Marketing Monster

Chirp, the first official Twitter developers conference, was held today in San Francisco. It was clear that the powers-that-be at Twitter were saving up quite a bit of information to lay on their “ecosystem” of third-party application developers, as the day  was filled with nuggets of information.

Watching the Chirp conference live stream on Justin.tv and reading the back channel #chirp tweets, conveniently brought together in one page on  TweetChat, it was difficult to keep up with the flood of information that was being made available. Twitter is so notoriously poor at communicating with their developer community and their users, that when they’ve seemingly turned on the fire hose of information, it’s a little overwhelming.

Here are some highlights:

Stats:
Registered users = 105.8 million
Monthly uniques=180 million
Daily signups=300,000
Posts per day = 55 million
Search queries per day = 600 million (the vast majority through the API)
Over 100,000 registered Twitter applications.

Geolocation:
Twitter is releasing Points of Interest, a geolocation tool tied to places. Instead of latitude and longitude, you’d have actual place names. They say that it will complement Foursquare and Gowalla, not compete with them.

Favorites:
A new API for Favorites will unlock interesting opportunities to manipulate more data. Will it be about influence? Will it be about topics and keywords? Who knows? Hackers will have 2 days to play with it during the conference.

Annotations:
This one is big. Twitter’s API will soon allow developers to add meta data to anything. The possibilities for applications to extract and manipulate data in new and interesting ways is huge. This will be opened up in the next quarter.

Resonance Score:
Marketers, PR folk, SEO/SEM practitioners and anyone else who’s in the business of increasing influence had best listen up. A Resonance Score is the Twitter equivalent of Google’s Page Rank. It examines tweets, favorites, retweets, link clicks, avatar clicks, hashtag reuse, etc. They have theories about how this will play out, but Twitter is going to roll this out slowly while they tinker with what it really means.

Promoted Tweets:
Announced yesterday this is Twitter’s long awaited revenue model. To start, Promoted Tweets is being implemented by Starbucks, Bravo and Virgin America. They offer the brands the opportunity to pin a tweet to the top of keyword search results. The Tweet is shaded to make it stand apart from the regular stream. The length of time it will stay in that position and the value of the tweet will be  tied to Resonance Score. At the start the costing is based on CPM but will evolve into ROI once Twitter understands Resonance Score better.

On Thursday, Starbucks is starting a campaign using Promoted Tweets that will involve giving free coffee to people who come in with a reusable tumbler. They addressed the difficulty of running promotions where they are speaking to an international audience. Starbucks stated that when geolocation can be applied, they will be able to refine their  messaging.

Twitter will be offering a 50/50 revenue split with application developers who opt-in to Promoted Tweets. Participation is not mandatory and 3rd-parties are allowed to have their own advertising models. However, Twitter is working on a policy that will prohibit the ecosystem from certain types of advertising that  would damage the brand integrity, for instance, having ads that were indistinguishable from regular tweets.

Now that Twitter will allow developers access to all that meta data through annotations, how will our data be used for targeted promoted tweets?

Mobile Apps:
The RIM partnered Blackberry app, released this week has resulted in 100,000 new users in 3 days; yesterday the Blackberry app was used on 1.7% of all Tweets. Twitter is also developing an Android app. These join the iPhone app that they released this week. These releases have caused their partners in the ecosystem to question their intentions in competing against 3rd-party development and the future stability of creating apps for Twitter.

User Streams:
Real time information being fed directly to you. No polling the system, no waiting, no rate limits. The API for this is being made available to developers for 48 hours to play with. (There’s a 2 day Twitter hacker event concurrent with Chirp.) Here’s a 3-minute clip from Ryan Sarver @rsarver detailing User Streams:

Watch live video from Bwana.TV on Justin.tv

Home for Devs:
During the conference, Twitter launched dev.twitter.com, the new home for developers to centralize and streamline availability of information and API documentation that will grow to replace the wiki and Google Docs. Documentation will now be generated directly from the code, rather than Twitter creating it manually (resulting in errors and a slow time to post.) The audience showed their relief and appreciation with the loudest applause of the day.

@Anywhere:
Also live today, the @anywere API will allow Twitter to be embedded into media outlets in an interactive way. The Guardian is incorporating @anywhere in their coverage of the UK elections as a way for people to connect directly with politicians.

Notes From the Executive:

• Evan Williams (@Ev) said Twitter was not a social network platform, but a “public interest graph” (as opposed to Facebook’s “private social graph”).
• Dick Costolo (@dickc) stated that Twitter is working on having syndication by the end of this year “or people back stage won’t be working at Twitter any more … including me.”
• @dickc also said that they’d release the number of active accounts from the 105 million registered accounts. But, he stressed that Twitter is often consumed on other sites by people without accounts.
• @Ev says Twitter will be releasing an integrated link shortener. They’ve been using one internally in their own DMs. (Uh oh Bit.ly!)

Misc:

• The Library of Congress has acquired every public tweet since Twitter started 4 years ago. They will continue to archive all public tweets.
• 30% – 40% of the audience indicated that they were hiring.
• Great quotes from Aaron Gotwalt of CoTweet: “Think big. Iterate violently.” and  “Central Pennsylvania: Silicon pasture”
• will.i.am from the Black Eyed Peas took the stage to talk about how musicians will be developers, aggregators of people and content.
• @KaraSwisher did a great job moderating a panel of Twitter application investors, injecting humour and forthrightness into the afternoon. (She was the only woman guest on the stage today.)

Developers: The Power Behind Twitter

I’ve said it many times before: Twitter gets it’s real power from 3rd-party applications. Twitter application developers are the ones who are building the tools that add value to our experience and fuel the intelligence that we’re demanding from this otherwise simplistic platform.

So, show developers a little respect and love for all that they do for Twitter users. Coding takes fuel. Find out what kind of boost your favorite app needs. Is it vocal support? If they’re fledgling, maybe they just need to pay the rent, so pay for an app or give them a donation.

Lastly, please take a few minutes to visit oneforty.com. Started by my buddy Laura Fitton (@pistachio), it’s a tremendous resource for all things Twitter (and is one of the few female-founded start-ups around Twitter.) It’s like an app store where you can search for applications, read and leave reviews, and find just what you need from one of the 100,000 registered developers in the Twitter ecosystem.