Twitter is to introduce a service that will provide detailed analytics data for businesses and professional users, it has emerged.

Speaking in an interview with Venture Beat, co-founder Biz Stone said that the firm is looking to launch a number of paid-for services for its commercial customers in order to begin generating revenue. Among these, he said, will be a number of things that "businesses say are helping to make them more profit", news that may be welcomed by internet consultants.

"We want to build statistics or analytics that let users know, ‘how am I doing on Twitter?'," he stated, adding that a new set of commercial application programming interfaces - or APIs - will be introduced to enable third-party developers to produce applications for the micro blogging service.

Mr Stone did not say when the analytics services will be introduced, but did note that business-focused applications will begin to become available later in the year.

He also moved to reassure those who are currently using Twitter, stating that the service will "still be free for everybody".

Last week, it emerged that Twitter has been unsuccessful in an attempt to trademark the word 'tweet' in the US.