Twitter co-founder hopes to create news network

Biz Stone, co-founder of Twitter, speaks at the Charles Schwab IMPACT 2010 conference in Boston, Massachusetts October 28, 2010.

OXFORD, England (Reuters) - Biz Stone, the co-founder of popular microblogging site Twitter, is eager to harness the vast quantities of information that it helps its users share to create a news network, he told Reuters on Monday.

A Twitter news network would not necessarily be run by Twitter itself but would be in partnership with several existing news organizations, and would be open, Stone said.

"From the very beginning this has seemed almost as if it's a news wire coming from everywhere around the world," he told Reuters Television on the sidelines of the Silicon Valley Comes to Oxford technology event.

"I think a Twitter News Service would be something that would be very open and shared with many different news organizations around the world."

Twitter receives 95 million short messages, or "tweets" -- each no longer than 140 characters -- each day from its 175 million registered users.

It already shares its incoming feed with Google Inc, Microsoft Corp's Bing search service and Yahoo Inc, but Stone said he envisaged other news organizations might take more specialized access.

Twitter could also help news organizations get in touch with the people on the ground experiencing events on which they wanted to report, Stone said.

Privately owned Twitter raised $100 million from investors last year, valuing the company at $1 billion, and has been reported to be considering a large round of funding. The company has declined comment on whether it is in talks with investors.