Twitter has just debuted the capability to add line breaks in your tweets. Brace yourself for the coming explosion of ASCII art on Twitter.

One comfort?

The line breaks will only show up on Twitter.com, not on mobile devices. And not even in embedded tweets, as you can tell from this announcement tweet straight from the horse’s mouth:

Guess what you can doView line breaks on Twitter webLet the fun begin.

— Twitter (@twitter) March 13, 2013

But there’s one more thing to brace yourself for. …

A horde of idiots doing exactly what I did when I first saw the news from Twitter: Creating inane tweets that say essentially nothing but explore the new and amazing freedom of line breakage in Twitter. Very exciting, isn’t it?

Source: @johnkoetsier

A tweet with line breaks

One concern about this new-found freedom besides the obvious?

Twitter’s stated objective in last year’s API restrictions that infuriated developers was to “deliver a consistent user experience.” In fact, the company switched its existing display guidelines to display requirements in an effort to make a tweet on Twitter.com look the same as a tweet in HootSuite or any other Twitter client.

But with this update of Twitter’s own making, tweets which look interesting and sensible on Twitter.com will look completely stupid and odd (see Twitter’s own embedded tweet above) on any other platform.

Is that part of the plan?

photo credit: degra™ via photopin cc

Balachandar Ganesh oversees research operations at Credii.

Twitter’s recent announcement of an Ads API hardly comes as a surprise. The rumour mills have been predicting this for nearly two years now, and with Facebook and LinkedIn already having made similar moves, it was merely a question of just when this was going to happen.

The move is widely being touted as a very wise one by Twitter — and for the right reasons. It enables Twitter to tap into the expertise of third party application developers with a proven track record of developing marketing platforms that help advertisers in launching, managing and optimizing their campaigns at scale.

Regardless of how big your advertising budgets are, Twitter’s Ads API and the value that it promises to deliver via third party ad solutions providers is unquestionable.

But how exactly will this impact marketers and marketing budgets? What tangible outcomes can advertisers expect from these third party ad solutions providers in the not so distant future?

Buying Twitter ad units just got easier

Balachandar Ganesh

Up until yesterday, the only way you could buy advertising real estate on Twitter was either off their basic self-service interface or from their direct sales team. Not only is this far from optimal, it is also extremely difficult to scale if you want to run frequent and multiple campaigns. There’s always been a demand for gaining more eyeballs on Twitter through advertising (Twitter sees nearly half a billion tweets on the platform every day!) and with this announcement, Twitter just widened the supply pipes.

The Ads API is a definitive step towards building a developer ecosystem similar to that of Facebook’s Preferred Marketing Developer program. As marketers, it gives you the flexibility to buy and manage Twitter ad units from a variety of developers, and arguably, do so easily and effectively.

Creating ad campaigns on Twitter just got easier

Creating and managing ad campaigns on Twitter was a labour intensive process — a process that couldn’t scale to meet the requirements of agencies and big brands. Consider an agency creating thousands of new ad units for their clients every day. These ads had to be manually uploaded, one by one. Editing these ad units, if you had to, was equally painful.

Running scheduled ad campaigns? Forget about it!

By tapping into the goodness of third-party tools like Salesforce Marketing Cloud, Adobe Marketing Cloud, GraphEffect from SHIFT and TBG Digital’s One Media Manager (and likely many more in the very near future), advertisers can now upload and edit bulk ads, and effortlessly create, plan and run ad campaigns like they do for Facebook or YouTube.

Reporting and analytics just got better

Twitter’s native ad analytics and reporting tools are, well, threadbare. Here’s a look at the entire repertoire of Twitter’s analytics for promoted tweets, trends and accounts.
Twitter doesn’t offer much apart from pretty basic metrics such as impressions, retweets, clicks, replies, and follows. Hardly enough to wet the lips of advertisers spending $200,000 per day on a promoted trend (yes, they’ve upped the price from the $80,000 they used to charge when it first launched).

Adding context to these metrics and enriching them with perspective that you glean from cross-channel ad campaigns is something that Facebook, LinkedIn and now, Twitter’s partner ecosystem is more than capable of delivering on.

You can squeeze more bang-for-your-buck with hyper targeting

Twitter barely offers anything in terms of targeting.

Since launching their promoted products suite, Twitter has offered businesses the ability to target by geography, by gender and only recently, by interest. There already is an impressive ecosystem of vendors that do some pretty neat stuff around generating in-depth audience profiles, like being able to suggest and rank individuals according to topic specific influence levels, or giving you a list of users similar to your target audience. As Twitter expands their Ads API partner ecosystem, marketing software vendors with a strong focus on analytics will be able to give marketers the ability to run highly targeted and highly contextual ad campaigns.

Want to run a promoted tweet campaign to get the attention of influential folks in technology, living in Palo Alto, and are unsatisfied Verizon customers? No problem!

You can finally expect data-driven real-time ad campaign optimization

The industry for tapping into the social web, mining for relevant conversations, and optimizing engagement is awash with hundreds of vendors catering to a wide array of requirements. In the process of adopting an ‘always-on’ approach in monitoring for trends or impending crises that could snowball into something disastrous, they generate a lot of real-time or near real-time insights. These insights can now be used to complete the feedback loop in optimizing ad campaigns at run time.

And maybe, just maybe …

Right now, the only engagement metrics on Twitter that are indicative of the success or failure of an ad campaign are retweets, @mentions and replies. You really can’t measure much else with promoted tweets, promoted trends and promoted accounts. However, Twitter is looking into newer ad units, giving advertisers more options to engage with their target audience.

The ad unit that Twitter is currently testing features an image with a ‘Get it Now’ button (see image below), giving marketers the ability to generate leads directly from Tweets. You can also expect Vine lending itself as a new, meaningful ad unit. 6 second videos on autoplay could very well be Twitter’s equivalent to Facebook’s rumoured autoplay video ads.

Whether or not Twitter chooses to roll out lead cards, it isn’t outlandish to suggest that Twitter will be rolling out newer, more complex ad units in the near future, enabling their partner ecosystem to deliver algorithmic, analytics- intensive, data-driven technology solutions so advertisers can increase the effectiveness of their Twitter campaigns.

Folks, Twitter marketing just got serious.

