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photo by Scott Beale / Laughing Squid

”How many of you are happy?” —Ryan Sarver

More than 100,000 registered applications have been built leveraging Twitter’s API, so when Ryan Sarver, director of Twitter’s platform, looks out at a packed house of developers at Chirp it’s a risky question to ask.

Twitter is growing up, it’s acquisition of Tweetie and openness that core features, previously filled by external apps, are now being built in-house. This transition renders many applications, some built by developers in the audience, irrelevant.

So, really, how many of you are happy? Run Ryan! Run!Facilitating and growing a developer ecosystem is a new bold world in the business of technology, and Twitter’s few core features created abundant opportunity.

For it’s first three years, developers fed into Twitter’s success engaging users and explaining Twitter through interface design and data organization than Twitter could do on its own. There’s tension in the room, and the number of times today’s speakers have used the term “empathy” could make for a great drinking game. The thing is there is empathy in earnest, and to hear Biz, Ev, and Ryan talk about change, both fun and frenetic, the developer ecosystem clearly remains a priority.

Ryan carefully and exuberantly outlined five new areas where the API is getting really good and where he and Twitter hope developers will go with gusto to innovate:

• Annotations—will allow developers to make the most of metadata
• Places—a curated database of places around the world that will allow developers to drill deeply and exploit content around locations (go further than the check-in model)
• @Anywhere—primarily for connecting publishers (ex. HuffPost, Guardian, MSNBC) with audiences through hover cards, sign in, tweetbox, and integration
• User Streams—all real-time data from DMs to Retweets, and it’s going to be opened up for the hackathon (get ready to see some inventive apps and ideas)
• dev.twitter.com—rolling out today, the new site organizes, teaches, and encourages development around the growing possibilities provided by the API. A side note, previously handwritten data is now replaced with examples generated by live code.

Twitter’s commitment to its APIs and to facilitating and growing an ecosystem where developers can innovate and new businesses can be formed is genuine. To illustrate that commitment, Ryan shared the stage with Aaron Gotwalt, co-founder and engineer behind CoTweet.

Aaron told the CoTweet story, which begins with a string of great ideas and apps that led him and his partner in design Kyle Sollenberger to Twitter.

After trying to share a Twitter account to promote one of their experimental non-Twitter projects, they capitalized on creating a work-flow, and with the addition of Jesse Engle as CEO, a business quickly grew. (CoTweet was recently acquired by Exact Target.)

It’s clear that developing on Twitter’s APIs is as precarious as it can be profitable. Ev shared a video to illustrate just how hard Twitter really is for users to understand, use, and share. By growing core features internally and encouraging developers to leverage the APIs to do more work around areas that they know best the goal is to grow the user base to increase the opportunities for app development.

There’s a lot of love in the room, it’s almost like people are determined to hug it out, and though it’s clear that “celebrate the developer” prevails, let’s be honest, Ryan, have you ever met a happy developer?