Twitter‘s Director of Platform Ryan Sarver just took the stage at Le Web a couple of minutes ago, and shared some announcements with the audience about the future of the platform and the effect this will have on the ecosystem.

He also shared a milestone for the company: Sarver said 50,000 registered applications to date have been built using Twitter APIs.

The roadmap ahead:

Transparency: “we need to be more public about our policy and intentions”
Communication: “we need to be out there and let our developers know what’s going on”
Utility: “we need to keep providing our robust APIs and enable third-party developers to thrive”
Profitability: “when our partners succeed, we succeed” (more details coming early 2010)

Four announcements:

1) Firehose! No details yet (coming early 2010), but everyone will be getting full access to the data stream. This is pretty significant news.

2) New home for developers: new website launching within the next few weeks, including status dashboard, tutorials, and much more.

3) Anyone making OAuth requests to Twitter is soon getting an increased rate limit (10x) – about to launch API for browser-less apps, and starting Basic Auth decprecation in June 2010.

4) Twitter is hosting an official developer conference called Chirp in San Francisco next year.