• Softpedia, Tuesday, March 2, 2010 1:30 PM

Twitter has extended access to its data "firehose" to seven lucky startups. Until now, only industry titans like Google, Yahoo and Microsoft have had full access to all of Twitter's tweets. Startups -- including Ellerdale, Collecta, Kosmix, Scoopler, twazzup, CrowdEye, and Chainn -- are "focused mainly on exploring the incredibly rich field of real-time search and discovery," according to Twitter's platform director Ryan Sarver.

"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." To date, Twitter has been quite open to developers, but access to its data APIs has been limited to prevent third-party apps from putting to much pressure on the system's infrastructure. The microblogging leader is presently looking for additional partners with which to share its real-time data.

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