“With this program, we’ve identified areas where we see huge demand for innovation on Twitter’s platform, Twitter representative Seth Binderngel, said in a post on the company’s developers blog.
“We’re launching today with 12 partners, and this is just the start. If you have a unique product that fits in at least one of the product verticals, solves a market need and has the potential for a large impact, please get in touch,” he added.
The 12 partners launching today are Attensity, ExactTarget, HootSuite, Mass Relevance, Radian6, Sprinklr, SocialFlow, Crimson Hexagon, Dataminr, Topsy, DataSift, and Gnip.
Twitter recently launched API restrictions that prevent third-party developers from accessing large amounts of Twitter’s data at once. Under the new rules, once a third-party app has 100,000 users it has to contact Twitter and get permission for additional access so its user-base can grow, or begin to work with Twitter directly. Existing third-party apps at the time of the announcement earlier this month can double their existing user base before having to contact Twitter to continue.
The company also limited the number of API calls that can be made each hour, making it difficult for some existing service – such as those who want to pull real-time analytics – to function.