Balachandar Ganesh oversees research operations at Credii, an interactive web-based platform for business software selection. In his previous role as an enterprise software analyst at Ovum, Bala evaluated over a hundred enterprise technologies in depth and authored reports that helped businesses mitigate technology adoption related challenges. He also undertook a number of consulting engagements, advising companies ranging from garage startups to global multi-billion dollar firms. Bala is a graduate in Technology Policy from the University of Cambridge, where he focused on Internet Governance and Policy related issues.

Image credit: ShutterStock/Tweet bird

The past 12 months have been an exciting ride over here at DevBeat. We’ve had thrilling announcements, head-scratching corporate maneuvers, and more than a little bit of developer drama.

But as we prepare to take on 2013, we don’t want to offer just empty reflections on the year that’s passed. Rather, here are the big lessons we learned from the top developer news stories of 2012.

As always, we welcome your own reflections, stories, and lessons learned in the comments.

The Node hype cycle peaks

The year began with Node.js creator Ryan Dahl backing not-so-slowly away from the technology’s day-to-day operations inside Joyent, hinting on Twitter that he was a bit Node’d out. But as Node was passed into the hands of other caretakers, it was also gaining traction at larger companies and within larger applications. Walmart started using it. Google and Mozilla talked about how it can scale, and LinkedIn used it for its revamped mobile suite. And Yahoo used it to build a better mobile browser.

The story: “Also, let’s point out the obvious: For all these open-source programming technologies (PHP, Ruby, and now Node), there’s a killing to be made in offering enterprise-grade services and support for the more popular choices among them. And Node is nothing if not popular; late last year, Node eclipsed Ruby to become the most-watched repo on GitHub.”

The moral: Node is cool, sure, but it’s also grown-up enough for the enterprise and scaled apps.

The open-source hardware trend comes of age

After a good couple years of banging on its Open Compute Project, Facebook saw its project take flight this year, with new supporters in high places. And it wasn’t just Facebook; other companies started talking about open-source hardware and support for hardware hackers. From startups like Circuits.io and Upverter to the big guys with data centers to spare, everyone seems to be well on board with this trend — except Google, oddly enough.

The story: “‘Open Compute might evolve into a broader focus over time,’ said Facebook exec Frank Frankovsky. There’s a possibility that the same open-source workflow that’s being applied to this data center hardware might someday be applied to other networked devices and even mobile devices. Can you imagine, for example, how the community might work together to solve issues like cellphone battery life? ‘We might spread our wings,” Frankovsky concluded, ‘but for now, we want to stay focused on data centers, servers, and storage.’”

The moral: We should all care a little bit more about the energy it takes to process a click. And the answer isn’t fewer clicks; it’s collaborative work on energy-efficient hardware.

The lean startup ethic backfires

The tale of Curebit isn’t a pleasant one to recall. The young team of Y Combinator/500 Startups acolytes were doing their best to build a company the lean way, but they ended leaning a little too far toward outright theft. After getting caught red-handed stealing images, code, and even background music for their demo video, they were forced to publicly apologize, and their reputation was badly tarnished by the whole ugly episode.

The story: “On Twitter, some of the Internet’s more colorful personalities are currently battling it out in a war of colorful words. After the discovery, Ruby on Rails creator and thievery victim DHH called the Curebit team ‘fucking scumbags’ and Grant himself ‘a person of poor moral character.’”

The moral: Yes, Virginia, there is such a thing as a moral absolute. Even if you’re a cheap bastard.

The continuing war between responsive mobile web apps and nativists

No topic has been bandied about with more rancor than the mobile web — specifically, whether HTML 5-based mobile web applications can or ever will compete in terms of design and performance with native mobile applications.

After open-sourcing Ringmark, a first stab at a testing suite and standards for mobile browsers, Facebook seemed to be leading the charge to defend mobile web apps. And it had Mozilla, LinkedIn, Adobe, and a slew of others in tow. Then it released an all-native iPhone app, with Mark Zuckerberg saying that his company’s bet on the mobile web was all a huge mistake. It was basically the mobile web debate in a nutshell.

Like Facebook, we’re all still working and hoping for a better mobile web next year. And this time, we’re looking toward Mozilla’s die-hard mobile web guys to lead the charge.

The story: “You would think, given their identical aspirations, the three titans — Facebook, Yahoo, and Google — would pool their boundless resources to fast-track the mobile web from the janky, derided ghetto it is to the elegant utopia each of these parties sees in the near future. Yet they remain divided rather than collaborating, which means consumers lose and innovation stagnates.”

The moral: The mobile web is still a far-off ideal, but we’ll get there someday.

Twitter gives Ruby on Rails the kiss-off

Back in the summer of 2011, Twitter started quietly moving away from Ruby on Rails and toward Java/Scala. The “Ruby can’t scale” dictum had already grown tired in developer circles by then. But when Twitter faced its biggest challenge of scale to date — the 2012 presidential election — it held up beautifully. And Ruby on Rails was nowhere in sight. In talking with the company’s architecture demigods, we learned that Twitter’s capability to stay afloat during record-breaking traffic cost the company quite a bit, but its new architecture was the primary reason no fail whales were sighted that November night.

The story: “While Twitter used to see brief spikes during major media events, Twitter infrastructure VP Mazen Rawashdeh wrote today on the company blog that election night was a sustained, hours-long onslaught of activity. … ‘The bottom line: No matter when, where, or how people use Twitter, we need to remain accessible 24/7, around the world,’ said Twitter infrastructure VP Mazen Rawashdeh. ‘We’re hard at work delivering on that vision.’”

The moral: Dude. Your app is not Twitter-scale, and it probably never will be. Relax.

Twitter finally shuts down its API

And speaking of Twitter, the microblogging-service-that-could finally delivered on a two-year-old promise to stop giving away free candy vis-a-vis its API and the host of traffic-stealing Twitter clients built on said API. Since its first (and only) developer conference in 2010, Twitter had been gently pleading with developers to not build Twitter clients that duplicated the core Twitter experience. And it put teeth in those requests by buying up the Twitter clients it liked — namely, Tweetie and Tweetdeck. So when Twitter finally turned the garden hose off, so to speak, no one was surprised … right?

