How Twitter Can Become A New Breed Of Technology Company

[Commentary] With leadership from its founders and a significant infusion of cash from investors, Twitter has created an innovative no-charge service for users and industry-standard APIs for developers. But more recently, access to its data through those APIs has been fairly inconsistent, with particularly opaque procedures for getting at its most coveted dataset, its full stream of Tweets.

Twitter has recently begun selling publishers, big and small, access to all its Tweets. Its licensing of the "full firehose," as it is also known, to Google, Microsoft and Yahoo marks Twitter's first big move towards monetization. The micro-blogging company has yet to make public the terms of these deals, but according to one report, Twitter is bringing in a combined $25 million from those agreements. Meanwhile, Twitter has granted small startups access to the same data at rates "proportional to the size of the company," according to Ryan Sarver, Director of Platform at Twitter. This points to a potential conflict: Quiet deal-making, variable pricing, and uneven access across Twitter's partner base could create questions about the commercial viability of the entire ecosystem. Twitter has an opportunity to maximize its own value and retain its inter-galactic goodwill with users and partners alike by fostering a new level of transparency around the licensing deals.

How can it do that?...