Twitter shares its 'firehose' of tweets with more partners

IDG News Service - After making the totality of public tweets available to search giants Google, Yahoo and Microsoft, Twitter is now cutting similar deals with smaller players.

The partnerships generate revenue for Twitter, which also stands to benefit from new tools that could help users and companies manage the torrent of Twitter messages posted every day.

Ellerdale, Collecta, Kosmix, Scoopler, twazzup, CrowdEye and Chainn Search all have licensed the Twitter "firehose" of tweets, moves that Twitter expects will lead to a "rush of innovation" in the area of real-time search and discovery, the company said Monday.

"More than fifty thousand interesting applications are currently using our freely available, rate-limited platform offerings. With access to the full Firehose of data, it is possible to move far beyond the Twitter experiences we know today," Twitter official Ryan Sarver wrote in an official blog post.

Twitter recently announced that people and organizations post about 50 million tweets every day, up from 2.5 million per day in 2009. There may be a lot of value in that stream of tweets, but tools are needed to filter out noise and surface relevant posts.

That's where real-time search tools like the ones from Google and the other partners come in, by applying algorithms and giving users control over the data flowing from the "tweet firehose," which is made possible by the company's Streaming API.