The partnership was formally announced yesterday by Gnip, who will now be selling three different types of Twitter feeds: Twitter Halfhose, Twitter Mentionhose and Twitter Decahose. Each feed offers varying degrees of access to Twitter data.
In an interview with John Battelle at the Web 2.0 Summit yesterday, Evan Williams discussed the Gnip partnership and provided some additional background on Twitter's agenda.
Williams made it clear that this is by no means a monetization effort on par with the company's Promoted products, or a decision to make the data available to just anyone. Instead, this a conscious move to make Twitter data available to the companies who want to use it to surface trends, determine influencers and analyze engagement metrics.
Williams also explained that following Twitter's decision to license the firehose to Google, Microsoft and Yahoo, it was then inundated with more demand than the company could handle. Twitter chose to license Gnip as a reseller to manage demand and dole out access to the parties that will be best capable of deriving patterns from tweets, not using the firehose for show, he said.