying to branch out on my own as a niche competitor solely focused on the historics space. It would be for companies with research-oriented goals such as social science, policy analysis, etc. I'm glad I didn't waste my time now seeing how Twitter has decided to handle their exclusivity...