Le Web: Twitter releases data firehose to everyone, now has 50,000 apps

by on December 9, 2009 at 7:24 pm

December 9, 2009 | Kim-Mai Cutler

rsarverTwitter said it’s opening up its data stream of tweets to all developers, not just Bing and Google. Ryan Sarver, who is on the platform team at Twitter, said details will be hashed out later next year.

Sarver said Twitter’s business model will be to drive and split revenue with the ecosystem of developers that have built applications around it.

“The business model will be a way that we share money and success, so that our incentives are aligned with partners from OneRiot to Seesmic to Tweetie to Tweetdeck,” he said on-stage at the Le Web conference in Paris today.

Sarver said there are now 50,000 applications built around Twitter. He also announced a developer site and a conference for developers called Chirp early next year.

“We will only be as successful as our partners, so we need to invest in them and make sure they’re profitable too.”

So question 1: What special privileges, exactly, did Microsoft and Google pay for if everyone gets a slice of the pie?

Photo courtesy of Robert Scoble