Twitter head of platform Ryan Sarver

Twitter has since rolled out some of the major platform features it debuted at Chirp, but not all. A pre-announced “Places” feature turned out to be less of a “Foursquare killer” and more of a way of focusing activity around a certain geographical area. The highly anticipated capability to add annotations to tweets is due in the second quarter. A new infrastructure for what’s called “user streams” is behind schedule, but promises to make tweets and other actions get pushed out in real-time (more on that in another post).

Om and I walked over to Twitter headquarters yesterday to meet with Sarver and other members of the product and platform teams. Since the last time I visited, Twitter has taken over another floor of its huge, bunker-like building in the Soma district of San Francisco. Now it has a yoga studio (apparently well-used) and a game and entertainment room (apparently not so much), as well as many more desks and conference rooms. It’s a time of insane growth; more than half the staff of the company has joined in the last six months.

Sarver said in addition to the announced feature additions, the next big thing he wants to offer developers is solid opportunities to succeed as businesses. That will consist of a couple to-do items:

• Better systems for promoting apps and enabling user discovery of apps.
• “Putting money through the ecosystem” by ramping up Twitter’s rollout of its advertising model, syndicating promoted tweets.

Sarver also said he expects to hold the next Twitter developer event in late August or early September. After Chirp, he had hoped to set an agenda of quarterly events, but other things — like the massive Twitter usage associated with the World Cup — have gotten in the way. And besides, as everyone at Twitter seems to admit with a pained smile, the best help Twitter can offer to its developers right now is a scalable and reliable service that doesn’t take their apps down with it. That, of course, has been a problem lately.

Despite Sarver’s happy version of events, it’s true that some investors and entrepreneurs are nervous about the uncertainties associated with building on Twitter. VP product Jason Goldman tried to explain Twitter’s point of view: “It’s not altruistic,” he said. “We depend on the ecosystem for our success.” Goldman said the Twitter management has committed to openness in planning, rules, and access to data for both developers and users.

Meanwhile behind the scenes, the company has made efforts to include select developers in its product testing, and allowed others to pay for better access to its data. Sarver said 30 to 40 Update: a Twitter spokesperson said the number is actually 15 to 20 companies now have access to the Twitter Firehose — the premium metered product of a real-time stream of all public Tweets. That includes big guys like Microsoft, Yahoo and Google and “two guys in Russia building relevance and discovery tools.” While the Firehose was first doled out in the name of real-time search, Sarver said today 10 to 12 of the companies using it are in search, and the others do a variety of things — for instance, Jive uses the Firehose for social business software.

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Twitter CEO Evan Williams speaks at the company's Chirp conference

But I think another factor is that Twitter has been a center of attention for most of its life, with everyone from celebrities to governments to social mediaites to developers demanding its time. “They have to be diplomatic so they defaulted to silence in their diplomacy instead of listening,” said Laura Fitton, who in running the Twitter tool directory Oneforty has become a de facto spokesperson and liaison for the Twitter developer community.

That Twitter has been out of touch was obvious on the first day of Chirp, which was billed as a developer conference but content-wise was all about business and media. Fitton called the Twitter executive keynotes “spinmeistery.” “Where was the code?” asked Orian Marx, developer of Fusebox, an app he called “a TweetDeck killer.” “Those morning speeches were a little too long for me,” said Danielle Morrill, the director of marketing for Twilio, who’s working on a “Tweet-to-call” application herself. Worse, the event itself was held in a theater, with the audience in darkness — not exactly a collaborative atmosphere.

Twitter investor Chris Sacca did an admirable job in the last session of the day (video embedded below), asking tough questions of a gaggle of Twitter executives onstage and voicing developer concerns about competition and support. Though the Twitter execs may have been a bit too punchy and silly, they did finally get to the point. “The thing I learn time after time is that if people don’t have visibility the natural reaction is to think it’s nefarious,” said CEO Evan Williams. “While there is some natural tension [between a platform and its developers], I think we can communicate a lot better.”

http://www.justin.tv/widgets/archive_embed_player.swf
Watch live video from Twitter Chirp Conference on Justin.tv

Five days before Chirp, Twitter announced it had acquired the maker of Tweetie, an iPhone client that will bring it into direct competition with other client developers. That made people who build businesses on the Twitter platform nervous, unsettled and angry. “Having the Tweetie acquisition then may have not been the greatest headline-producing strategy,” said Twitter VP of Product Jason Goldman. “But from a communication transparency perspective it was awesome — we can talk to you much more directly.” So in a sense, Twitter was forced into honest and upfront communication by its own actions.

