App developers invade Twitter

by Dan Leahul, revolutionmagazine.com

LONDON - Twitter chief executive Evan Williams has revealed that there has been over 11,000 third-party apps registered with the microblogging website, with a large majority of these in development and production.

Williams confirmed the amount, fittingly through a tweet, and said that as of a few weeks ago, Twitter passed the 11,000 app threshold.

If assumed that the majority of app developers are businesses promoting their brands, Twitter could see a windfall of cash if it decided to flip the switch to a moneymaking enterprise.

By comparison, Facebook, which is seemingly bent on remodelling its website after Twitter, boasts more than 50,000 apps, created by nearly one million different developers in 180 countries.

Facebook also trumps Twitter in online membership, more than 200 million to Twitter's 35 million.

Apple houses twice as many apps as Twitter in its App Store, about 25,000, which have been downloaded more than one billion times.

Yet this week it was revealed that its App Store may not be a wildly lucrative as first presumed. Analysts have found that Apple makes a relatively low amount of revenue from all its apps, only a few hundred million dollars, at best.

Twitter recently made moves to trademark the word 'tweet' to protect the brand from 'potentially damaging' apps. Luckily, some of Twitter's most popular applications, such as TweetDeck and Tweetie, will not be forced to change their names.