Back in December at Le Web, Twitter Director of Platform Ryan Sarver announced that Twitter would be holding the first conference of their own in 2010. Today, they’ve unveiled the details. Called Chirp, the conference will take place April 14 and 15 in San Francisco. Notably, this is exactly one week before Facebook’s big developer conference, f8, which will be April 21 and 22.
Day 1 of the Twitter conference will take place at the Palace of Fine Arts Theater. This day will contain the meat of the schedule. Highlighted talking points include OAuth, streaming, geolocation, business strategies, mobile integration, and the product roadmap. Right now, the only highlighted speakers include Twitter co-founders Evan Williams and Biz Stone as well as COO Dick Costolo and Sarver, but you can expect more to be added. Day 2 will see the event move to the Herbst Pavilion in Fort Mason for a 24-hour “Hack Day” for Twitter third-party developers. Naturally, there will also be a big party after the conference with “free beer, food and music all night long.” No word on any performers yet, but you can be sure that much like f8, Twitter will bring in some big names to make their community happy.
And they should because it’s going to cost those developers a pretty penny to attend. $469, to be exact. While Facebook hasn’t yet announced the price of f8 2010, in previous years it has been significantly cheaper than $469. In 2008 (its second year) for example, it was $250 to attend, and $150 if you signed up early. But the Twitter conference will also be more exclusive. There are 800 tickets that Twitter will be releasing on a first-come-first-serve basis. And you have to use the API to sign up, which means it will be kept very developer-focused. It’s also worth noting that the costs are higher because Twitter isn’t taking outside sponsors, like Facebook does for f8, I’m told.
Today, Twitter is releasing the first 100 tickets — you can sign up here. There is also a way for people on Twitter to anonymously give a ticket to someone else, which Twitter is calling the “scholarship ticket.”
As Facebook touts on its f8 2010 preview page, there are over 500,000 applications on the Facebook Platform, and over 300 of those have more than a million users each. Facebook also has a number of applications developers that are making quite a bit of money on their platform, such as Zynga. In fact, the Zynga revenues are so huge that there is no shortage of talk that they could go IPO soon — maybe even before Facebook itself. Twitter has a ways to go before it reaches that level as a platform, but the community of third-party developers is growing rapidly — hence, this conference. Twitter is using Carsonified to produce the event, the group known for putting on events such as the Future of Web Apps.
On the Chirp page, there is also a hidden area that teaches you how to make Magical Origami Chirp Birds, if you’re into that sort of thing.
Twitter user Peter Boctor has also made a useful Twitter list that is auto-updating with everyone who registers to attend the conference.
Created in 2006, Twitter is a global real-time communications platform with 400 million monthly visitors to twitter.com, more than 200 million monthly active users around the world. We see a billion tweets every 2.5 days on every conceivable topic. World leaders, major athletes, star performers, news organizations and entertainment outlets are among the millions of active Twitter accounts through which users can truly get the pulse of the planet.
Facebook is the world’s largest social network, with over 1 billion monthly active users. Facebook was founded by Mark Zuckerberg in February 2004, initially as an exclusive network for Harvard students. It was a huge hit: in 2 weeks, half of the schools in the Boston area began demanding a Facebook network. Zuckerberg immediately recruited his friends Dustin Moskovitz, Chris Hughes, and Eduardo Saverin to help build Facebook, and within four months, Facebook added 30 more college networks. The original...
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