Twitter’s Chirp Conference 2010: Day 1 Recap

So I just finished watching the live stream of the Chirp Conference and it was very interesting stuff. If you’re not familiar with the conference, Chirp is Twitter’s first conference for app developers. It’s a two day conference held at the Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco. Today’s speakers included Evan Williams, Biz Stone, Ryan Sarver, Dick Costolo, and a few others. The topics that were covered included OAuth, streaming, geolocation, business strategies, mobile integration, product roadmap, third-party developers, monetization, and Twitter’s @anywhere platform which just went live a few hours ago.

Co-founder Biz Stone kicked off the event with some key statistics about the company. Biz revealed that Twitter now has 105 million registered users, or to be exact, 105,779,710 registered users since its launch in 2006. He went on to say that Twitter is also adding 300,000 new users each day and about 60% of these users are coming from outside the U.S. According to my math, that’s 180,000 new signups coming from outside the U.S. and 120,000 coming within the U.S each day. While these are very impressive numbers, I have to wonder how many people sign up for multiple Twitter accounts, how many users are currently active, and how many signups are spam users or bots. Nonetheless, to learn more about all the statistics revealed at Chirp visit Chirp Conference – 2010: Twitter Statistics Revealed.

Although the entire conference was interesting and provided a lot of valuable information, perhaps the most interesting part of the event came at the end when five key Twitter executives (CEO Evan Williams, and Co-Founder Biz Stone, VP Product Jason Goldman, COO Dick Costolo, and Director of Platform Ryan Sarver) took the stage to answer questions from the audience. The majority of questions came from people who attended the conference, but Twitter users who tweeted questions accompanied with the hashtag #chirpqa had a chance to get their questions answered as well. For more on the Q&A session feel free to visit Mashable.

So let’s take a look at some of the things that were discussed on stage at Chirp.

Twitter for Android – Yes, an Android app is in the works, but it’s unclear if Twitter will acquire an existing company who already developed an app, partner with a mobile device maker, or develop the app themselves.

URL shortener – Twitter confirmed that it has plans to launch their own URL shortner. This news comes two days after Twitter purchased the twee.tt domain name. However, it’s unclear if this will be the official short URL.

Twitter hosted rich media – According to CEO Evan Williams, there hasn’t been a decision yet about hosting rich media content like photos, videos, etc…. However, he went on to say “We won’t discount the possibility of hosting.”

Geolocation
– Twitter announced that it will be possible to add locations to tweets, but CEO Evan Williams said Twitter has no plans to challenge location-based services like Foursquare and Gowalla.

Promoted Tweets
– Twitter CEO Evan Williams and Twitter COO Dick Costolo made it clear that promoted tweets are not ads. You can read more about Twitter’s monetization model and the launch of promoted tweets by visiting the official Twitter blog here.

Annotations – This will allow developers to attach metadata to a tweet.

Twitter expanding into China – Twitter has no plans to grow their business in China now. However, according to co-founder Biz Stone, Twitter wants “to translate the service into as many languages as possible without putting any servers into these countries.”

App developers get their own site – Director of Platform, Ryan Sarver, announced that Twitter will be giving developers their own sandbox for developing apps. In addition, developers will get a lot more information about the Twitter API.

Library of CongressTwitter and the Library of Congress announced that every public tweet that has been posted since Twitter’s launch in 2006 will be digitally archived by the federal library.

Although a lot of good information was shared at Chirp today, I highlighted only a few of the topics that were covered. If you missed Chirp and would like to learn more you can watch a few of the videos here.

[Photo Credit: Scott Beale / Laughing Squid]

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