Insights from Chirp

A few days ago, Twitter held its first ever official developers conference, Chirp. Because it was in San Francisco and I’m an east coast girl, I stuck to the live webcast (which was kind of spotty at times). But here are some of the interesting things I that learned/announcements that Twitter made.

- A New York Times story link is tweeted every four seconds. Twitterverse is well-read.

- Careful what you tweet – from now on, every single public tweet will be housed in the Library of Congress. They also acquired the public tweets in the Twitter archive, dating back to the first tweet in 2006. More on that here.

- Tweet annotations: starting next quarter, you’ll be able to add any metadata that you want to tweets. This was apparently big news, as people were tweeting about it all over the place. But I didn’t really understand why until I read this article on Venture Beat. They’ve got all sorts of ideas about what developers can use this metadata for.

- Twitter will soon be coming out with its own built-in link shortener, so WATCH YOUR BACK, bit.ly. But will it allow for tracking click-throughs?

- Promoted Tweets. News of this actually broke before the conference, but they went into it in more detail at the event. Promoted Tweets are tweets that advertisers will pay for so that they appear at the top of your screen when you search for certain keywords. That being said, Twitter will also use something called a resonance score to measure whether or not that tweet should stay at the top of your screen. If they find that the tweet doesn’t resonate (based on the number of RTs, replies, favorites, etc.), they’ll remove it from the stream and the advertiser won’t have to pay for it.

- The launch of http://dev.twitter.com/ – now anyone can integrate Twitter into their web site with just a few lines of Javascript. Unfortunately I a) haven’t used Javascript in a long time and b) am lazy, so you guys might have to wait a little bit on that.

- The Guardian is going to be using this service (known as @Anywhere) in an interesting way. They’re doing a lot of coverage on the upcoming UK general election, and through @Anywhere, they’ll allow people to connect with the politicians on Twitter via their web site. They explain it more thoroughly here.

Anyhow, in case you’re interested, Justin.tv has videos up from the conference, featuring a special guest appearance from Will.i.am of the Black Eyed Peas (I’m not kidding).

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