Twitter working on developer destination site

Ronny Kerr · June 30, 2011 · Short URL: https://vator.tv/n/1c35

Relationship with developers not always rosy, but Twitter's actively working to mend that

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.

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What is Twitter?

Twitter is an online information network that allows anyone with an account to post 140 character messages, called tweets. It is free to sign up. Users then follow other accounts which they are interested in, and view the tweets of everyone they follow in their "timeline." Most Twitter accounts are public, where one does not need to approve a request to follow, or need to follow back. This makes Twitter a powerful "one to many" broadcast platform where individuals, companies or organizations can reach millions of followers with a single message. Twitter is accessible from Twitter.com, our mobile website, SMS, our mobile apps for iPhone, Android, Blackberry, our iPad application, or 3rd party clients built by outside developers using our API. Twitter accounts can also be private, where the owner must approve follower requests. 

Where did the idea for Twitter come from?

Twitter started as an internal project within the podcasting company Odeo. Jack Dorsey, and engineer, had long been interested in status updates. Jack developed the idea, along with Biz Stone, and the first prototype was built in two weeks in March 2006 and launched publicly in August of 2006. The service grew popular very quickly and it soon made sense for Twitter to move outside of Odea. In May 2007, Twitter Inc was founded.

How is Twitter built?

Our engineering team works with a web application framework called Ruby on Rails. We all work on Apple computers except for testing purposes. 

We built Twitter using Ruby on Rails because it allows us to work quickly and easily--our team likes to deploy features and changes multiple times per day. Rails provides skeleton code frameworks so we don't have to re-invent the wheel every time we want to add something simple like a sign in form or a picture upload feature.

How do you make money from Twitter?

There are a few ways that Twitter makes money. We have licensing deals in place with Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft's Bing to give them access to the "firehose" - a stream of tweets so that they can more easily incorporate those tweets into their search results.

In Summer 2010, we launched our Promoted Tweets product. Promoted Tweets are a special kind of tweet which appear at the top of search results within Twitter.com, if a company has bid on that keyword. Unlike search results in search engines, Promoted Tweets are normal tweets from a business, so they are as interactive as any other tweet - you can @reply, favorite or retweet a Promoted Tweet. 

At the same time, we launched Promoted Trends, where companies can place a trend (clearly marked Promoted) within Twitter's Trending Topics. These are especially effective for upcoming launches, like a movie or album release.

Lastly, we started a Twitter account called @earlybird where we partner with other companies to provide users with a special, short-term deal. For example, we partnered with Virgin America for a special day of fares on Virginamerica.com that were only accessible through the link in the @earlybird tweet.

 

What's next for Twitter?

We continue to focus on building a product that provides value for users. 

We're building Twitter, Inc into a successful, revenue-generating company that attracts world-class talent with an inspiring culture and attitude towards doing business.

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