ReadWriteWeb

Many of you probably never heard of the Ellerdale project until this week, when Twitter announced it was one of the company's new partners in receiving the "firehose" of Twitter data, a full feed stream of tweets that was, prior to Monday, only available to the major players like Yahoo!, Google and Microsoft.

What Ellerdale is now doing with Twitter's 50 million tweets per day is definitely interesting - the service uses an intelligent data-parsing engine to analyze the context of tweets and the links they contain and combines that with other data sources like RSS feeds and Wikipedia to create a real-time search engine and trends tracker that provides more than just a list of tweets - it provides an understanding of the world's conversations.

Twitter has just announced a number of partnerships with a companies engaged in "real-time search and discovery". According to the blog post, the company is "happily turning the Firehose on for some new partners focused mainly on exploring the incredibly rich field of real-time search and discovery."

This partnership is sure to dramatically increase the number of people reached by Twitter's current user-base and could mean some big things for the microblog, not only in terms of exposure but in terms of its much rumored ad platform.

Having just launched a new real-time mobile search engine in conjunction with OneRiot only weeks ago, mobile search company Taptu is now expanding their revamped service to the Android platform. Today, they're launching a new application designed specifically for Android phones running version 1.5 and above. Like their brand-new mobile website, Taptu for Android includes real-time search results thanks to OneRiot integration. It also offers a touchscreen interface for viewing the results without having to pinch, resize, or refocus the screen.

Specialized mobile search engine Taptu and real-time search service OneRiot have teamed up to launch a new real-time search engine for mobile. With the touch-friendly interface provided by Taptu, you can now perform searches from your mobile phone and receive real-time results from sites like Twitter and Digg. In addition, you can browse through the trending topics to see what recent events are currently being buzzed about.

In its current state, Twitter is a strange mix of real-time features like search and the slow polling mechanism that desktop clients use to grab new messages. As Twitter puts a limit on how many times per hour a client can check for updates, most of the conversations on Twitter are slow and arduous. When Seesmic released its new desktop and web applications last week, however, the company also mentioned that its applications would soon be able to update Twitter streams in real time, including @replies and direct messages. While the Seesmic team was tight-lipped about how exactly they are going to do this (maybe by tapping into Twitter's Streaming API?), we can't help but wonder how this will change the dynamics on the service.