Twitter is making its play for developers.
At its first-ever Flight developer conference, Twitter CEO Dick Costolo announced a new developer toolkit aimed at helping developers build and make money off applications on the Twitter platform. Called Twitter Fabric, the bundle of services includes Twitter’s Crashlytics application crash detecting service, and MoPub, the ad exchange network.
With the new tools, Twitter officially throws its hat in the ring to compete with Facebook and Google for developers’ time and attention. Its tools are designed to work with Apple’s Xcode and “all major Android IDEs,” meaning that developers can presumably use the Twitter tools within the development environments they’re already used to.
Costolo also lobbed some direct criticism at competitors during his keynote address. “The mobile SDK landscape has been inhabited by parties that optimize for self-interest first, and your interest second,” Costolo said.
He was presumably poking at Facebook, which offers developers the backend-as-a-service Parse, Facebook Login, and the new Facebook Audience Network that displays Facebook ads across different applications.
Google, meanwhile, also just acquired Firebase, a backend service for building realtime apps as part of its cloud services.
Twitter also debuted a new Twitter login feature that will let people log into applications and services with their Twitter credentials instead of creating new username/password IDs for each one. That service essentially matches similar login services from Facebook and Google.
Lead image by Selena Larson for ReadWrite
