Otaku Gadgets

A recent tweet from twitter engineer Alex Payne has set off a chain of speculations, questions and clarifications about what Twitter is about to do its website. The online real time social network has been in the news recently thanks to talks of a new ad network being incorporated into the system as a primary revenue source and this new event has sparked off more people.

As you can see from the tweet, Alex is basically bragging about what the employees have in the works and teasing us with the hint that we will have it soon. But when he says that we might not use desktop twitter clients ever again, he obviously puts the third-party developers in a limbo of emotions that is best described as an ‘confused & angry’ state of being.

Soon the @ replies started pouring in and one developer expressed his concern directly, saying that he is not sure how he as a developer should react to this. In reply, Alex is quick to point out that these features will of course be released in to the public API and they would hence have access immediately. Alex then further clarified that these features that he is talking about are actually built on the public API and they are meant to insipire desktop app developers. It is easy for use to see that first tweet as plain bragging but it does put developers in a twist.

The recent rumblings around Twitter suggest that an ad network will be built into the service and it will be based around the search function. Even though twitter added two major features last year — lists and retweet — they haven’t done anything to the limited search function. it now seems like might actually be working on a total overhaul of the search to integrate this ad network that we keep on hearing about.

Another feature to talk about is Geo-location. It is currently available in the API but it seems like twitter is also planning big things around it because let’s face it — the hyper local is the future for services like twitter where relevant news trending in real time is what matters the most.

With Twitter’s developer conference ‘Chirp’ coming up fast, we should have some concrete news on these developments soon enough.

[read]