Twitter News Roundup

Official Twitter Apps - Twitter recently acquired  the parent company of the Tweetie app, release a new Blackberry Twitter app, and is developing a official app for the Google Android. All of these apps were referenced as "Official Twitter Apps", but Twitter quickly retracted the "official" label due to backlash from the developer community. This anouncement worried third-party developers that Twitter was going to buy or develop competing "official" apps. Read more  

Promoted Tweets - Twitter is going to place promoted tweets within their search results. These promoted tweets will allow companies to only promote their own tweets. Users will be able to to reply to them, retweet them, and add them as favorites. The promoted tweets will come with real-time analytics, which is one piece of the soon to be released business accounts. Here is a cool tool that displays the sentiment on the topic of promoted tweets.

Twitter Releases Data - During their Chirp conference, Twitter released some user data. Twitter reported 105 million users and is adding 300,000 users every day. They mentioned that they are currently handling over 600 million search queries each day, almost as many as Yahoo. Another interesting fact is that 75% of traffic comes from third-party applications. These third-party applications account for 60% of all tweets sent.

Twitter Places - A new app that allows users to check-in at different locations by attaching geo-location data to the tweets. The app will aggregate what people are saying, who has been their, as well as the opinion of the place. Some see this as a competitor to FourSquares and Gowalla.

User Streams - Twitter launched a developers network site at dev.twitter.com. With this new dev center, they are providing a new streaming API. This API will allow developers to have near-realtime access to various subsets of Twitter public statuses.