The story: “Twitter has put the kibosh on unofficial consumer clients for Twitter; the only loophole is for apps that have 100,000 users or fewer. The Twheel team has just decided that to keep the app alive, they’re going to take that loophole. And in an Internet economy where eyeballs equal money, 100,000 users or fewer still meets our definition of ‘doomed.’ You can’t raise funding on 100,000 users, and you can’t sell ads against 100,000 users — not enough ads to support a whole company, anyhow.”

The moral: This should have happened a long time ago, but better late than never — at least for Twitter’s business.

The “learn to code” craze

By far, our favorite ongoing story of the year has been normal people learning how to code. It’s been equally exciting to watch the crop of code-teaching startups spring up, get funding, and acquire huge numbers of users — and even revenue. From Codecademy to Treehouse to Bloc to Code School to Hackbright, we love how nerdy developers are showing everyone “the man behind the curtain” and proving that anyone — even women, even underprivileged kids, even poor folks — can improve their circumstances or understand the Internet better with a little effort and a little intelligence.

The story: “Jalen Rose is a year-old institution located in the northwest part of Detroit, where high school diplomas are not the norm in many students’ families and social spheres. Currently, only 32 percent of Detroit high school students graduate in four years. In a recent conversation with Treehouse founder and web guru Ryan Carson, we learned that Carson sees Treehouse (and coding education in general) as a world-changing stepping stone for underserved kids who can’t afford to — and maybe don’t need to — go to college.”

The moral: The world is a better place when users become builders and learn that code is not magic.

Image credits: konstantynov/Shutterstock, Ioannis Pantzi/Shutterstock, Jolie O’Dell/Flickr, Rafael Edwards/Flickr, lightpoet/Shutterstock

This morning, Gnip launched its Historical PowerTrack for Twitter, which will give developers the ability to search, find, analyze, and compare all the tweets ever written, even ones written before the developer in question started scraping Twitter.

It’s the same level of access the Library of Congress got when it started archiving and storing all Twitter data, but this time, it’s commercially available.

“There are a handful of companies that have collected some portion of Twitter data,” said Gnip COO Chris Moody in a meeting with VentureBeat yesterday. “We were able to do it because we partnered with Twitter on it.”

The data will make it possible for anyone (anyone working with Gnip, that is) to parse a huge historical archive of tweets and look for patterns. Did tweets have a real correlation to the 2008 election results? How about the iPhone 3GS launch and first-week sales? Using that kind of information, analysts can better forecast expected results for current events.

“Four and a half years ago, the company was founded on the idea that data would be insanely valuable, that people would do amazing shit with it, said Moody, “and we wanted to fuel all those applications.”

We asked Moody the billion-dollar question: What if there turns out to be no or very little correlation? What if tweets turn out to be just so much hot air, totally useless for predictive analysis?

“We have many risky things about our business, but that’s not one of them,” he said. “We spend all day every day talking to people who are finding goldmines in this data. … They’re so excited and they’re investing so much. Maybe we’re deceiving outselves, but if that turned out not to be the case, we’d fold up and go home, because we were founded on the idea that data is valuable.”

Still, Gnip isn’t doing the analysis itself and doesn’t have too much control over where the magic happens. Calling his company’s bread-and-butter “just the plumbing” of online data analysis, Moody said, “Some of our customers have a milllion-plus rule that they will use to filter data … If we miss a single tweet, that could cost a customer a million dollars.”

But if Gnip could make its own use cases, the company would probably focus less on sales forecasting and more on global events with huge human impact. It would try to predict where the next political revolution is going to happen or how the election will turn out.

“We are a commercial entity; our services do cost money,” Moody said. “But some people have approached us — a PhD candidate studying epidemic outbreaks, for example — and unfortunately a lot of that stuff we can’t serve today. … [But] we’re always fascinated by those; they always make the most fascinating use cases to talk about.

“If you’re Miami, and you know you’re going to get a hurricane, you can look at social data and model the kinds of questions and concerns people have, evacuation route planning, you can figure out how people are exiting the city with location data. We had a big fire outside of [Gnip's hometown] Boulder [Colorado] a couple of years ago. … One company mashed up geocoded Twitter data with geocoded Flickr data and was able to be an extra set of eyes for emergency responders.”

But how Gnip’s historical Twitter data gets used is up to its customers. Gnip considers itself responsible solely for being a fully reliable, fully compliant steward of that data — and that means deleting private or deleted tweets each time a customer runs a request.

“It takes a lot of horsepower,” said Moody. “In one dimension, you have a lot of data, and then you have to filter it really quickly — no one actually wants all the data — and then you have to assume that we’ll be innundated with requests. … So it has to scale in many directions. It’s an incredibly difficult task, and it really involves a lot of proprietary technology that we deveoped to take this on.”

Gnip does plan to start sharing bits and pieces of its architecture — think less of pretty but useless diagrams and more of highly useful information that might help others plan their own architecture and products. Moody said the company might even open-source some of its tech someday soon.

When it comes to the data and the tech that powers it, Moody concludes, “We’re half a percent into the journey of what is possible. … The platforms themelves are maturing. The way people use Twitter today is very different from a few years ago. And now, you have this full data set to operate on.”

Top image courtesy of Ilse, Flickr

This post is written by News360 CEO Roman Karachinsky.

Ever since an influential little blue bird announced new, more stringent, developer guidelines last month, the tech world has worked itself into a tizzy about how this will impact app developers in the Valley: What’s to become of third-party developers reliant on Twitter’s API? How will these new restrictions impact the user experience? What’s Twitter got to gain by limiting developers’ access to its treasure trove of data? And what’s it got to lose if it doesn’t?

Twitter’s new policies for third-party developers leave dozens of companies whose entire business model is predicated on having access to the Twitter API wondering “what do we do next?” The answers to these questions will unfold in the coming weeks and months, but this predicament poses the larger question of whether we’re relying too heavily on social – Twitter, Facebook – to power other aspects of our lives.

Twitter’s API restrictions have already hemmed in LinkedIn and Instagram; and Tumblr is the latest tech giant to fall victim to the changes. Some say Flipboard might be the next. Flipboard CEO and co-founder Mike McCue’s recent decision to step down from Twitter’s board is certainly an indication of tough decisions on the horizon. Now that Twitter is fueling dozens of social startups, Facebook knows everything you’re Instagraming, and you can’t read half the news on the web unless you log into a social reader, the reliance of many fledgling tech companies on this data has become a huge risk factor. Not only does this dependency put developers at the mercy of social networking giants, it also introduces a filter bubble that limits users’ exposure to new discovery beyond the walls of their social graphs. We’re moving from integrated and inter-connected to incestuous, turning social discovery into somewhat of an echo-chamber.

