If anyone was ever in any doubt about the growing popularity of Twitter and its so-called ecosystem, then they only have to look at the latest blog entry posted by the social networking company on Monday.
According to the post, there are now more than a million third-party Twitter apps in existence, up from only 150,000 a year ago. The apps are the work of some 750,000 developers from around the world.
“A new app is registered every 1.5 seconds, fueling a spike in ecosystem growth in the areas of analytics, curation and publisher tools,” Twitter said in the post.
The company explains that these apps “help people understand and make the most of Twitter, whether they’re on the web, on mobile, and even watching television.” The blog post highlighted a few that have come to its attention in recent months.
Mass Relevance gets a mention. This “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.”
Another, Poptweets, “created an addictive iPhone trivia game that challenges players to match Tweets with the famous people who said them.”
Radian6 is also acknowledged, a company that “turned its brand monitoring tools into a thriving business and was recently acquired by Salesforce for $326 million.”
The post points out that in the last seven months, over $500 million has been invested in the companies making these apps, with more than a billion dollars having been forked out in acquisitions. Twitter itself recently bought TweetDeck for a sum estimated to be in the region of $45 million.
And in a move which could have a big impact on the number of Twitter apps coming to fruition (ie. forget every 1.5 seconds – we could soon be looking at every half a second), the company also announced a Twitter Developer site, “where anyone in the ecosystem can start building with Twitter, connect directly with Twitter team members, exchange ideas with fellow developers, and find all the resources they need to create their own product or business.”
However, would-be developers should keep in mind the words of Twitter platform chief Ryan Sarver, who in March warned developers not to create any new apps “that mimic or reproduce the mainstream Twitter consumer client experience.”
With so many Twitter apps being made, the biggest challenge must surely be coming up with something attractive and original that people will actually want to use.
