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Ben Moses, 19th April 2010

Chirp News Distilled

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Last week saw Chirp, Twitter’s first ever Developer’s conference being hosted in San Francisco. As you would expect, news and announcements trickled out one tweet at a time. Here is the essential update on all the significant news coming out of the conference.

75% of all tweets come from outside Twitter, via external web and mobile apps. So there is a thriving development community.

Android is finally getting an official Twitter App very soon

Link Shortening - Twitter is getting its own link shortener. Speculation was rife about various domain names owned by Twitter and it is rumoured that link shortening rivals such as bit.ly are to be blocked and crushed.

The Library of Congress is going to be archiving all Tweets posted since Twitter’s inception in March 2006.

API News - Twitter have acquired Tweetie and are now building in house core features that were previously being filled by external apps. This change in direction is ultimately going to render many third party apps irrelevant. So bad news for the Twitter development community? Not so apparently. To date more than 100,000 registered applications have been leveraging Twitter’s API. Third Party development is far from dead with the announcement of new API tools and features including:

•   Annotations – this allows Twitter clients to attach metadata onto a Tweet. This could allow Hashtags to be migrated to the metadata layer; review ratings such as 1 to 5 stars could be automatically added to a tweet; or the user location’s weather description could be automatically built into a tweet.
•   Places – this is a Geo-Location feature that has existed for some time, but is being enhanced to tag tweets with more than just longitude/latitude co-ordinates. It is being speculated that this feature will match locations to actual places such as businesses and places of interest and eventually challenge the likes of FourSquare and Gowalla
•   @Anywhere – this allows web developers to easily interact with Twitter. The platform allows you to easily add Tweet Boxes, hovercards and Twitter Connect buttons with only a few lines of javascript.
•   User Streams – this allows twitter activity to be streamed to end-users in real time. This will enable third party apps to be updated automatically without the need for polling or refreshing.
•   Dev.twitter.com – this is the Twitter hosted site/forum which provides all the necessary tools and resources especially for Twitter developers.