Not to rag on social, but this predicament may be an indication that we’re on the verge of a shift from the socially charged services of the last half-decade to a more intelligent approach, one that makes use of the following emerging trends to provide value beyond hyper-social discovery:

•     Context Driven

We already have plenty of apps that simplify our lives, but it takes an extra step to create technology that is truly revolutionary – tech that is able to come up with just the right solution at the right moment. As tech is increasingly built to take into account what we’re doing and how it factors into our personality, we should be able to come up with better ways to help people live their lives. We’re already seeing this with Google Now and Siri, which factor in contextual cues to discern what you’re really looking for, and we can expect to see more services emerge that rely on behavioral data to analyze your habits and deliver recommendations, answers, alerts, and so on. Savvy developers will begin using social data to focus less on what your friends and followers are sharing, and more on finding what’s right for you.

• Return to the Real World

Judging by the popularity of SXSW darlings Highlight and Glancee, and a new push toward “meet-ups” from dating sites Match.com and OkCupid, we’re ready for technology that enhances our physical, not just virtual, lives. Tech that integrates social and physical networks, with an emphasis on strengthening real-world relationships will shape the next wave of startups.

• Anti-Social Discovery

The content our friends, colleagues, and family members share and discuss is usually a good indicator of the topics that will interest us. Usually. But by relying only on your social networks as editors, you’re creating a blind spot when it comes to content. Instead of relying on what others share, this new approach will serve up personally tailored content in tune with your sharing and information consuming habits. We’re putting it all out there – we should expect services finely tuned to our personal preferences in return. A new trend in discovery is emerging — one that looks beyond the front lines of social data to provide personalized value, using machine learning to understand your personality and then matching you with the specific pieces of content you’ll most enjoy. We’re calling it anti-social, not because it doesn’t factor in social data, but because it’s about your use of social, not your friends’. The goal is to break you out of the bubble of stuff your friends share and let you be the discoverer of original content.

Social certainly serves its place in our lives; it’s allowed us to tap into the vast pool of knowledge, interests, and sharing activity of our friends, family, and coworkers. But, we’re becoming socially fatigued and yearning for services that intelligently use personal data and thoughtfully capitalize on the context of the world surrounding us. If social was the wave of the millennium, anti-social is its younger, smarter sister.

Roman Karachinsky is CEO of news-personalization app News360. Before News360, he led a number of successful B2B semantic analysis projects.

Twitter has created its very own Dean’s List for vendors of Twitter-related products — everything from Twitter analytics to Twitter API licensing. Called Certified Products, the program aims to connect these Twitter-approved services with the brands and developers that need them most.

“We hear continually from companies looking for tools to help them engage with customers, understand what people are saying about them on Twitter, and learn more about their followers so they can share more valuable, timely content,” writes Twitter exec Doug Williams today on the company blog. ”Meanwhile, there is a thriving ecosystem of Twitter developers building products and services that address these needs and help businesses grow. To make it easier for businesses to find the right tools, we’re launching the Twitter Certified Products Program.”

Certified Products is launching with 12 partners who, according to Twitter, represent the crème de la crème of companies focusing on Twitter engagement, analytics, and data.

Launch partners include ExactTarget, Hootsuite, Gnip (which has been close to Twitter for some time and is one of the only authorized resellers of the Twitter firehose), DataSift, SocialFlow, Radian6, Attensity, Crimson Hexagon, Dataminr, Mass Relevance, Topsy, and Sprinklr — all products that, according to Twitter, “make Twitter more valuable to businesses, encourage their use of Twitter, and bring Twitter to new users.”

In an email to VentureBeat, an Attensity spokesperson said that prior to the company’s official certification as well as currently, “Attensity is working closely with Twitter to help shape its Respond solution [a real-time conversation monitoring product] to fit the needs Twitter hears about from its brand, publishing, and media partners.”

Twitter said it expects the list of partners and verticals to grow in the near future and has issued an open call for program applicants. Program requirements include not directly competing with Twitter by duplicating its consumer services, bringing Twitter to new markets, and using Twitter’s platform rather than recreating the platform, among a few other criteria.

And of course, Certified Products all have to follow the new rules and guidelines for Twitter’s evolving API.

For some time now, in private meeting rooms and on public stages, Twitter has urged developers to make these kinds of products — noncompetitive products that would give their makers a real business opportunity. As we brace ourselves for a few apps and businesses being shut down in the “API apocalypse,” or whatever other melodramatic term you may prefer, it’s somewhat encouraging to see Twitter creating incentives for building the right kind of Twitter apps, not just punishments for building the wrong kind.

We recently covered Twheel, a gorgeous Twitter app that we said was “doomed” due to its use/misuse of the Twitter API. Twheel is a consumer-facing client made to replace the official Twitter mobile app, and we loved it.

Unfortunately, Twitter has put the kibosh on unofficial consumer clients for Twitter; the only loophole is for apps that have 100,000 users or fewer. The Twheel team has just decided that to keep the app alive, they’re going to take that loophole.

And in an Internet economy where eyeballs equal money, 100,000 users or fewer still meets our definition of “doomed.”

You can’t raise funding on 100,000 users, and you can’t sell ads against 100,000 users — not enough ads to support a whole company, anyhow.

We’re sure the Twheel team (known more agnostically as Fluid Interaction) is aware of all this, and we’re equally sure they have an amazing plan for what to do next. One gorgeous product that doesn’t quite work out due to Twitter API changes doesn’t spell doom for the team — just the product. And we look forward to learning about whatever the founders build next (assuming they’re still speaking to us by then).

It’s similar to the issues faced by Thirst, an equally gorgeous Twitter mobile client that may also be doomed due to Twitter’s API changes.

“In time, Twheel will become an exclusive Twitter service that is available only to the lucky members who signed up before the user limit [imposed by Twitter] comes up,” writes Twheel CEO Kalle Määttä on the company blog.

