Twitter® Application Development for Dummies®

Chapter 4. Getting to Know the Twitter Application Ecosystem

In This Chapter

• Types of Twitter applications

• Examples of Twitter applications

• Sources for inspiration

Twitter has strategically taken on a role as a communication platform and is seemingly not out to solve every user requested feature demand. With their open API, this allows developers to find a niche in the Twitter application ecosystem by identifying a feature that Twitter users want but that Twitter itself does not address.

Before you jump in and start creating your Twitter application, you need to investigate the various applications that have already been developed. This is your opportunity to learn from those applications and gain inspiration, identify opportunities, and find your niche.

The Twitter application ecosystem can be broken into five different categories: desktop clients, mobile clients, Web applications, Twitter bots, and hardware. There are over 10,000 Twitter applications. In this chapter, I profile 34 example applications across all five categories just identified. You will get a sense of what each application is about, who made it, and how it is monetized, if it is monetized at all. Popular applications that don't have a direct revenue stream may still benefit the creators indirectly by increasing their name recognition, providing them with job leads, or simply satisfying their need to create. However, in the applications profiled in this chapter, I focus on how they create cash directly.

Desktop Client ...