Twitter has just announced a number of partnerships with a companies engaged in “real-time search and discovery”. According to the blog post, the company is “happily turning the Firehose on for some new partners focused mainly on exploring the incredibly rich field of real-time search and discovery.”
This partnership is sure to dramatically increase the number of people reached by Twitter’s current user-base and could mean some big things for the microblog, not only in terms of exposure but in terms of its much rumored ad platform.
According to the blog post, the full spectrum of data available in the “Firehose” was previously only available to Yahoo, Google and Microsoft. With this announcement, Ellerdale, Collecta, Kosmix, Scoopler, twazzup, CrowdEye, and Chainn Search will all join on as partners with Twitter and have access to the entirety of Twitter’s data stream in real time.
The Firehose, as compared to standard API access, does not have the same limits on how much a program accesses the data, which means much more real-time interaction is possible.
Gerry Campbell, CEO of Collecta, said that these partnerships show that “real-time is real,” calling this “the natural progression of the validation of real-time as a mode of information gathering.”
Twitter’s blog post, titled “Enabling A Rush of Innovation”, reads at times like a proclamation from above, but we have to admit we’re excited to see what can come of this. “Full investment,” reads the post “in this ecosystem of innovation, means all our partners should have access to the same volume of data, regardless of company size. […] With access to the full Firehose of data, it is possible to move far beyond the Twitter experiences we know today. In fact, we’re pretty sure that some amazing innovation is possible. “
Twitter seems to be making a point that even the little guy can get access to the full wealth of the Firehose and if this is true, then real-time interaction is just moments away from the smallest of startups.
But for now, the fact that this wealth of data is suddenly available to a number of real-time search engines can mean something big for the ad platform. As we wrote last Friday, Peter Kafka uncovered some details on the proposed advertising platform, one being that “the ads will only show up in search results.”
These partnerships could mean that these advertisements just gained a new real-time audience, outside of the big three. We asked Twitter about this but have yet to receive comment.