The company promises that it will do better in the future; for instance, platform head Ryan Sarver promised quarterly platform updates, to be available on video. Sarver, by the way, was the breakout hit of the conference, offering frank and practical information about the things developers were there to hear about. (Fittingly, he was Foursquare’s “mayor” of the Chirp Hack Day when I checked in this morning.) And already, the second, hands-on day of the conference was held in a much friendlier open space at Fort Mason. Even if the awful acoustics made attending sessions difficult, the beanbag chairs were a much better setting for actual conversations. Plus, there was a tweeting taco truck!

In the future, expect Twitter’s blanket justification for its actions to be that it’s trying to build a bigger pie for everyone. “The best thing we can do for you guys in our minds is to grow the user base. That’s going to create an order of magnitude more opportunities than exist today,” Williams said in his keynote. Sure, it’s an excuse, but it’s not just talk; the company will be giving developers half of its revenue when they participate in its grand new ad product, Sponsored Tweets.

So now that it’s all said and done, here are my practical lessons from Chirp.

Where Twitter will compete with developers:

* The company will release its own Android client (Williams said he tried to have the announcement ready for the conference but couldn’t talk more about it, which sounds a lot like they’re trying to close an acquisition).

* Twitter will release a full link shortener soon. “It’s absolutely stupid that a user can’t put a URL in our box,” said Williams. Users of Twitter’s own web and other apps won’t be offered a choice of which link shortener to use.

* Hosting images is not in the company’s “immediate plans,” Williams said, but defined the time period as “this quarter.” So it may be coming fairly soon. Twitter does plan to make it easier for developers to manage media.

New tools Twitter will offer developers:

Sarver said developer tools will include places, annotations and actions from user streams. The company has also made its developer resources much better and opened up some of the technologies it’s used to scale. Sarver said Twitter won’t try to treat some developers preferentially, but it will necessarily try to learn which ones it can trust and give better indications of where it’s going to everyone. Expect to see a more structured agenda for communicating Twitter’s road map coming soon.

Will investors continue to put money into Twitter ecosystem startups?

Twitter invited super angel investor Ron Conway to open its second day, and he rallied those present with the promise that he’s still bullish on companies in the Twitter space. “In five years there will be a billion [Twitter] users, and five public companies in this sector, and one of you here will be CEO of one of them,” he said. Of course that optimistic attitude isn’t going to extend to every investor. “I’ll be honest with you: I’m not buying all the feel-good, make-love-not-war stuff,” said Mike Hirshland of Polaris Ventures, an investor in companies like Thing Labs and Automattic, on Chirp’s VC panel.

What Twitter-based opportunities remain?

Some of the ideas thrown out by Twitter executives and potential investors at Chirp include:

* Building on top of Twitter’s cheap international SMS deals (Williams)

* Helping publishers integrate with the @Anywhere platform (Twitter COO Dick Costolo)

* Giving users good reasons to share their locations (Sarver)

* Analyzing all the data thrown off by Twitter’s users, encouraging users to share more personal information like on Blippy and Swipely (David Pakman of Venrock)

* High-touch business applications, agency businesses, analytics and something like Groupon for Twitter (Peter Fenton of Benchmark)

My big takeaway: Before this week, Twitter was its ecosystem’s keeper; now, it’s really a company. While it may not be a great time to be a well-funded Twitter client maker like Seesmic, the companies that are getting off the ground post-Chirp have the promise of surer footing and better guidance. Smaller startups and development shops have reason to hope that Twitter will buy them as it staffs up in a hurry in order to tackle the market, as it’s doing now. The company has made four acquisitions to date and it’s clear more are coming soon.

But to some extent, this will all just be talk until a startup that’s not named Twitter creates a big Twitter-based business.

Feature image courtesy of Scott Beale/Laughing Squid.

“It’s important that we do keep agile, but as much as I can, we want to be explicit about where we’re going with these things,” Sarver said, noting that Twitter has fostered more than 100,000 registered applications, up from 50,000 in December.

Twitter’s new location feature, Places, will give developers a structured and curated database of places from around the world. That will allow tweets to be associated with the actual location they originated from, in a way that’s more decipherable and interesting than lat-long coordinates. It’s not necessarily a direct competitor to Foursquare or Gowalla, but it serves much of the same purpose for noting your location and broadcasting your comments about it in context.

