Twitter Firehose: Set to ON
Jinfo Blog

3rd March 2010

By Nancy Davis Kho

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Sometime today, Twitter is expected to crest an impressive benchmark: its ten billionth tweet. As reported first on Mashable (http://digbig.com/5bbdwh), the site has gone from four to ten billion tweets in the space of only four months - impressive by any measure. Here's a handy counter if you want to check in: http://popacular.com/gigatweet/ . It's a stark reminder that change is all around us, but it's the staggering pace of that change that is really different. As Tim Buckley Owen reported earlier this week, LinkedIn welcomed its 60 millionth member recently, Facebook participation continues to explode, and services popular in other global markets are experiencing similar growth rates (http://www.vivavip.com/go/e28058). For these services, the work of transforming those enormous, engaged audiences into repeatable revenue opportunities is also picking up speed. Paidcontent.org reported this week that Facebook has deepened its relationship with web analytics provider Omniture (http://digbig.com/5bbdwj). The two companies have been partnering for the past year on analytics, but announcement signals the intention to exploit advertising opportunities on the Facebook platform on a more automated basis. Similarly, Twitter has announced yet another major search-engine partnership, this time with Yahoo, to license the full feed of all public tweets to integrate with search engine results. The February deal came on the heels of similar agreements with Google and MSFT Bing. In a blog post entitled 'Enabling a Rush of Innovation' (http://digbig.com/5bbdwk ) the Twitter team says 'we’re happily turning the Firehose on for some new partners focused mainly on exploring the incredibly rich field of real-time search and discovery. We are thrilled to announce that Ellerdale, Collecta, Kosmix, Scoopler, twazzup, CrowdEye, and Chainn Search join us as partners. These companies range from funded startups to part-time, one-person operations so we came up with a fair way to license access that scales with their business.' The post ends with an invitation to contact the company for more info on API redistribution deals. As the growth both in tweets and redistribution partnerships shows, Twitter set to become an increasingly visible part of the content environment. The company is making it easy to pull its user-generated content onboard; the challenge for content vendors is to do so in a way that complements existing content assets and, as Alacra's Barry Graubart points out (in his Twitter stream - @graubart) underscores their curatorial expertise.

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