Twitter To Open Firehose Feed To Expand Twitter Ecosystem
By Anna Johnson on December 14th, 2009Twitter plans to expand its ecosystem even further in the new year, with plans to give third party developers full access to Twitter’s ‘firehose’ feed.
Announcing the plan last week at the Le Web event, Ryan Sarver, Twitter’s Director of Platform, said Twitter will also launch a new developer site, raise the rate limit for services that use OAuth authentication, and introduce a new application programming interface (API) for non-browser applications.
Since the first Twitter application was created in January 2007, there are now over 50,000 applications in Twitter’s ecosystem. During his Le Web presentation, Ryan Sarver said that 50 percent of Twitter’s traffic occurs on partner sites or through Twitter clients.
As such, Twitter is wholly focused on growing the market and building the Twitter ecosystem. The company regards its success as interdependent with that of its developers. Sarver cited CoTweet, OneRiot and TweetMeme as just three examples of third party developers that had made money being part of the Twitter universe.
