There goes the Twitter Data Mining secondary market

Scarcely a day goes by without yet another "real time search service" developer on the Twitter API declaring that they can do data analysis on the Twitter ecosystem, thus hopefully chasing the unbelievable riches that brand and influencer aggregators believe is there.

Unfortunately, Twitter has spotted it too and has decided if anybody is going to make money, its them. They are "Talking Separately to Microsoft and Google About Big Data-Mining Deals" sez BoomTown.

Sources said a number of scenarios are being discussed to compensate Twitter for its huge and potentially valuable trove of real-time and content-sharing information, generated from the data stream of billions of tweets from its 54 million monthly users.

These include a number of structures, including a payment of several million dollars to Twitter, along with various revenue-sharing proposals that would give Twitter a piece of the revenue made from search results.

The deals, stressed sources close to the situation, are nonexclusive, especially because Twitter’s management is keen to remain independent and also nonpartisan in the growing search battle between Google (GOOG) and Microsoft (MSFT).

This means Yahoo (YHOO)–which recently struck a search-technology and online-advertising partnership with Microsoft–could also license Twitter’s feed to make its search results even more robust, although Boomtown could not determine if the company is in talks with the San Francisco start-up.

What this means is that the true value of the data will be realised. What it also means is that they won't let it go to two-bit startups building their own businesses by giving twitter data away for free to build their own businesses.