“We will keep on serving Twheel users to the best of our capabilities. … Even if we need to make Twheel exclusive to only a fixed number of users on Twitter, it will be available for everybody on other social media that we’ll be supporting in the future.”

We do love the Twheel client, and we’d absolutely love to see it applied to the information-overload problem we all experience on other networks that don’t have build-in algorithms and filters for sorting and prioritizing updates from friends. See how it works in this clip from the company, and be sure to sign up now before the user-limit takes effect:

Twitter’s API changes have made quite a few folks shy about launching Twitter clients. Not Thirst. This team has just put out a new version of its iOS app, and it’s without a doubt the prettiest Twitter client we’ve ever seen.

It’s also a pretty big gamble. Twitter has asked developers — warned developers — repeatedly over the past couple years to not make Twitter clients for consumers, to not reproduce the Twitter experience in a new skin with new interactions.

Thirst is in some ways everything the Twitter developer relations team has been working to prevent. But it’s so damn gorgeous.

Take a look:

This is roughly the same situation we pointed out a couple weeks ago with Twheel. Twheel is a pretty, innovative new mobile app that also reskins Twitter and runs into the same problem.

As Twitter developer relations chief Ryan Sarver told VentureBeat in a recent interview, “The most important thing for us as a platform is to give people a clear idea of where we’re going.” And since the Chirp conference in 2010, the company’s message has been clear: Don’t build consumer-facing clients; we build the clients around here.

“We can’t put out a complete roadmap for competitive reasons and because roadmaps change,” Sarver said. “The best way to go about it is to give directional guidance, to give some boundaries that people can build up to.”

Thirst’s founders, Berkeley grads Anuj Verma and Kunal Modi, are aiming to skirt the long arm of Twitter’s API justice by claiming their app is all about natural language processing, not re-skinning Twitter.

In an introductory email, a company rep told VentureBeat, “While many are voicing concerns about Twitter’s attitude toward developers, Thirst Labs is focused on growth opportunity. With more than 340 million tweets posted per day — and more than 70 percent of those tweets receiving no response from followers — Thirst sees a huge opportunity in using natural language processing to transform information from Twitter and other social channels into an organized, relevant information stream.”

In follow-up conversations, Verma told us that Thirst v1.2 was Apple-approved before Twitter’s API changes were announced; consequently, the team didn’t have the opportunity to make changes to the app before its release.

But, Verma stressed, “Our app already closely adheres to Twitter’s display guidelines. So when those guidelines become requirements, Thirst will not be impacted.”

Briefly, Thirst changes your Twitter stream from a chronological timeline flooded with tweets and links of varying degrees of importance into a Flipboard-like interface that shows you the content you’re most likely to care about and interact with.

But regardless of the algorithms they’re using to reorganize the Twitter stream, it’s still a mobile Twitter client, one that competes with the official Twitter apps for iOS.

Also, in filtering tweets and trends, it’s quite possible that the app is stripping out Twitter’s bread and butter: its suite of promoted tweets, trends, and profiles that act as in-app advertising on Twitter.com.

On top of all that, Thirst’s core value-add (curating tweets you’ll care about) is duplicative of Twitter’s new-ish Discover tab, which purports to surface “stories [about] what’s happening now, tailored for you.”

A company rep told us that the Thirst team sees the situation differently; they’re more than just a Twitter client. “Thirst Labs would probably be categorized along the same lines as Storify and Favstar — two examples called out by Twitter as companies that add unique value as opposed to just recycling existing content.”

Thirst is bold and beautiful, but its young team is fighting an uphill battle with another company’s API. They — and we — will have to wait and see what Twitter’s reaction will be.

Thirst Labs is based in San Francisco, Calif., and has taken an undisclosed amount of funding from BlueRun Ventures, Steve Newcomb, and Jason Krikorian. The startup was founded last year.

We’ve been keeping an eye on Twheel, an absolutely stunning Twitter client for iOS. It’s a fun, thumbable carousel that presents tweets in an entirely new and totally gorgeous interface.

Too bad it was doomed from the start.

You see, although the pretty app is innovative, unique, and beautifully designed, it crosses the line for Twitter API use. Over the past couple of years, Twitter has consistently asked developers to stop making Twitter clients — apps that scrape Twitter’s data (tweets, profile info, etc.) and reproduce it in a new API without Twitter’s advertising products (the promoted tweets, profiles, and trends that pay the young startup’s bills and that don’t currently have their own API).

From stages and in blog posts and memos, Twitter execs have been steering developers away from building clients, recommending instead focusing apps and third-party businesses on analytics, marketing, and other areas of opportunity. While the API technically still allows for client-building, that will be changing soon.

Specifically, Twitter’s API terms of service currently state that Twitter apps “cannot frame or otherwise reproduce significant portions of the Twitter service.” While the API still currently allows for clients — a legacy we’re sure will be corrected over the coming months and years — the terms of service place some strict rules on how clients display tweets and serve ads.

Twitter started out with a wide-open API for any kind of use, including building clients like Twheel. However, since 2010 or so, Twitter has been slowly applying pressure to the ecosystem of third-party apps and hoping that developers will get the loud-and-clear message: No more clients, please.

Twitter itself acquired a couple of the more popular clients, including iPhone app Tweetie and desktop app TweetDeck. Other apps, such as UberTwitter, Seesmic, and Hootsuite, have been put into the awkward position of competing with their own API provider.

Here’s a demo video/commercial showing what Twheel can do:

Starting in 2010 and continuing through 2011, Twitter began issuing strong and consistent messaging to developers: Don’t make a Twitter client using Twitter’s API. Don’t duplicate Twitter’s features, and don’t rename or redesign them. Most vitally, don’t channel users away from Twitter’s ads.

These changes were reflected in the company’s API documentation as well as in several memos and blog posts from high-profile Twitter platform employees.

So, why would the founders press forward with the app when it’s obvious Twitter isn’t smiling on such uses of the API?

We’re not sure if Twheel’s launch represents arrogance, ignorance, or high optimism on the part of its team, but of this we are sure: the app won’t be around for long.