Next, a new User Stream API will give developers access to a feed of user actions on a more granular level than just tweets. The user stream includes mentions, friending and favoriting (the kind of stuff you’re used to seeing in Facebook’s news feed). The API will be available to developers to play with at Twitter’s Chirp Hack Day (which actually starts tonight).

On the concept of metadata, Sarver previewed an Annotations feature that will be launching “next quarter” that gives developers much more flexibility around the context of a tweet. The feature will allow developers to “add any arbitrary metadata to any tweet in the system.” So, just like a tweet can today be transmitted along with information about which other tweet it was in reply to, or what location it came from, or what application it was created on, now Twitter will allow developers to make up new stuff. Twitter is looking to see how developers use Annotations before it creates any sort of taxonomy for them, Sarver said.

Lastly, Twitter is launching a central developer resource site at dev.twitter.com later today. It includes such features as documentation that’s generated from code, rather than written by hand (this won applause from the Chirp audience), a way to securely build and reference API calls, an official WatchMouse monitor for the Twitter service and a way to search across all the repositories of Twitter developer information.

You can find video of Sarver’s presentation at Justin.tv

Related content from GigaOM Pro (sub req’d): As Twitter Develops, Developers Quiver in Fear

Twitter is holding its first developer conference, Chirp, today in San Francisco. Co-founder Biz Stone opened with now familiar stories of how Twitter has been used for the betterment of humanity. He also (to his own chagrin, since he’s not a numbers guy) dropped a few stats about the service: 105,779,710 registered Twitter users; 300,000 signups per day; 180 million uniques/month. And 75 percent of traffic comes from outside twitter.com.

Next up, Twitter CEO Evan Williams addressed the company’s relationship with developers:

“Twitter has always been about developers,” Williams said. “Twitter is the ecosystem more than any other web services that has ever existed. You’ve helped define it, poured in your time and energy all the while putting up with our growing pains. And for that we thank you. there’s been a lot of changes lately, we’ve been getting into areas people never thought we would — making money for instance — but we’ve also been releasing more products.”

There’s a fundamental philosophy that’s not changing with Twitter. We’ve always believed in openness. we believe in an open system and the power of ideas. And that is not changing. Twitter is truly a collaboration and that is not changing.

Williams said Twitter released an API just a few months after launch, in September 2006, because he thought that was a thing you do for web apps and services, having created one at Blogger to solicit outside contributions when it was just he working on the product. Williams described how the first Twitter desktop app, Twitterific, and a map visualizer, Twittervision, helped the company understand what it was. First, people’s preference for Twitterific over the web showed “Twitter is ultimately a different experience for different people,” he said. And then Twittervision was a way to show how people used Twitter to those who didn’t understand what it was.

“Ever since then there’s a been an explosion of clients, visualizers, business apps, stat apps, discovery tools. We can’t keep up, the numbers are just staggering,” Williams said. “Twitter now gets 3 billion API requests per day and is seeing 1,500 percent growth per year.” The company also handles 600 million search requests a day, he said. Twitter has grown by 1,500 percent a year for three years, he told the conference, and “to deal with that level of growth has been difficult.”

A year ago this week “there was some wacky stuff happening” at Twitter, Williams said. Ashton Kutcher was racing CNN to a million followers. Oprah did a show about Twitter and had Williams on. Those rogues from 4chan attacked, and meanwhile traffic was up 90 percent after SXSW. The company had just 30-35 employees. “It was surreal… not a normal startup experience.” Now, things have “evolved,” said Williams, and so the company — which now has a team of 175 employees — can provide developers much better guidance. “While we’ve largely been dealing with uncharted territory, we’re going to start painting out the map.”

Twitter’s fundamental tenet, Williams said, is that “The open exchange of information has a positive impact on the world. Our goal as a company is to maximize this impact, that’s what we’re about and it’s what drives everything we do.” That’s why Twitter made those deals with Google, Bing and Yahoo, though investors worried that the licensing deals would be “giving away the farm.” Williams said his team was swayed by the idea that putting the Twitter firehose in front of those engineering teams and their millions of users would “maximize value for end users.”

Next, Williams laid out the company’s four core strategic priorities: infrastructure, friction-free, relevance, revenue. He provided a progress report on infrastructure: Twitter has reduced error rates by two thirds, released tweet delivery failures by two orders of magnitude and killed bugs. It has written a tool based on BitTorrent to transfer lots of files. It took the average time from 40 minutes down to 12 seconds, Williams said.

