[tibbon]

I'd be most interested in finding why Twitter selected some partners and not others.

I spoke with some people that had Firehose and said that they mainly just had to sign lengthy legal documents, but that they didn't really pay for it (or not much).

Then we hear of MSFT/GOOG paying for it.

But I had a startup that was providing strong value to the community (http://webecologyproject.org) and we offered to pay for it- whatever they were asking, and they said, "No, we'll call you when we think you should have it". Maybe we'd have offered the same money as Google- they didn't know what we'd pay. But our money wasn't good enough.

Clearly, I didn't do a good enough job of BD there, but I was talking with their API team nearly every day in the mailing list and in private emails. I wasn't having lunch with Biz, but honestly we were too busy researching and developing for that.