And other new features Twitter has announced

Apr 15, 2010 15:40 GMT  ·  By
Twitter plans to launch quite a lot of new features in the short-term future
   Twitter plans to launch quite a lot of new features in the short-term future

Finally revealing how many people use Twitter and how big the third-party ecosystem is is nice, but most people expected Twitter to announce some new technology or feature at its first developer conference, Chirp. And Twitter delivered, with a couple of quite interesting, new features it plans to launch in the future, Places and Annotations. That’s not all, developers will also get access to more user actions with the User Stream API. Finally, Twitter also made an announcement some had been anticipating, it will launch its own URL shortener.

Places - Google Place Pages meets Foursquare

The Places feature is a mixture of Google’s Place Pages and location services like Foursquare. It aims to associate a user’s location with an actual one rather than just lat-long data and will make use of Twitter’s existing, but rather unemployed, location API.

Twitter users will be able to check in, though the action won’t be called that, at various locations, letting the world know where they are more accurately. Twitter says it doesn’t want to become a competitor to Foursqaure or Gowalla, but just put to good use the location features it has in place. Still, apart from the game element, there is a considerable overlap between the Places feature and existing services that enable users to ‘check in.’

Annotations - add any meta-data to tweets

Another interesting feature is aimed at developers. With Annotations, apps will be able to attach various meta-data to the actual tweets, more than what is available today. Tweets already carry additional information like whether it is a reply, the name of the app that created it, location info, and so on. Developers will have plenty of freedom in the type of data they can attach and Twitter says it is curious to see what they can come up with.

The User Stream API is another tool aimed squarely at developers. It will enable apps to access more than a user’s tweet and retrieve information like who they recently followed, mentions, and so on.

Twitter app for Android

But it’s not all good news for developers, Twitter’s recent move to start offering ‘official’ alternatives to the various apps and services that have sprung up around it continues. After the launch of a BlackBerry app and the acquisition of the team behind the Tweetie iPhone app, Twitter has revealed that it also plans to launch an Android app at some point. It isn’t clear if it will acquire an existing company or create its own app from scratch.

Twee.tt - Twitter’s new URL shortener

And there’s more, URL shorteners aren’t safe either. Twitter plans to launch its own such service. It could use the Twee.tt URL that it already owns, but this hasn’t been confirmed. It will be the default URL shortener on Twitter.com and the company says it will not offer a way for users to switch to another provider. Third-party apps are free to use any shortener they want, of course.

Bit.ly, the current default URL shortener on Twitter.com, will be hit the hardest, but the company has been taking steps to ensure that it can survive such a move. Already, it gets almost half of shortening requests from outside Twitter and the additional services it provides should keep the serious players stick with Bit.ly.

Other Twitter Chirp coverage: - Twitter Has 106 Million Users - Twitter Search Is Bigger than Yahoo and Bing Combined - Library of Congress to Preserve Every Tweet Ever RecordedTwitter Ready to Take On Facebook Connect with @anywhere