Twitter Launches An Issue Tracker And Other New Features For Third-Party Developers

Leena Rao currently works as a writer for TechCrunch. She recently finished graduate school at the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University, where she studied business journalism and videography. From 2004 to 2007, she helped lead Congresswoman Carloyn Maloney’s community outreach and relations efforts in New York City. She graduated from Columbia University in 2003, where she was... ? Learn More

In early September, Twitter’s Jack Dorsey posted a note to developers asking for feedback on how the network could better serve them. From the post: We want to know what additional materials you need from us to help you build products, boost distribution and expand your reach. It looks like Twitter has taken this feedback into account, and has rolled out a number of new features for developers based on their responses.

One of the main developer requests was a centralized issue tracker. Twitter has now launched a dedicated Issue Tracker, hosted on its new developer portal, which will replace the existing Google Code Tracker.

Another piece of feedback was a clear policy on API changes. Twitter will now give developers a minimum is 30 days advance notice before ‘sunsetting’ anything. For more broad, sweeping changes, Twitter says it will be flexible with developers and give them as much time as possible.

Rate limits are a big issue for Twitter developers and the company says that it permits 350 requests per user (oauth_token) per hour if you’re making authenticated calls and 150 per hour against the calling IP address for unauthenticated calls.

The goal is to scale usage of the API with the growth of a developer’s user-base and as they bring on more users, they will get greater access to the APU. Twitter also said that it is committed to push Site Streams, which will allow apps to receive real-time updates for events such as mentions, follows, timelines, and more, out of beta by Q1 of 2011.

Twitter promises to be more communicative overall with developers and especially help third-party developers work through authentication issues using oAuth.

By investing in creating new tools and features for developers, Twitter is clearly making a more concerted effort to work with third-party developers. In the past, there have been come miscommunications and it’s wise for the network to start listening to what developers want and need. In March, Twitter basically told developers to avoid competing with them on native clients. It’s not that Twitter doesn’t want developers to build off their platform, they just don’t want developers to build clients that mimic Twitter’s own services. As we’ve written, this is business, not personal. Regardless, it’s good to see Twitter taking actions to smooth things over with developers.

Twitter, founded by Jack Dorsey, Biz Stone, and Evan Williams in March 2006 (launched publicly in July 2006), is a social networking and micro-blogging service that allows users to post their latest updates. An update is limited by 140 characters and can be posted through three methods: web form, text message, or instant message. The company has been busy adding features to the product like Gmail import and search. They recently launched a new site section called “Explore” for...

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Microsoft And Nokia Release Windows Phone Porting Guides For Symbian Developers

Microsoft and Nokia have teamed up on a package of new tools aimed at getting Nokia developers prepared for the transition to Windows Phone. Announced today are three jointly developed tools and guides, the most notable being the addition of Symbian Qt to the Windows Phone API mapping tool.

The Windows Phone mapping tool, which already supports iOS and Android, serves as a translation dictionary between the Windows Phone platform and other mobile operating systems. With it, developers can pick out the API calls in their apps, then look up the equivalent classes, methods and notification events in Windows Phone.

To be clear, this is not a direct porting tool – it doesn’t do the work for you. Developers can simply reference the guide to aid in porting their applications.

Included in the mapping tool are the core libraries for Qt 4.7 for Symbian (QtCore, QtGui, QtLocation, QtNetwork, QtSensors, QtSql, QtXml, QtWebKit, QML Elements and QML Components). Sample code and tutorials are available, too.

Microsoft and Nokia have also released a 100-page white paper to serve as the de facto guide for Symbian Qt Application Developers interested in learning about Windows Phone. Within its 8 chapters, the companies detail Windows Phone guidelines, C# programming, the application life cycle, porting procedures and more.

Today also heralds the start of a series of developer events called the “Nokia Windows Phone Training” roadshow, with the first event being held in Paris. The events will then be held throughout Europe and Australia on the following days: Milan, Italy (Sept 26), Madrid, Spain (Sept 29), Berlin, Germany (Oct 4), London, United Kingdom (Oct 10), Sydney (Sept 24-25[SOLD OUT], Oct 8-9), Melbourne (Oct 8-9[SOLD OUT, wait list]) and Brisbane (Oct 8-9).

The U.S. dates, including the Silicon Valley dates, are not yet available.

Symbian isn’t a dead operating system just yet – after all, it received a big update just last month. But Nokia has publicly stated it plans to phase it out over time. Windows Phone is what’s next for Nokia, and it’s not surprising to see these tools and guides launch just prior to the release of the first Nokia Windows Phone, expected by year-end.