In 2007, Twitter was still in its infancy and needed client apps to improve on its bare-bones design and create excitement and adoption for the young service. Co-founder Biz Stone said at the time, “The API has been arguably the most important, or maybe even inarguably, the most important thing we’ve done with Twitter. It has allowed us, first of all, to keep the service very simple and create a simple API so that developers can build on top of our infrastructure and come up with ideas that are way better than our ideas.”

But times have changed drastically over the past five years, and so has Twitter’s position on its own API and the developers that use it.

Twheel may try to save itself by incorporating other services; the team may reach some sort of agreement with Twitter; it could languish in the App Store with a few thousand downloads, allowing it to pass under Twitter’s radar. Or it could see its API access revoked. Or it could get quietly crushed during a Twitter API update. Time will tell; we’ve reached out to both companies for more information on the issues at stake and will update this post when we hear back.

Flipboard co-founder and CEO Mike McCue has announced his departure from Twitter’s board of directors.

In a tweet on the change, the serial entrepreneur sounded no false notes, graciously saying, “To the @Twitter team: it was amazing to be part of the board. You’re truly changing the world. Thanks @ev @jack @dick for the opportunity.”

Twitter CEO Dick Costolo (actually @dickc, not @dick), responded in a similarly warm fashion, saying, “Thanks for the time, enthusiasm, and passion you’ve brought to everything happening here. Remember the slide you showed me in 2009?!”

McCue had been part of the Twitter board since December 2010, when the startup took a hefty round of funding from Kleiner Perkins and made room at the boardroom table for a couple new faces.

As Twitter’s board ecosystem of third-party developers is still struggling to get its head around upcoming API changes from the microblogging service, a few folks are speculating that the Flipboard exec’s decision is a signal that he and other major Twitter API users aren’t happy with the directions Twitter is taking.

That theory makes some sense. Twitter is, in fact, cracking down on API misuse, where “misuse” is defined as making apps that “mimic or reproduce the mainstream Twitter consumer client experience.”

And Flipboard most definitely reproduces the Twitter consumer experience, and does so in an entirely elegant way that is fundamentally different from Twitter’s UI. Plus, Flipboard puts a kink in Twitter’s revenue stream of sponsored tweets, profiles, and trends — the biggest no-no of them all, according to in-depth chats we’ve had with Twitter’s developer outreach team members.

Still, we’re reluctant to call this a “war” between McCue and Twitter. We’ve reached out to Flipboard and Twitter; a Flipboard rep said, “We are still big fans of what Twitter does and we continue to support Twitter across Flipboard.”

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Contrary to rumors, social media startup Hootsuite is not actively raising another round — but if it were, its price tag would be even higher than reported.

We had a nice chat yesterday with Hootsuite CEO and founder Ryan Holmes. He told us that Hootsuite, which raised $20 million from Omers Ventures in March, was already considering another raise in May.

However, Holmes said, the hunt for cash has cooled off a bit, but the valuation has gone up.

Hootsuite makes a web-based tool that individuals and companies can use to manage updates to social networks, including Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. It competes with Tweetdeck (which got acquired by Twitter), Buddy Media, Wildfyre, and Cotweet (which got acquired by ExactTarget in 2010). Unlike most of its competitors, it uses a “freemium” model: Hootsuite is free for individuals to use, but the company charges monthly fees for companies who want to deploy it to teams of people.

We asked Holmes point-blank if his company was really worth $500 million.

“I’m always talking to VCs, giving them updates,” he told us. “I was looking at doing a raise, and at that point that would have been a fair valuation. … Given some of the comparables in the market, at that point, we would have warranted that kind of valuation.”

(We reached out to a slew of VCs on this point; all declined to comment on Hootsuite’s possible valuation.)

But, Holmes continued, things have changed since then. The startup beat its $10 million revenue forecast for 2011 by a cool million, and it’s also on track to smash 2012 projections by a “significant” margin, said Holmes.

“We’ve been having some really big growth. … I think we’ve moved beyond [the half-billion-dollar valuation]. We’ve created a business with a higher valuation at this point.”

Holmes continued to say that the startup hasn’t been knocking too loudly on the door of Sand Hill Road since this spring. “The company is highly profitable, and it doesn’t really need the money at this point,” he said. “There are a lot of acquisitions happening, a lot of positioning in the market.”

Hootsuite’s investors are not Silicon Valley-based. Besides Omers Ventures, other major investors include Blumberg Capital and Hearst Ventures, the venture capital arm of the Hearst Corporation.

Did the Twitter API change kill the deal?

If “we don’t need no stinkin’ money” and “we’re worth more than that, anyway” sound like sour grapes to you, it did to us at first, too.

One big shake-up in the market is the recent upset over Twitter’s API changes. In fact, given the timing of the funding rumors and Twitter’s most recent “thou shalt not misuse our API” blog post, we wondered if the stern language from Twitter had put investors off on Hootsuite’s funding deal.

After all, Hootsuite’s product depends very heavily on Twitter’s API. And while Hootsuite incorporates Facebook and Google+ features into its product, it is very much a client — precisely the kind of client that Twitter has repeatedly asked third-party developers not to build. Repeatedly. Twitter dev ombudsman-in-chief Ryan Sarver laid down the law in a controversial memo last March, and the company’s intentions were further illuminated in an in-depth VentureBeat interview late last year.

But Holmes told us not to worry ourselves on his account; he and the Hootsuite team remain in close contact with the higher-ups at Twitter, and the API changes didn’t scare off any VCs.

“That fear around Twitter’s API and ecosystem, I absolutely don’t think it has hurt us,” he said. “We have it on very good authority that the product we’re building out is not in conflict with their roadmap.”

That communication is all important in the increasingly uncertain Twitter ecosystem. As repeat entrepreneur Loic Le Meur told me in an interview, “There are two types of Twitter apps: The ones Twitter likes, and the ones that are competitive and don’t have good communication with them.”

Basically, Holmes contends (more or less correctly) that Twitter is looking to take down consumer-facing Twitter clients and other products that strip the tweetstream of money-making promoted profiles, trends, and tweets, which ultimately pay to keep the lights on at Twitter HQ. Hootsuite, like many of the apps on Twitter’s good side, caters mostly to non-consumer users, so it’s not a threat to Twitter.

“Our userbase is small, medium, and enterprise businesses; that’s what we focus on,” said Holmes. “We’ve never focused on being a consumer product; we have a lot more functionality than a consumer needs.”

