Official Android Twitter App
It’s been said that Twitter launched as an incomplete product–unlike, say, Facebook, Twitter is very much a skeleton, without its own versions of many of the most important ways we interact with the service. Twitter doesn’t have its own mobile app, its own photo uploading service, or its own URL shortener–so third-party developers have jumped in to provide them. Twitter’s slowly been filling those “holes,” recently releasing their own BlackBerry app and buying Tweetie, one of the best iPhone apps. That still leaves Android–and on the first day of Chirp, Evan Williams announced that Android would be getting its own official Twitter app. No word on if it’ll be a first-party app, like BlackBerry’s, or a purchased existing app, like Tweetie on the iPhone. (My suggestion for that latter option: either Twicca or Touiteur).
Official URL Shortener
URLs are often too long for the limited space allowed in a Twitter update, which necessitates a URL shortener. Bit.ly has been the default shortener in Twitter for a while now, but Twitter has already bought twt.tl and twee.tt, which indicated the news that came yesterday. In addition to the Android Twitter app, Williams announced that the URL shortening hole would be filled as well. No word, though, on what will happen to Bit.ly, or how Twitter’s own shortener will be implemented.
More Tools for Developers
Twitter’s platform director, Ryan Sarver, announced a whole bunch of developer tools that mostly won’t affect you yet. There’s a location feature called Places that gives a structured database of locations rather than lat-long coordinates. Places should make it easier for developers to integrate location-based features like those offered by Foursquare and Gowalla into Twitter. A User Stream API give developers access to more data, like mentions, friending, and favoriting. Annotations allows devs to add metadata to any tweet, and a new developer site will have more robust search and monitoring functions.
