ReadWriteWeb

Data extracted from 500 million Twitter messages was released today by a tiny Texas startup company that forward-looking geeks have been watching for a year. Austin-based Infochimps announced this afternoon that it is now selling two important and very large sets of Twitter data. Limited samples of the data are available for free and a third, most important, set of data still won't be ready for a few more hours.

"What we want is to see people use this to build web apps," Infochimps co-founder Flip Kromer told us today. "You take this data, mash it up with any other very large corpus of data with timestamps - and you've got a web app."