Twitter Introduces Fabric, A Toolkit For Developers To Build Apps On Its Platform

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At Twitter’s Flight conference this morning, Dick Costolo’s introduced Fabric, a set of APIs aimed at developers to encourage them to build apps and services on top of the Twitter platform.

In the build up to introducing the new APIs, Costolo said that Twitter “wanted to approach this not from the perspective of what would be best for Twitter, but what would help [developers] be most productive.”

Fabric is built upon Twitter’s social platform, but also ties in features from Twitter acquiree Crashlytics’s crash reporting software and fellow acquiree MoPub’s social targeting. But it’s not *just* about making apps that let you sign in with Twitter so they can shove ads in your users’ face. Twitter Mobile Platform Director Jeff Seibert showed off a TestFlight-like solution for distributing pre-release builds to testers without requiring account creation, letting you send particular builds with specific links.

Of course,  the Twitter social platform wasn’t totally ignored. There’s now a native Twitter SDK for mobile, letting developers create Twitter clients that show rich media from the service as well as integrate universal Twitter logins in mobile apps. This solution also helps developers integrate MoPub to increase revenue by routing ads through the highest-bidding network.