Twitter supports 100,000 apps, shows off new social functionality

Twitter showed off new social features and said it now supports 100,000 registered apps today, the company’s director of platform Ryan Sarver said at the Chirp conference in San Francisco today. Seventy-five percent of the company’s traffic now comes through external apps.
“Twitter is the way it is because of the ecosystem,” said Ryan Sarver “There is no way we can be successful without you guys.”
Sarver said that the company’s system for allowing people to use their Twitter log-ins on external sites, OAuth, had been written from top to bottom. The company was also retooling the way its denotes places in tweets so all applications “have the same common language” of locations.
The neatest thing he showed off was a new feature that allows external apps to pull a feed of user activity like following and marking favorite tweets. It could allow users to see when their friends decide to follow other accounts to star comments they liked.
As part of his presentation, Sarver brought CoTweet co-founder Aaron Gotwalt on-stage to talk about how he built the enterprise-focused Twitter client.
Gotwalt said the idea came to him after recognizing how much trouble different brands were having in managing their presences on Twitter. He initially launched a product called Twansmit, or “Twitter for trust agents,” which he quickly scrapped. He then changed it to CoTweet with the slogan “Twitter for business” and brought several social media advisors on board.
The product eventually began attracting serious brands and was finally acquired earlier this year by e-mail marketing giant ExactTarget.
“Sixteen months ago I was a guy working in my parent’s house. Now we have a team of nine people. It’s interesting to go from a little idea to a really big thing,” he said.
Companies: Twitter
People: Ryan Sarver