Los Angeles — Micro-blogging outfit Twitter Inc., expressing lot of love these days to people who develop apps for the platform, after months of tensions and regulatory scrutiny into its relationship with outside developers, on Monday announced that it has surpassed the 1 million apps milestone.
The Twitter blog disclosed that the number of registered applications developed for the Twitter “ecosystem” has crossed one million. This number is up from 150,000 apps a year ago, the blog said.
The micro-blogging service exhibited examples of apps that connect to Twitter in interesting ways, such as Mass Relevance, which “combed through more than 160,000 Tweets to bring the White House’s first Twitter Town Hall to life though real-time content curation and visualization to Poptweets, an iPhone game where players match celebrities to their Tweets.”
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“Application developers play an essential role in helping people get the best out of Twitter,” the blog post said. “A new app is registered every 1.5 seconds, fueling a spike in ecosystem growth in the areas of analytics, curation and publisher tools.”
“The entire Twitter team is committed to investing in the ecosystem by listening to developers and enabling them with the right tools and information,” the micro-blogging site said in the blog posting.
More than 750,000 developers are engaged with the company. Twitter also launched a new site for developers apparently dedicated at providing better info on how to develop for the company’s platform, where people can connect directly with staff, exchange ideas and find resources for products or businesses.
Interestingly, Twitter calls it “a new home to help the Twitter community better” and as such promises better documentation, search and an improved apps management system. The new site also does away with the developer mailing list, in favor of an online discussion board for developers to ask questions. This comes at a time when the FTC is said to be eyeing the company over its competitive practices in relation to its third-party apps.
“With over 1,000,000 registered applications and 750,000 developers building on the platform today, we needed a new home to support the Twitter community better,” writes Arnaud Meunier on the Twitter Developer blog. “So, we listened to everyone and collected your ideas. The new site enhances communication channels, offers improved reference material and documentation, and will foster better interaction for everyone who visits it.”
“As you dive in, you will notice a number of changes,” adds Meunier. “We focused on tightly structuring the content so it is more easily discoverable and understandable. Because the site will have to change over time to serve the needs of our evolving community, we relaunched it using Drupal, which provides more flexibility, better tools than we had, and a large developer network with whom we can work more closely.”
Despite the impressive growth the ecosystem has had in the past year, Twitter’s relationship with the third-party developer community has strained. In March, Twitter’s director of platform Ryan Sarver told developers to stop making apps that “mimic or reproduce the mainstream Twitter consumer client experience,” undercutting some of the competition that comes from these third-party devs.
The move follows criticism that Twitter is crushing out programmers by co-opting their features. The U.S. Federal Trade Commission began contacting software makers as part of a preliminary investigation into Twitter’s business practices, two people familiar with the matter said this month. The agency is responding to complaints that Twitter is making it harder for some software developers to design applications that run in concert with the company’s service, said one of the people.
Recently, Twitter raised money in an investment round that values the company at $7 billion, people familiar with the deal said last week.