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Twitter passes 1 million registered third-party apps

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Twitter has hit a growth spurt and on Monday said it has shot up from 150,000 third-party apps a year ago to more than 1 million apps today.

Most of these apps, Twitter said Monday in a company blog post, use tweets and other information shared on Twitter in ways that the company itself doesn’t through its website or official apps for smartphones and tablets.

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‘Application developers play a fundamental role in helping people get the best out of Twitter,’ the blog post said. ‘A new app is registered every 1.5 seconds, fueling a spike in ecosystem growth in the areas of analytics, curation and publisher tools.’

The San Francisco microblogging service offered examples of apps that connect to Twitter in interesting ways, such as Mass Relevance, which ‘combed through more than 160,000 Tweets to bring the White House’s first Twitter Town Hall to life though real-time content curation and visualization.’

Another example was Trendrr, which ‘evaluated the sentiment of Tweets about sci-fi thriller SUPER8 to measure the film’s blockbuster $38-million opening weekend.’

Twitter also pointed out Datasift, which announced Monday that it had raised $6 million in funding to continue building out its app, which makes ‘the Twitter firehose accessible to any developer.’

Apps such as these have been built by more than 750,000 registered developers, Twitter said, adding that since December 2010, more than $500 million has been invested in its third-party developers and that more than $1 billion has been paid out in companies buying other companies.

‘This level of investment is indicative of the opportunity for developers and entrepreneurs to build successful businesses as part of the Twitter platform,’ the company said in its blog post, offering yet another example -- Radian6, which ‘turned its brand monitoring tools into a thriving business’ and then gobbled up by Salesforce for $326 million.

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Twitter itself has spent some money on takeovers, buying TweetDeck for an estimated $40 million to $50 million (Twitter has not officially said how much it paid) and iPhone app maker Tweetie last year. It then turned Tweetie into the official Twitter app.

With all the momentum the social network has on the developer side, Twitter also announced the launch of a new Twitter Developer website, ‘where anyone in the ecosystem can start building with Twitter, connect directly with Twitter team members, exchange ideas with fellow developers, and find all the resources they need to create their own product or business.’

The site -- built using the open-source website building tool Drupal -- will have a discussion forum for developers to talk to one another and connect, a new developer blog and improved Apps management tools, among other features.

There have been some questions recently about Twitter’s relationships with developers. The Federal Trade Commission is investigating the company’s dealings with third-party app makers.

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-- Nathan Olivarez-Giles

twitter.com/nateog

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