Twitter Turns On the Firehose for Several Startups

Twitter has made the big announcement anticipated for several months now, it has opened, or rather, extended access to its data 'firehose,' but only to seven startups for now. Twitter revealed that it would open up its firehose API to more partners a couple of months ago. Until now, it has partnered with Google, Yahoo and Microsoft, enabling full access to all the tweets for the major search engines.

"Today, 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," Twitter's Ryan Sarver announced.

Twitter has always been very open to developers and, indeed, it owes a great part of its success to third-party apps and services that have built on Twitter's functionality. However, the free access to the data and the Twitter APIs is limited in terms of traffic and some functionality, so third-party apps won't put too much pressure on the infrastructure. The cap isn't much of a problem for most apps or services, like desktop or mobile clients, but for others, like anything having to do with real-time search, it can be pretty limiting.

Enter the Streaming API, which, for a price, gives developers full access to the data stream almost in real time. So far, the functionality has only been available to Google, Microsoft and Yahoo, all of which have signed deals with Twitter to provide them with the access. But Twitter has said that it plans to allow other developers and companies to license the data as well, and now it's taking the first step with just seven startups. It won't stop here, though, and it is currently looking for other potential partners, so future announcements like this should be expected.