Twitter has granted full access to its firehose to the social media data mining company rumored to have predicted the death of Osama Bin Laden. The company, Dataminr, plans to use the public tweets “to create actionable signals for enterprise clients.” Wow.

Being granted access to Twitter’s Firehose is HUGE. Only a few companies have Firehose access, including one we posted about recently, Gnip. As ars technica tells us:

The Firehose is not a publicly available resource, and the level of access it provides is required by very few applications, according to Twitter. There is a publicly available version of the Firehose feed called “Spritzer,” but it provides a random sample composed of just 1 percent of all public statuses. Another feed, with limited availability, is called the “Gardenhose’ and provides about 10 percent of tweets, making it more suitable for data mining. The Firehose returns all public tweets, billions each month.

What will it Dataminr being doing, specifically? According to its press release,

Dataminr has developed a new category of Twitter based signals, providing clients with one of the earliest warning systems for breaking news and emerging events. Clients receive signals in real-time, often in advance of mainstream news, alerting them to industry-relevant information and noteworthy events.

Dataminr’s real-time analytics engine processes public Tweets in the aggregate, detecting linguistic and propagation patterns across the over 340 million messages shared on Twitter daily. In addition, Dataminr takes the unique approach of merging Tweets with third-party and client proprietary data to perform multi-variable event detection. Dataminr’s product suite is designed to fit directly into the unique workflow of its client set and provides real-time analytics that enable clients to make mission-critical decisions with greater confidence.

In other words, whether you’re trying to predict the stock market, election results, the next Oscar winners or Osama Bin Laden’s death, DataMinr now offers a tool that rivals any crystal ball.

Pretty amazing.

(Businessman with crystal ball image from Shutterstock)