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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Facebook’s New Features Get Animated [VIDEO]

The Taiwanese are at it again! This time the humorists at Next Media Animation (NMA) have turned their computer-animation reenactment efforts to the latest Facebook changes.

NMA takes on the latest updates from the f8 conference including the new Timeline and music features.

As usual, NMA nails it.

Check out some images from the event below.

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Two Key Features Of Facebook Music: Scrobbling And Track Unification

MG Siegler has been writing for TechCrunch since 2009. He covers the web, mobile, social, big companies, small companies, essentially everything. And Apple. A lot. Prior to TechCrunch, he covered various technology beats for VentureBeat. Originally from Ohio, MG attended the University of Michigan. He’s previously lived in Los Angeles where he worked in Hollywood and in San Diego where... ? Learn More

Yesterday, we outlined a bit of what we’ve heard about Facebook’s upcoming f8 conference. One big launch will be their official foray into music. Today, we’ve heard more about that launch.

One thing we’ve heard from a very good source is that a key aspect of the service will be “scrobbling”. The term, made popular by Last.fm, means that when you listen to a song, it gets sent to your profile without you have to do anything. I assume there will be a way to turn this off, or a way for you to selectively share songs, but this is a key to the service.

Not that a post-music-to-profile feature should be surprising. Facebook’s core feature is the feed, and music will now make it even more robust. In fact, depending on how popular Facebook Music is, it could end up being one of the biggest sources of feed content.

And I think it will be pretty popular based on the second bit of information we’ve heard. Facebook Music will also apparently offer content resolution between all the different music partners involved. This means that if you’re listening to Rdio and a track goes up on your profile, a MOG user can click on the track and still hear the exact same song in full. Essentially, you’ll only need to sign up for one of the major music services Facebook is launching with to be able to access most content (there undoubtedly will be some songs available on one service but not another, so it probably won’t be fully seamless, but I assume you’ll be able to hear previews regardless).

This content resolution will likely be the most important aspect of Facebook Music. It turns Facebook into the great social music unifier. You can share songs without having to worry if your friends will be able to hear it or not based on what streaming service they use.

It’s not clear what partners Facebook has gotten to agree to this unification beyond Rdio, MOG, and Spotify. It’s certainly possible that while other services will be a part of Facebook Music, those three will be the key ones.

In terms of functionality, we’ve also heard that there will be a standard player that plays music without interruption from page to page as you browse Facebook. Om Malik previously reported on the persistent controls as well as a larger Music Dashboard area. Malik stated that the player would be at the bottom of Facebook, but we’ve heard that Facebook has been testing variations on this player, so it’s not yet clear where it will reside (top, bottom, etc).

Update: Inside Facebook’s Josh Constine has an interesting thought: what if the desktop software team at Facebook was working on a scrobbler that could also work with iTunes to import listens? Those tracks could then by matched and played via Spotify, MOG, Rdio, etc, on Facebook Music itself. Constine notes that he doesn’t have any inside information on this, but he did outline that possibility following our post from May on Facebook’s Seattle-based desktop software team.

Even if that isn’t a part of the initial roll-out, this makes a lot of sense down the road for Facebook Music. Or what about a Last.fm partnership for the service? And what would Apple think of all this?

Facebook is the world’s largest social network, with over 500 million users. Facebook was founded by Mark Zuckerberg in February 2004, initially as an exclusive network for Harvard students. It was a huge hit: in 2 weeks, half of the schools in the Boston area began demanding a Facebook network. Zuckerberg immediately recruited his friends Dustin Moskowitz and Chris Hughes to help build Facebook, and within four months, Facebook added 30 more college networks. The original idea for the term...

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