Twitter Colorado - founders Biz Stone and Evan Williams shared some long - await employment figures for the service and sought to assure developers that Twitter is becoming a stable platform for building applications , as they kicked off the first - ever developer conference in San Francisco Wednesday .
Twitter has 105 million register drug user , with 300,000 new users signing up every day , Stone said , opening Twitter ’s Chirp conference at the Palace of Fine Arts before an audience of just shy of 1,000 developers . That substance abuser public figure is more than a late estimation from comScore , which peg Twitter ’s substance abuser basis at 65 million .
The Twitter API ( app programming port ) field 3 billion requests per day , Williams tell . “ That ’s large than all but a couple of Web sites in the existence , ” he said , claiming it seduce Twitter “ about the same size as Yahoo . ” He enounce the service has grown 1,500 pct each class on average since “ Twitter Inc. ” was founded three years ago this month . The service is also field about 19 billion lookup a calendar month , Williams say , which compares to about 90 billion for Google .
But the emergence has brought challenges . Twitter has struggled to keep up with the need on its infrastructure , and Williams acknowledged the preceding two year have been a disorderly and not always pleasant time for the company .
His message for developer Wednesday was that Twitter is putting the difficult time behind it and can now offer a unchanging , reliable weapons platform on which developers can build novel applications .
“ Even just in the past few months , Twitter is a qualitatively different party than it has been , ” Williams said . “ We ’re out of the chaos to some degree , we ’re reacting better , we ’ve build up the infrastructure we need .
“ What it have in mind for you guy , ” he told developer , “ is a more stable and organized platform for you to establish on . ”
He accost the fact that Twitter has begin release some of its own applications , cast it in rival with its developer community . Referring to the BlackBerry andiPhone applicationsthe company recently released , Williams said he know it was a “ controversial decision ” but that it had to be done .
“ When we did the research we discover we were underserving drug user , ” he said . “ We had to have a essence experience on these weapons platform just like we have on the Web . We were fail the ecosystem because we were not getting as many people as we could engaged . ”
The company has seen 100,000 unexampled user sign up through the BlackBerry app in just a few day , and 1.7 percent of all Twitter posts come through the BlackBerry program program , he said .
make Twitter easier to use remains a central object lens . “ Twitter is too surd to use . It ’s awing it has arise as prominent as it is give how hard it is to employ , ” Williams said ..
To instance the degree , he said if you type “ I do n’t get ” into the Google lookup bar , the 2nd auto - complete proposition is “ I do n’t get Twitter . ” That example draw laughs , but Williams said it ’s a serious job the society has to address if it desire to keep flesh out .
Twitter has four chief precedence going fore , he said : keep improving its substructure , make the avail easier to use , improve the relevancy of “ tweets ” for users and make revenue .
informality - of - use efforts will be focus in big part on mobile devices , where Williams still sees Twitter ’s future tense . “ Mobile is intelligibly where the legal age of economic consumption will go on , ” he said .
unspoilt relevancy will permit users to find what they want from the 55 million Twitter posts that he read are being created every solar day . The company serve well 600 million search queries a day , he order , mostly through the Twitter lookup API . Until now the results have been presented mostly in chronological fashion — presenting the most late rather than the most relevant results .
The company has been experimenting with “ Top Tweets , ” which assay to present more relevant result , and it will continue to perfect its algorithm to make results relevant . It will also expand its localization capableness , which are a bit part of relevance because they allow people to line up posts from people secretive to them or in particular locations .
A few hebdomad ago it commence to incorporate city and neighborhood information into result . On Wednesday , it declare that it will provide information about specific landmark . “ You ’ll be capable to snap on Palace of Fine Arts and see what all the people there are saying in a hunting scene — but even that will just be the beginning , ” he said .
The company will talk a hatful more about new genus Apis and its plans for make money over the next two days . “ The receipts design will be organic to Twitter , it will be user - beneficial and it will be ecosystem - friendly , ” Williams enjoin .
He recommend developers to wait to the future . There will be “ hundreds of millions of users ” and “ chiliad of way to habituate Twitter that have n’t even been imagined yet , ” he say .
“ It will be incorporate into our daily lives . There will be Modern capability that have n’t been created yet . That ’s the case of domain we want you to decant your originative minds into . ”
The Chirp conference come at an of import time for Twitter , which has been adding users at a fast clip but until this week had not issue forth up with a plan for give money . That transfer Tuesday with the launch ofPromoted Tweets , through which some user will start to see promotional messages from Best Buy , Red Bull , Starbucks and other advertising partners at the top of Twitter hunt results .
Forrester psychoanalyst Josh Bernoff said rate advertising in search results is a good place for Twitter to start . “ Of all the stead Twitter could include ads , this is the least obtrusive and the most relevant , ” he wrote in a blog post this calendar week . “ People will not abandon Twitter for this . It ’s inevitable — engineering service require revenue . ”
But the society may shortly move beyond that . Twitter aver it will expend some time figuring out how the ads vibrate with advertiser and remainder - users . After that it may presently go sprinkling them between its users ’ message timeline .
The group discussion remain Wednesday and Thursday with presentation about upcoming genus Apis and more details about Twitter ’s business plan .