Feedback from Chirp
Posted by Michaela B., VeriSign
Our guest blogger for today is one of the VeriSign engineers that I work with, Srini Panidepu, who attended the first ever Twitter conference. What does that have to do with .tv? Well the conference was streamed live on Justin.tv. And, we all know that video on the web is getting more social and sharable — the two are combining. So I thought I’d share his write up from the event.
Twitter held its first ever developer conference “Chirp” in San Francisco on April 14th and 15th, 2010. The conference was attended by 500 developers from all over the world. Twitter believes in an open ecosystem. Ever since Twitter was launched, their API and the platform has been open to the public and developers. Currently there are about 100,000 registered third party applications that were built using their API. The third party application development on the Twitter platform is growing at a rapid pace. Ev Williams, CEO of Twitter, announced that 75% of the traffic comes from third party applications and 60% of the tweets come from these third party apps. Ev admitted that Twitter is too hard and gave an example: if you type in “I don’t get” in Google search box, then “I don’t get Twitter” is number 2 in the list. However, it is Twitter’s highest priority to make this experience “friction free” to users and developers.
For the first time ever, Twitter announced the roadmap of their platform during this conference.
Here are the highlights of the roadmap for 2010:
1) Location API – The current location API provides Longitude and Latitude only. Twitter is planning to allow you to associate city and places to tweets. So, not only you can read tweets from your followers, you can read tweets from anyone in your neighborhood or city, whether you follow them or not.
2) @Annotations – Adding location to the tweets was a first step, now with the annotations you can associate any arbitrary meta-data to your tweets when it’s published and you can query back the tweets using the same meta-data. The new annotations open the possibility for making tweets and search much richer.
3) User Streams or Streaming API – So far we have been using their REST API for publishing tweets, searching tweets, following etc. The new streaming API allows the applications to receive tweets in near real-time. So, no more rate limitations, no need for waiting or polling for the tweets. The tweets will be pushed to you automatically as soon as they are received.
4) @Anywhere – The idea of @anywhere is to plug Twitter seamlessly into your own website with a few lines of Javascript code. So, when you visit a website that supports @anywhere, you’ll be able to follow any Twitter account associated with that site without navigating away from that site. @anywhere is analogous to Facebook Connect.
5) Twitter launched http://dev.twitter.com/ during this conference. Twitter promised to keep this website up to date with the information. In fact, the documentation is generated out of the code itself so it will never be out of date.
6) Twitter also announced their long-awaited revenue model which is not about ads, it’s about promoting tweets. Promoted tweets are shown as the top tweets. However, there are still questions how promoted tweets will actually work.
Twitter is growing at a rapid rate, currently Twitter has about 105 million registered users across the world and the investors are expecting this number to rise by half a billion in the next 1 to 2 years. Twitter has about 175 employees, for such a small team their impact across the whole world is enormous.
