Twitter last night hosted a developer-centric event in San Francisco called #devnest, and it did a good job of returning the site’s developer ecosystem to a positive light with just a few mind-boggling statistics.
There are 600,000 developers working on 900,000 applications that interact with the microblogging site’s API, according to Ryan Sarver (head of Twitter Platform/API), and Twitter is now processing over 13 billion API requests daily.
Here are some other notable stats that surfaced at #devnest:
Monthly account signups increased by 52 percent in Q1 2011, or by 57 percent for the U.S. alone. Twitter also experienced a 41 percent increase in daily tweets, TNW reports, with a 38 percent increase just in the U.S.
In that same quarter, of course, Twitter noted an increase in monthly active users on all mobile devices: 104 percent on Android, 72 percent on iPad, 55 percent on iPhone and 51 percent on Blackberry.
Jason Costa, who Twitter hired in April to head developer relations, says key areas for development include “Analytics, Content, Curation, Publishing and Enterprise.” (Just don’t build another Twitter client: developers were told to stop doing so earlier this year, likely because it’s not in the company’s best interests to have consumers driven to unofficial apps.)
Finally, Costa tweeted that the Twitter ecosystem saw $1 billion in acquisitions and $475 million in venture capital investments over the past six months.
Seen as a kind of replacement for Chirp, the official Twitter developer conference hosted April of last year in San Francisco, #devnest seems a much more laid-back affair. The only official Web presence the event had consisted of a Google Groups discussion and a Tweetup page, which says 204 people were in attendance. (That number hasn’t been confirmed.)
Costa, who was completely in charge of this #devnest, says it’s only “the first of many events to come.”
“And for those not based in San Francisco, we’re planning to do a string of dates in several cities around the US, and in other cities around the world. Plus, we’re planning to record the event and release it on YouTube.”
#devnest and Costa’s hiring, in general, are seen as moves by Twitter to recover its relationship with developers, turned off a bit by the company’s reprimanding anyone still making third-party clients. Plus, there was the whole fiasco with UberMedia losing API access for a couple days, a struggle that apparently still lives on in the fight to acquire TweetDeck, one of the single most popular third-party Twitter clients.
