Twitter Selling Tweets For Analysis, Not Display

Twitter’s business plan has taken another step today: Twitter and Gnip, a social data provider, have partnered to offer up to half of the Twitter “firehose” of tweets for sale with a couple conditions: Companies buying the tweets can’t display them, nor can they resell them; they’re for analysis only.

According to Gnip’s announcement, the data will be available primarily for marketing and research purposes: “This partnership opens the door to developers who want to use Twitter streams to create monitoring and analytics tools for the non-display market.” No doubt this data will be valuable to companies that want to develop or improve tools for reputation management, trend monitoring, and so forth.

The partnership includes three types of feeds for sale: a “Halfhose” with 50% of all tweets, a “Mentionhose” that’s limited to replies and retweets of a particular user, and a “Decahose” that offers 10% of all tweets.

ReadWriteWeb is reporting that the “Halfhose” will cost $360,000 per year, and that Twitter, itself, will continue to be the only seller of access to the full, 100% “firehose” of data.

There’s more discussion at Techmeme.