Late last year, when we asked Twitter’s Sarver for Twitter-based business ideas that were safe bets, he said, “Analytics is a huge sector for us, obviously, finding those insights you can bring to brands using this real-time corpus of data.” He also talked about curation (“finding the key tweets to talk about events that are happening, be that the elections, the Olympics, etc.”) and publishing (“figuring out the right content that will resonate with the audience”). And Hootsuite does focus on those areas, to a great extent.

Still, Hootsuite’s unique freemium model means that it’s still a highly-favored Twitter client among power users, meaning consumers. And there may come a day when Twitter decides to cut off that type of access entirely.

If that ever happened — that is, in a dystopian, nightmarish future wherein Twitter only gave read/write API access to enterprise apps — Hootsuite’s freemium product would have to omit Twitter from its services. If this seems like an unlikely scenario, keep in mind that Twitter restricting API access in the first place once seemed unlikely, too. Since then, API changes have killed off at least a few companies.

“I think it would take away the vibrancy of our product,” Holmes said of an unlikely-but-possible Twitter pull-out. “Twitter and Facebook are the biggest social networks for our users.”

And ultimately, the entrepreneur concluded, “I want to see Twitter’s API do well.”

And Twitter’s API will do well when developers heed the ever-less-subtle warnings from Twitter: Don’t, they repeat, do not make Twitter clients. Don’t take “promoted” content out of the stream. It’s going to be Twitter’s bread and butter within the next couple years, after all.

“It’s important to us that third parties have access to the data,” said Twitter CEO Costolo in a press meeting last fall. “I get a million emails a day about what Twitter could be doing to make more money, but … the advertising business will sustain us. We have no intention to scale the data licensing business. We’re just going to focus on scaling the advertising business.”

And as long as devs stay out of Twitter’s way when it comes to ads, they stand a decent chance of survival.

Notice I said “wedding” and not “honeymoon.” Sarver has for some time been Twitter’s first line of defense between the company and a occasionally disgruntled army of third-party developers. The relationship between those two entities has been testy at best and an out-and-out war at worst for the better part of two years. Unfortunately, mid-2011 was no time for a honeymoon.

I met with Sarver in Twitter’s San Francisco headquarters, where bikes stood in racks against the walls and neon plastic deer and framed cross stitch decorated the foyer. It’s a hipster paradise, and the clean-cut, blazer-wearing Sarver seemed at once infinitely at home and slightly out of place in it.

But where Sarver is unquestionably beleaguered is in the relatively public forum of Twitter’s ecosystem developers: the men and women who develop apps that use Twitter’s APIs. They try to build businesses that complement Twitter, and when anything goes wrong with that setup (for example, Twitter makes a minor change to an API), Sarver is the de facto shock absorber. And that explains why he skipped his honeymoon to deal with his unruly constituency.

For such a young man, he handles the role of “the guy developers love to hate” with a large measure of grace and resilience.

“The ecosystem is over 750,000 developers,” he told me. “It’s a massive thing. Any community of that size, you’re never going to keep everyone happy at all times. … Some people might be mad at me, but I try to hear what they’re trying to say and fold that back into what we’re trying to do.

“The most critical people are usually the most valuable ones. They tell you where the points of friction are and how you can improve.”

Unlike Sarver, Twitter did get a honeymoon. There were a few years when it was the much-beloved social platform of tech insiders and hipsters everywhere. Developers flocked to it, drawn by its openness, flexibility and simplicity, building a wealth of Twitter apps and integrating it into their own web services.

Now the honeymoon is over. For Twitter to survive challenges from rivals like Facebook and Google+, much depends on whether it can continue to hold onto the love of its developer community.

“The most critical people”

In 2007, the infant microblogging service had yet to establish any real foothold outside San Francisco techies, yet it was trumpeting the wild success of its APIs. Co-founder Biz Stone said at the time, “The API has been arguably the most important, or maybe even inarguably, the most important thing we’ve done with Twitter. It has allowed us, first of all, to keep the service very simple and create a simple API so that developers can build on top of our infrastructure and come up with ideas that are way better than our ideas.”

Yet for many developers, it seemed that as soon as an outside party came up with an innovative idea, Twitter jumped onto the same idea too, stomping on the little guys. A long list of Twitter’s features, including mentions and lists, first appeared as features of third-party Twitter clients, only to be incorporated into the main service.

Of course, since such features are often dictated by user behavior and requests, just how much Twitter was scamming off the ideas of others and how much it was simply responding to user needs are unknown.

What we do know is that the company began to seem opaque to the developers who used its API. By the spring of 2010, when it hosted its first developer conference, developer angst had reached a fever pitch.

As the conference opened, the world learned that Twitter had acquired Tweetie and crowned it the company’s official iPhone app. Other makers of Twitter iPhone apps felt blindsided and betrayed. Businesses went down not with a whimper but a bang. Development shops started wondering aloud what areas of the map were safe territory and what Twitter might decide to annex next for itself. No one seemed to be getting or giving any clear answers.

Twitter had built an ecosystem before it decided on a business model, and while it tried out different avenues and experimented with new features, it wasn’t disclosing all of its roadmap to all of its presumed partners. While some folks benefited from a close relationship with the company and its founders, others suffered from a full-on communication breakdown.

It was a situation that was bound to create bad feelings.

“The change in attitude Twitter had since Chirp conference … is just the feeling that they no longer care about developers or their ecosystem,” said third-party developer Arik Fraimovich in a recent interview. “They seem to look at it from the narrow perspective of ‘what’s in it for Twitter?,’ failing to understand that in an ecosystem, all parts need to contribute and communicate. They also fail to understand that the next creative use of Twitter won’t be developed by their developers, but by some API developer — just as it was since their inception.”

A big part of the problem was what plagues many relationships: Lack of clear communication.

Twitter only gradually worked to clear things up. A year after the Tweetie acquisition, after everyone had adjusted to Twitter’s official, in-house suite of mobile apps, the company made an attempt to communicate part of its roadmap, the upcoming acquisition of TweetDeck and a renewed focus on consumer features.

In a controversial memo to a Google Groups list in March, Sarver laid down the law: Don’t make a Twitter client using Twitter’s API. Don’t duplicate Twitter’s features. Don’t rename them. Don’t channel users away from Twitter’s ads and experience.

