The bird is tweeting, but way up above the sky. Twitter released a new blogpost. The micro-blogging network shared the fact in the post that there are one million registered third party apps in its platform now. The news came into report at a time, when a number of social media analysts have been becoming skeptic to Twitter’s growth.
Just a year back, Twitter had around 150000 developers working in its ecosystem. And now it has 750000 developers, who are contributing to build the applications. To describe how dense Twitter’s network is becoming of third party apps, the blog post reads, “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 blog also tells us that from December 2010, over $500 million has been invested in companies that belong to Twitter’s eco-system, which is a reliable indicator of Twitter’s being a suitable platform for developers.
No doubt these stat figures signify Twitter’s growth as a platform to lure app developers. But in my view, it also solidifies the opinion that Twitter is largely dependent upon third party developers. In fact, the blog post stands in sync with this view as it reads, “Apps help people understand and make the most of Twitter”. The most recent additions like dev.twitter.com, the streamlined app manager or TfN, are all courtesy to third party developers.
Twitter needs to reduce the said dependence. Their social networking counterpart Facebook also aims to leverage those developers, but doesn’t compromise with the autonomy of its platform. So Twitter, would want to spend another rounds of millions after any other client like TweetDeck?
