Up until now, when Twitter has struck deals overseas with carriers, it has mainly been for SMS deals so that users can send/receive tweets for free and/or cheap. Today, Twitter has announced a new type of deal with NTT DOCOMO, Japan’s largest carrier: a content deal.
As they’ve announced in Japanese on their blog (with English translation below), “Tweets and other Twitter content will be included in DOCOMO i-mode portal search results, providing access to relevant, real-time information.” In other words, it’s a deal similar to the one that Twitter struck with Google, Microsoft and others a few years back.
And like those, it’s a full firehose deal, a Twitter representative tells us. That means that NTT DOCOMO will be able to do cool things with their portal and search results, but also other things as well which we’ll see down the road.
As usual, terms of the deal are not being disclosed.
Deals like this one around the world seem more likely as Twitter continues to expand their reach. Japan is a natural first step as it’s the country that the service has worked most closely with since their inception.