It was clear, but it was also surprisingly heavy-handed for a company that until then had been known for its open and easy-going approach.

On one hand, Twitter as a business had every right to control how its APIs were being used. On the other hand, it had willingly and knowingly cultivated a thriving sub-economy of Twitter apps and was now telling many of them to kiss off. It’s a communique Sarver regrets, and it started quite the war of words.

Laura Fitton, the perky, audacious founder of Twitter-related startup Oneforty (and an unofficial team mom for the Twitter app community), told me back in March, “Twitter is full of genuinely earnestly awesome people who want to do the right thing, but it has resolutely failed to create the conditions for real business success on their platform.”

I also spoke to Loic LeMeur, the tall, eccentric French entrepreneur behind the rapidly pivoting Seesmic, who told me, “There are two types of Twitter apps, the ones Twitter likes and the ones that are competitive and don’t have good communication with them.”

Of Sarver’s missive, which put Seesmic in the direct line of fire, LeMeur said, “I wasn’t expecting such dramatic changes, but instead of complaining, I have to adapt to it. … Competing with your number one partner is a little dangerous.”

Jesse Stay is another entrepreneur/engineer who has built a business around a collection of social APIs, including Twitter’s. Stay is the picture of a mild-mannered Mormon, a truly kind man who would think long and hard before uttering a negative word about anyone. Still, during yet another minor but uncommunicated technical change at Twitter, he told me, “This move by Twitter is no surprise, as I’ve experienced over and over through the last three years. It’s why we’ve moved to a $29-per-month plan for all the services we offer. … That’s the only way to afford the risk of Twitter.”

Perhaps no one understands the risk of Twitter better than Noah Everett, a man whose name came up more than once in my talk with Sarver. Everett built TwitPic, a highly popular and successful app for uploading photos and sharing them through Twitter. Out of the blue earlier this year, Twitter announced it would be implementing media-sharing capabilities into its web and mobile apps, first for photos, then for videos, cutting a number of photo-sharing apps — including TwitPic — off at the roots.

“TwitPic will continue to still live on,” Everett told me when the feature rolled out to users, espousing the kind of grim optimism I’ve heard from many entrepreneurs facing hopeless odds. “We’ve got a huge base of loyal users and we still want to continue to provide them with the best service possible … regardless of this feature announcement from Twitter.”

But there was a bitter twist. Everett had the previous year started working on a stealth project called Heello, a project attempting to “make email suck less,” as he put it to me. But out of spite or pique or frustration, he decided to turn Heello into a Twitter clone.

“If Twitter can compete with its developers without fair notice, then why can’t we?” he quipped. “Twitter rolling out their photo option to everyone [the day before the Heello site launched] was a complete coincidence, but I’m glad the timing happened that way.”

These voices and many others ring in my ears – and likely, to some extent, in Sarver’s, too – as we face one another over a small table in a small conference room at Twitter.

I ask him if he thinks the company made any mistakes.

“You can always do things better,” he told me. “If you go back to the guidance we gave last March, we could have executed that message much better. The tone and format could have been improved. But the intent is still important: The most important thing for us as a platform is to give people a clear idea of where we’re going.”

And that clarity of communication is all most of these critical voices were asking for.

Pages: 1 2

The service’s creator, Arik Fraimovich, emailed users a “so long and thanks for all the fish” note, stating the reason for the deadpooling was yet another change in Twitter’s backend about which developers got no prior notice. The microblogging service removed X-Twitter headers containing user and message IDs from its emails; unfortunately, these headers were more or less essential to Topify’s service.

As a Twitter rep pointed out to VentureBeat, “Email headers have never been a supported or documented part of the Twitter API.” App developers know this; those who chose to build Twitter apps using email headers as data were working with and accepting that risk.

TweetyMail is another Twitter email service. Founder Anil Chawla spoke to VentureBeat, saying, “I realize that since it was not an official API, Twitter had every right to remove the headers at will. However, it would have been nice if they would have provided a heads-up and an explanation. I’m sure they are well aware that apps like mine were dependent on those headers. Instead, the headers simply disappeared one day.”

SocialToo is a similar social/email service. Its founder Jesse Stay told VentureBeat, “On SocialToo, we never rely on Twitter’s emails for API access and always try to go through the recommended API channels, so we were not affected by this.” However, he also noted, “This move by Twitter is no surprise, as I’ve experienced over and over through the last three years. It’s why we’ve moved to a $29-per-month plan for all the services we offer similar to Topify. That’s the only way to afford the risk of Twitter.”

So why won’t Fraimovich be switching to the recommended APIs? In his final note to users, he wrote, “I considered switching to using the Streaming API in the past, but the only option for Topify is to use the Site Streams version of it. But Site Streams are still in beta, and according to the documentation, there is no estimated date for it to exit beta. Considering this last episode and other actions by Twitter in the past year, I have no desire to experiment with their beta offerings. Not only this can result in unstable service for you, they might just shut it down one day.”

Although removing the email headers is a small change overall, it is indicative of what some developers see as an overarching issue with Twitter and third-party devs. Devs who aren’t particularly close to the company end up feeling shut out of important decisions, and a perceived lack of communication only exacerbates the problem.

As Fraimovich clarified to VentureBeat, “The change in attitude Twitter had since Chirp conference… is not something particular towards me or Topify, just the feeling that they no longer care about developers or their ecosystem. They seem to look at it from the narrow perspective of ‘what’s in it for Twitter?,’ failing to understand that in an ecosystem, all parts need to contribute and communicate. They also fail to understand that the next creative use of Twitter won’t be developed by their developers, but by some API developer — just as it was since their inception.”

But Fraimovich says he won’t be looking to Twitter’s APIs for his next project. “I somewhat lost faith in Twitter’s ecosystem… From a business perspective, I prefer to invest my time elsewhere.”

Still, this is just one side of the larger story about Twitter’s relationship with devs (and the investors who fund them). While Fraimovich’s and others’ complaints about how Twitter handles third-party devs are valid, many other devs have found a great deal of success and enjoy working with the microblogging startup.

We’ll delve more into the intricacies (and the cold, hard numbers) of the Twitter ecosystem later this week; stay tuned.

Image courtesy of Wendy Mason.