Bing Renews Its Firehose Deal With Twitter

Microsoft today announced that it has renewed its partnership with Twitter, giving Bing access to all of the public content Twitter’s users create. The terse three-sentence announcement is short on details, but a Microsoft spokesperson told us it extends, for an unspecified amount of time, the deal the two companies made four years ago.

“The past four years partnering with Twitter have been great, and we’re excited to continue that relationship in order to help deliver the best possible search experience,” the spokesperson told us.

Unlike Google, Bing has made social search a cornerstone of its strategy. Its close relationship with Facebook has long given it the ability to highlight posts from the popular social network, as well as from Twitter, LinkedIn, Quora, Foursquare, Klout and other services in its social sidebar. With Bing’s latest redesign, which dropped the number of columns on its search results pages from three to two, the social sidebar now features even more prominently on the site.

Twitter itself started giving access to its public firehose feed to partners in 2010, and it continues to keep a very tight grip on who gets access to this information. It’s providing a full feed to large partners like Microsoft, Google and others, though a small number of select resellers like Gnip and DataSift can provide anybody with the right resources (both financial and technical) with access to this data.