A website for translators. A website for journalists. And now, a website for developers? Makes sense.
Twitter is working on a website dedicated purely to those developing apps and services for the microblogging platform, according to GigaOm. The site could launch as early as July.
When I reached out to Twitter, I was told that “more info is coming soon.”
Since Twitter already has one website dedicated to its developers, dev.twitter.com, there’s no telling what the new site will offer. The current dev destination offers limited introduction to the Twitter API, additional documentation and discussions.
My best guess is that the new site would be modeled after the just-launched Twitter for Newsrooms, which is more like an instruction manual on the many ways in which journalists can use Twitter to their advantage. Developers are often confused, not knowing what official Twitter services may eventually overshadow their own products, so any advice from the company that helps guide their work could prove useful.
While 2011 is understood to be a critical year for Twitter to figure out how to monetize its large and still-growing network, the company has also been actively spending resources on mending its fragile and aching relationship with developers.
Many of those relationship problems are unavoidable, if Twitter wants to succeed as a business. The site has expanded a lot since its early days, flourishing with mobile and desktop platforms, rolling out a new photo service and more, all of which necessarily shoved aside smaller third-party developers who built businesses on providing those features. It’s not pretty, but Twitter doesn’t have much choice.
Things aren’t so bad though.
In May, the company hosted an event for developers called #devnest, right at its San Francisco headquarters. Intended to be a mini-replacement for the Chirp conference, #devnest painted quite the rosy picture of third-party development on Twitter: there are currently 600,000 developers working on 900,000 applications running on the platform.
We’re eager to see how they try to cater to developers next.
