Twitter’s first developer conference, held this week in San Francisco, served as a coming-out party for the four-year-old service. Twitter the start-up is becoming Twitter the big company, with more polish, controversy, competition and revenue.
At the conference, called Chirp, Twitter announced several new features that will make it more useful, including geo-location services, a database of places and additional metadata for posts. It also offered details about @anywhere, a new service that lets people gain access to Twitter from elsewhere on the Web.
These new features could expand Twitter’s reach, but it also pits the company against other popular Web companies, including Facebook and Foursquare.
“They’ve gone from a data play to a platform play,” said Jeremiah Owyang, a partner at Altimeter Group, a digital strategy consulting firm. “You’re seeing the same behavior that Facebook, Google and other online communities have done. This is a natural evolution of a Web company.”
As evidence of its growth, Twitter revealed some previously undisclosed numbers. It has 106 million registered users and is adding new users at the rate of 300,000 a day. Those customers write 55 million daily posts, and 180 million people log on to Twitter.com each month to read them.
Despite the growth, Twitter has a pressing need to make the service easier to understand for new users, said Evan Williams, its chief executive. “It’s amazing it’s grown so fast given how hard it is to use.”
One of the new features Twitter announced is called points of interest. People on Twitter have been able to include their general location. But now they will be able to reveal exactly where they are. People will be able to search for a certain location, like a concert hall or hotel, and see all the posts written from that spot.
This is similar to the check-ins on Foursquare, Gowalla and other services that people use to share their location. Mr. Williams said that Twitter was not trying to duplicate those services but rather provide Twitter users with more relevant content.
“Where you are defines what you’re interested in,” he said.
Twitter and its developers will build a database of places — parks, restaurants, hospitals and the like — across the world so people can refer to them in posts.
Another new tool is called annotations. Already, individual posts show which app someone used to write the post and the date, time and (if users choose to make it public) location. With annotations, software developers will be able to add other material, which Twitter calls metadata, to Twitter posts.
This could significantly expand the amount of information a post includes, beyond its 140 characters, and could enhance the way Twitter is used.
Posts could include the name of the restaurant where a post was written and its star rating on Yelp, for instance. Then, someone could find Twitter posts about restaurants nearby with five stars. Or developers could add a way to make a payment and purchase, so retailers could sell items from within a post.
Twitter does not know what developers will decide to do with the tool, said Ryan Sarver, who manages the Twitter platform. “The underlying idea is think big, push yourself.”
Dick Costolo, Twitter’s chief operating officer, gave details about @anywhere, which was first announced at the South by Southwest conference. (Initial partners include more than a dozen news sites, including The New York Times Company.) Similar to Facebook Connect, @anywhere will allow people to log in to Twitter from other Web sites.
When visiting a magazine Web site, for instance, a user could sign in to Twitter, hover the cursor over a writer’s byline and follow the writer on Twitter or write a post without leaving the page. The magazine could also suggest other writers that the reader should follow on Twitter.
Twitter also said it would incorporate more outside services — including an Android app and a link shortener — into its own service, either by acquiring start-ups or building its own tools.
This added to the unease that many software developers have felt since last week, when Twitter announced its own iPhone and BlackBerry apps. Developers who make these types of apps worry that Twitter could put them out of business.
Twitter tried to reassure developers, by emphasizing how crucial they have been to Twitter’s success.
Developers have built more than 100,000 Twitter apps, and 75 percent of Twitter’s traffic comes from people using these apps instead of Twitter.com.
No comments:
Post a Comment