14 DAY TRIAL // Depending on how you look at it, Twitter couldn’t have picked a better or a worse time to anger its developers. With less than a week until its first developer conference, Chirp, it launched its own official BlackBerry app and acquired the makers of the most popular iPhone app, Tweetie. Effectively, Twitter would be competing with the third-party developers that make up a big part of the company’s success. And with the new numbers revealed at the Chirp conference, the role of its developer community is even clearer.
100,000 apps – twice as many as four months ago
It was known that apps played a big role, but the percentage speaks for itself. 75 percent of the traffic Twitter sees comes from client apps rather than the site. It’s no wonder then that the Twitter platform gets three billion API calls each day from 100,000 registered applications. That’s double the number of apps it had in December 2009, when it revealed that its ecosystem contained 50,000 individual applications.
Twitter search is bigger than Bing and Yahoo combined
Another interesting tidbit is that, out of the three billion API requests, 600 million are searches. In fact, Twitter gets about 19 billion searches each month, a number that would make it the second biggest search engine, below Google, but above Yahoo and Bing. Actually, it would be bigger than Yahoo and Bing combined. That’s probably one number that no one saw coming. And search volume is expected to reach one billion queries each day next month.
However, as Twitter’s Evan Williams notes, it’s not a direct comparison. Most of the searches on Twitter come from client apps, many of which have an automatic search setup. They constantly poll Twitter for the search term in question and each counts as a new search. On a typical search engine, a user manually initiates a search.
Still, that’s a lot of data to push and process, so, from a technical point of view, it’s quite an achievement. Considering that one of Twitter’s most well-known traits as early as a year ago was how often it went down, it speaks volumes for how much Twitter has evolved. But Twitter can handle it, and the expected future growth, partly because it has been on somewhat of a hiring spree, going from 40 employees to 175 in just one year.
Other Twitter Chirp coverage:
- Twitter Has 106 Million Users
-
Library of Congress to Preserve Every Tweet Ever Recorded
- Twitter Ready to Take On Facebook Connect with @anywhere
- Places, Annotations, Twitter for Android and Twee.tt