At LeWeb today, Ryan Sarver, Twitter’s Director of Platform, took the state during the morning session. He stressed that Twitter needs the developer ecosystem if it wants to continue to grow. Sarver also announced that Twitter will give all developers access to the full firehose feed in early 2010. In addition, Twitter will also soon launch a new developer site, increase the rate limit for services that use OAuth and launch a new API for browser-less apps.
Walking through the history of Twitter, Sarver noted that the core value of Twitter is openness. The first Twitter application was written in January 2007. There are now over 50,000 application in Twitter’s ecosystem. This, Sarver notes, shows how developers can use simple APIs to create rich experiences.
Sarver also noted that 50% of the company’s traffic now happens on partner sites and through applications. For Twitter, according to Sarver, it’s all about growing the market and building out the ecosystem. Throughout the keynote, Sarver stressed that Twitter can only be as successful as long as its developers are successful.
Sarver pointed out 3 companies that have manged to monetize Twitter: CoTweet, OneRiot and TweetMeme.
Coming Up: More Transparency, Improved Communication and a Business Model
Going forward, Twitter wants to offer even better tools for third-party developers in its ecosystem. Twitter wants to be more transparent with its developers and improve its communication. In addition, the company wants to improve the utility of its API. Twitter also plans to announce a business model that allows it to share in the success of its partners.
Everybody Gets Access to the Firehose
Most importantly, Twitter is opening up the firehose of tweets to all developers. Sarver didn’t announce any details, but this is obviously a very important move as it will give more developers the ability to build applications that need real-time access to every tweet without having to get Twitter’s permission.
Soon, developers who use OAuth will be able to ping Twitter more often than services that still use Twitter’s old authentication mechanism. Twitter will soon deprecate its old non-OAuth authentication mechanisms. In addition, Twitter will launch an API for browser-less apps.
Twitter also plans to launch a new developers site to educate its developers and will soon host its first developers conference.
Image credit: @scobleizer.
