Twitter says New York Times, EBay to display tweets

Twitter Inc., a Web site whose users post about 50 million short messages a day, introduced a feature that lets other sites display its content.

Amazon.com Inc., EBay Inc. and New York Times Co. will show Twitter updates, or tweets, on their sites, Chief Executive Officer Evan Williams said today at a conference in Austin, Texas. He said 13 sites will adapt the service initially.

"It's only scratching the surface," Williams said. "These big partners aren't the only ones we want to limit it to."

Twitter, which already has signed licensing deals with Microsoft Corp., Google Inc. and Yahoo! Inc., is looking for further sources of revenue. This month, it gave real-time search engines, including Collecta and Scoopler, more access to its software code. That lets the sites come up with new ways to distribute comments that Twitter users post about their lives and consumption habits.

The feature announced today would, for example, allow a Huffington Post reader to see the tweets of brands and people mentioned in the stories. People also will be able to log in to certain sites using Twitter accounts, Williams said.

"It's all about not having to go back to Twitter to do stuff and really capturing in the moment whatever you want to do," he said in an interview. "It's not directly a revenue play, but it could relate to that eventually."

Twitter, the third-most-popular social-networking site in the U.S., lets users post updates of up to 140 characters. The closely held company, founded in 2006, began focusing on revenue only last year.

The deals with Microsoft and Google, allowing their search engines to display tweets, generated about $25 million for Twitter, people familiar with the matter said in December. That was enough to make the San Francisco-based company profitable in 2009, the people said.