When it comes to the goal of being friction-free, Twitter is still too hard, Williams said, noting that if you type “I don’t get” into Google, the number two thing people don’t get is Twitter. The company has a new “onboarding” team to try and help get people used to the service, and a recent new sign-up revamp increased retention by 20 percent. Improvements are based around the fact that “Twitter is different things for different people. you can build specialized experiences that make twitter relevant for different people.”

But mobile, said Williams, is “clearly where most people will use Twitter,” and it’s the best way to “take twitter to the weakest signals around the globe.” After canceling international SMS on Twitter due to rising costs a while back, carriers are now seeking out Twitter and signing deals for cheap SMS — 65 of them now. “This is something I’d encourage people to think about,” Williams told the developers. “You can use Twitter’s SMS reach, which normally takes a lot of money and it’s hard to get these deals.”

Next, Williams turned to its hot-button moves to create an “official” BlackBerry Twitter app and buy Tweetie. He said that Twitter not having these apps is a big problem. “Or else we’re just failing users, we’re failing the ecosystem because we’re not getting people engaged.” Williams’ rationale for the deal: “The best thing we can do for you guys in our minds is to grow the user base. That’s going to create an order of magnitude more opportunities than exist today.”

Today there are about 55 million new Tweets per day, and vast majority are open to the public. “We want to start building relevance into search,” Williams said, using factors like understanding the value of a link and location or “points of interest,” a new feature the company is launching today. “Our goal is to make twitter a tool for finding what people care about, not just more information,” he said. Lastly, the Twitter CEO had just a couple of words on revenue: he said it will be organic to Twitter, it will be “user beneficial” and it will be “ecosystem friendly.”

Williams ended with three takeaways, and he offered them in less than 140 characters: “Keynote takeaways: 1. Twitter is evolving. 2. the goal is to serve users. 3. There is much left to invent.”

You can find Evan Williams’ keynote video at Justin.tv

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Timing:

Twitter’s first Chirp event comes at a time of tension with its developer community. The company is clearly under pressure from its investors’ and its own lofty expectations to become more of a money-generating product and less of an open platform. In the last week Twitter has made clear its intent to compete with Twitter-based startups by buying a select few and building competing branded products. Developers are still getting themselves organized, but they’re meeting today at a Pre-Chirp event and there’s also some momentum to move off Twitter to an open federated standard.

Facebook’s third f8 conference, by contrast, comes at a more stable time. The company roadmapped many of its planned changes in advance, and others have leaked out. But you never know, Facebook isn’t immune to community and developer revolts; the site could always make another privacy preferences change or prune back developer access further.

News:

Twitter is of course launching its Sponsored Tweets product, which it started talking about openly last night. It will also presumably be clarifying and responding to criticism of its relationship with developers.

Among the features Facebook is expected to launch are: location functionality, a fire hose feed, and “a ‘Like’ Button For the Whole Darn Internet.” Also expected is the further opening up of its platform.

Attendance:

Both events are sold out, but will be available through live video streams. Twitter is using Justin.tv and the stream will be available here. Facebook is using Livestream and the stream will be linked to and/or embedded here.

Agenda:

Chirp is notably Twitter-heavy, with a full day of content coming mainly from four of its top execs (CEO Ev Williams and COO Dick Costolo are each speaking twice). It will have just two panels including outsiders, with VCs and people in government and crisis management represented.

Facebook has one name on its agenda so far: Mark Zuckerberg — though its scheduled afternoon tracks on new tools, best practices, industry strategies and its open-source projects will presumably include a range of other speakers.

Twitter is hosting a 24-hour Hack Day that starts after the main Chirp agenda and goes into the next day. It will include a variety of office hours by Twitter employees and talks on more specific topics like Cassandra, the mobile web, and Twitter and the media. Apps developed at the event will be showcased at the end. Tickets are still available and they’re cheaper than the full pass.

Facebook, by contrast, is hosting an “intimate” day-after hackathon to which you have to apply.

Logistics:

The Chirp pass base price was $469 with Hack Day-only passes at $140. f8 tickets were $425 or cheaper with an early discount. Chirp is at the majestic Palace of Fine Arts (which is really a theater setting) with the Hack Day at Fort Mason. Facebook is at the The Concourse at San Francisco Design Center on the south side of the city.

(Then, if you want to see how a massive public web company does a developer conference, stick around till next month’s Google I/O, which is at the big-daddy conference location Moscone.)

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Please see the disclosure related to Facebook in my bio.

The faceoff photo is courtesy of Flickr user eflon.