Microsoft, founded in 1975 by Bill Gates and Paul Allen, is a veteran software company, best known for its Microsoft Windows operating system and the Microsoft Office suite of productivity software. Starting in 1980 Microsoft formed a partnership with IBM allowing Microsoft to sell its software package with the computers IBM manufactured. Microsoft is widely used by professionals worldwide and largely dominates the American corporate market. Additionally, the company has ventured into hardware with consumer products such as the Zune and...

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Nokia is a Finnish multinational communications corporation. It is primarily engaged in the manufacturing of mobile devices and in converging Internet and communications industries. They make a wide range of mobile devices with services and software that enable people to experience music, navigation, video, television, imaging, games, business mobility and more. Nokia is the owner of Symbian operation system and partially owns MeeGo operating system.

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Twitter’s Dorsey To Developers: With Apple, We Can Take This To A Whole New Level

Leena Rao currently works as a writer for TechCrunch. She recently finished graduate school at the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University, where she studied business journalism and videography. From 2004 to 2007, she helped lead Congresswoman Carloyn Maloney’s community outreach and relations efforts in New York City. She graduated from Columbia University in 2003, where she was... ? Learn More

Twitter founder Jack Dorsey just posted a note to third-party Twitter developers, asking for feedback. He writes: We want to know what additional materials you need from us to help you build products, boost distribution and expand your reach.

What’s interesting about the post is that it mentions that “Very soon, anywhere there’s an iPhone or an iPad, you’ll always find Twitter.” He’s referring to Twitter’s deep integration in iOS 5. He writes: With Apple’s upcoming deep integration of Twitter into iOS 5, there is an opportunity for us, together, to take the ecosystem to a new level.

Here are some details from our post on Apple and Twitter’s announcement earlier this year: Apple will provide a single sign-on for Twitter use on the phone, and with any app you download, it will just ask you for Twitter credential permission. There’s no need to re-login.

Apple has taken it a step further to integrate Twitter into many of its own features and applications like camera and photos. You can also Tweet articles and content directly from Safari, Maps, videos from YouTube, etc and add location as well. And Twitter photos and @usernames can be autopulled into the phone’s contacts. You can see screenshots here.

In his note, Dorsey is saying is that Twitter and Apple iOS are now joined at the hip and that any iPhone or iPad app can integrate deeply with Twitter. Dorsey wants to become the realtime communications layer for iOS apps, which is a highly coveted position (and one that Facebook may want too). And what better way to take this position than to create  network of third-party apps building with Twitter for iOS.

It’s important to mention that Twitter has had a tenuous relationships with its developers. In March, Twitter basically told developers to avoid competing with them on native clients. It’s not that Twitter doesn’t want developers to build off their platform, they just don’t want developers to build clients that mimic Twitter’s own services.

As we’ve written in the past, this is business, not personal. But the FTC reportedly is making inquiries about whether the company’s developer policies are anti-competitive.

Clearly the tone of this note is more inviting and collaborative, and Twitter is trying to make nice with third-party developers as the integration with iOS 5 debuts.

Twitter, founded by Jack Dorsey, Biz Stone, and Evan Williams in March 2006 (launched publicly in July 2006), is a social networking and micro-blogging service that allows users to...

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PlayHaven’s New Platform Lets iOS Developers Tweak Their Apps On The Fly

Greg Kumparak is the editor of MobileCrunch.com, a mobile industry blog within the TechCrunch Network. Greg has been writing for the TechCrunch network since May of 2008. Greg was born in the outskirts of San Jose, CA, and now lives in the East Bay. ? Learn More

The iOS App Store is quite the volatile place. Even if you manage to fight your app up to the top of the charts, keeping it up there is an entirely new challenge. You’ve got to know exactly what’s working with your users — and more importantly, you’ve got to be able to mix things up quickly when you find things that aren’t.

Alas, mixing things up quickly on the App Store is inherently a bit difficult. Even if you can crank out everything required for your app update in a week or two, you can never be too sure if Apple’s review process will take a day, a week, or a month.

This morning, PlayHaven is launching a new platform that allows iOS developers to launch and test content campaigns within their apps without requiring another trip through the approval arena.

The idea is pretty simple, but it’s a clever one: PlayHaven’s platform lets developers design and fire off what they call “Dynamic Overlays”, which are essentially quickly customizable HTML5 pop-ups that engage the user and can fire off underlying code.

Now, what the hell does that mean? Here’s some examples of what you can do:

Rewards: Want to give your users a bit of in-game currency for playing on Christmas? Or Easter? Or Secretary’s Day? Tuck in PlayHaven’s APIs, drop in your code to allow currency rewards, and submit those changes — once it’s approved, you can schedule/change/cancel rewards on-the-fly without requiring updates each and every time.Announce updates: PlayHaven can detect when a user is using an old version of an app, then automatically pop up a graphical alert explaining why they should update.Game promotion: Launching a new game? Toss up an alert in your currently available games letting players know.

