Chirp Update -- Morning 1

The first morning of Chirp has been very interesting. After a nice mimosa to open up the morning, moderator John Betalle ( @johnbetalle ) got us off to a nice start and the very distinguished speakers started taking the stage.

The opening remarks by Biz Stone ( @biz ) teased us with promises of talk about upcoming changes to Twitter’s API and Twitter’s revenue model. We haven’t heard a lot about the revenue model yet — I expect that will come as we discuss the ad platform later today with Ev Williams and Dick Costello at 3:30 and 3:45 — but Ryan Sarver delivered with some huge announcements about the Twitter API. But Biz is a Twitter cofounder, so he’s been there since the beginning, and my favorite parts of his talk were about Twitter’s history. For example, it turns out that the first big “Twitter is actually important” experience the founders had came at SXSW in 2007 when a whole meet-and-greet spontaneously changed venues when someone tweeted they were going from one bar to another. And, as he said, he knew Twitter had made it big when they had to postpone some planned maintenance because Iranian protesters said their lives would be in danger if their communication channel of choice went down during some upcoming protests. (He also just slipped in that the original Twitter prototype was written in two weeks. Damn.)

The official keynote from Twitter CEO Ev Wililams ( @ev ) focused on three messages: (1) Twitter is always evolving; (2) Twitter’s goal is to serve users; and (3) There is much more to invent.

Regarding Twitter’s evolution, Ev talked a little more about Twitter’s history. For example, did you know that that Twitter’s original design was absolutely hideous? (Will work on getting a picture of it up here.) More importantly, though, he talked about Twitter’s history of growth, discussing how Twitter was experiencing 90% month-to-month growth at periods of 2008 due to plugs from @cnn, @aplusk, and @oprah, and that Twitter now serves about 3 billion requests each day from the Twitter API alone.

Ev also explained the reasoning behind Twitter’s commitment to keeping its data open: it adds value for Twitter’s users. Ev claimed that creating the Twitter API was The Right Thing because Twitter believes that its community will create things it couldn’t even dream of, and when you look at examples like Cotweet and Twitteriffic it’s hard to say Ev is wrong.

Finally, Ev went on to say that there is much more to invent. Hearing him talk about how Twitter’s success is based on the innovation of its users is inspiring.

When Ryan Sarver ( @rsarver ) took the stage, though, all the developers in the audience really started to pay attention. Ryan is Twitter’s Platform Director, which puts him in charge of Twitter’s API and makes him really interesting to all the Twitter API geeks. And our friend Ryan’s announcements of 3 killer features being released over the next 3-6 months do not disappoint: user streams, which capture all of a user’s activities, including favoriting, retweeting, following, unfollowing, and so on; places of interest, which will tag tweets with richer location information, like “Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco, CA” instead of “San Francisco, CA”; and most significantly, Annotations, which will let developers attach arbitrary metadata to any tweet.

That last one damn near got a standing ovation from the audience. It would have gotten a full standing ovation, except we’re still not quite sure what to make of annotations yet.

From user streams, you can expect to see new applications that will do things like show what the people following you and the people your’e following are doing and looking at, and from annotations (combined with @Anywhere, which will be covered in the afternoon session) you can expect to see tweets coming from new sources, like instant message clients or blog comments, with rich data about where those tweets came from, like the source article.

The lights have just flashed to let us know that the afternoon session is starting, so I’m going to call it a post and head back into the theater for another dose of info to share. Be sure to check back for more updates!