These are the most obvious ideas, but there’s plenty of room for creativity here. These Dynamic Overlays can be triggered by just about anything: scheduled dates, version number, accessing a specific part of the application, etc., which should make them pretty flexible.

PlayHaven also makes it pretty simple to figure out what’s working and what’s not, with a full analytics dashboard sitting on the backend. So you launched a campaign in your crazy space shooter advertising your new zombie flower-planting game, but no one is clicking? Tweak the graphic to make the zombie a bit bloodier and your flowers a bit brighter, push the new overlay, and measure the changes in click-throughs and conversion rate on-the-fly.

PlayHaven has quickly found some pretty serious traction for the platform, already naming heavy-hitters like Halfbrick (Fruit Ninja), DistinctDev (The Moron Test), and Glu (with their bajillions of games) as committed partners.

You can find more information on PlayHaven’s new platform here.

PlayHaven is a real-time mobile game marketing platform with a reach of 35 million unique users, driving 100 million monthly game sessions. Since its launch in May 2010, PlayHaven...

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Diffbot Sees The Web Like People Do, Now Free For Developers

Diffbot is a geeky and incredibly interesting technology that uses bots, algorithms, computer vision and artificial intelligence to process the content on the Web the way a human being can. “The entire Internet can be broken down into 30 different page types” explains Co-founder Mike Tung, also known as “Diffbot Mike,” and “Diffbot can identify them all.” Diffbot knows the difference between a social network profile, a blog post, a site’s front page, a product page, an event page and dozens more.

Today, Diffbot is releasing its first set of APIs, now open to all developers for free. The launch has the potential to dramatically impact the types of applications developers can build, and for consumers, it means a whole host of intelligent applications are about to emerge.

The New APIs: On-Demand & Follow

With the two API’s available now, developers can build apps that automatically extract meaning from pages, apps that understand what’s trending and who’s talking about it, apps that provide RSS feeds where none were available before and apps that read just the relevant parts of webpages aloud, ignoring ads, header and footer copy.

And that’s just for starters. Future API’s will enable developers to automatically turn event pages into calendar appointments, social network profiles into vCards or automatically extract shipping prices or reviews from product pages, among other things. While Diffbot doesn’t have a set roadmap, it expects to launch these additional API’s over the new few months.

Today, the first 2 API’s available are:

On-Demand API: This API is divided into page types “Frontpage” and “Article.” The former is used to analyze site homepages and index pages using common layout markers like headlines, bylines, images, articles, ads, etc. The Article API extracts clean article text, pictures and tags. (For example, see Readably.)Follow API: This is used to track the changes or updates made to any webpage. Diffbot automatically determines the part of the page that the developer wants to follow and extracts metadata like title, images, text summary and more, then segments the page into meaningful sections (See above photo).

What Can Diffbot Actually Do? 

These same APIs are already being used by companies like speech recognition system maker Nuance, AOL (disclaimer: TechCrunch is owned by AOL), social media monitoring firm SocMetrics, and others.

AOL uses Diffbot to extract the title, author, image, text, videos, topics and other metadata for its new iPad mag, AOL Editions. Nuance uses the technology to improve its natural language processing in a product for doctors, which requires comprehension of complex medical terminology. SocMetrics sends bit.ly shortened links to Diffbot to get the full article text and topics, so it can determine which social media users are talking about which topics the most.

These are just a few big-name examples. There are smaller, but just as innovative use cases out there, too. Like Hacker News Radio, for example, which reads Hacker News and comments to you. Or FeedBeater, which makes it easy to turn any URL into an RSS feed automatically (one of Diffbot’s first creations). Or this Diffbot-generated Twitter feed, which tracks changes to the webpage for the city of São Paulo, Brazil (as it lacks RSS), and tweets the updates.

The new self-serve platform for developers is free up to 50,000 API calls per month. The cloud plan provides 100,000 calls for free, then is $0.002/call afterwards. The Managed plan for Enterprise requires custom pricing.

Diffbot was founded by Mike Tung and Leith Abdulla, both Stanford PhD students on a leave of absence to build the company. The idea sprung from Tung’s desire to automatically track new assignments on the class website automatically, through the use of technology. Diffbot was also the first startup funded by Stanford’s incubator program, now called StartX (formerly SSE Labs).

Diffbot, founded in 2008 by two Stanford students, applies computer vision techniques in order to extract the semantic structure of webpages. Diffbot analyzes documents much like a human would, using...

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