Brands are increasingly turning to Facebook both as a place to advertise and as a complementary platform by which to build their online presence — and begin conducting social commerce. There are a number of solutions, for example, that allow big and small operations alike to operate retail storefronts on Facebook, sell their wares, and, to a degree, manage their transactions.

But what about that other popular social network, Twitter? The “micro-blogging” platform has certainly become a vehicle for celebrities and brands looking to hawk their products, stir up brand awareness, and interact with their customers, so the question becomes: Why can’t Twitter, too, offer some of the same eCommerce functionality as Facebook?

There are a number of reasons for this, but for starters, Twitter has been largely focused on doing one thing well above all others: Building the best realtime communication platform the Internets has to offer. There’s also the fact that Twitter has privileged a “consistent user experience” and hasn’t always had the best relationship with third-party developers.

Thus, brands have typically used Twitter as a somewhat indirect broadcast platform, listing items for sale, but only doing so in a way that is intended to lure customers away from Twitter to their own eCommerce platforms. (Facebook has also struggled to keep commerce and transactions happening on its platform, rather than suffering from redirection to retailers’ homepages.)

But Chris Teso sees a big opportunity for direct eCommerce on Twitter, which is why, in July, he launched Sell Simply — a simple way to enable consumers and brands to buy, sell, and transact on Twitter. Essentially, Sell Simply turns Twitter into a eMarketplace, allowing users to buy and sell anything over Twitter by replying “buy” to any listing Tweet.

Users can list an item for sale on Sell Simply, or import their items from other commerce platforms, like Etsy, Ebay, Craigslist, ArtFire, or Bonanza, and automatically tweet those items out for sale. All users have to do is connect their Sell Simply accounts with Twitter and PayPal, so when someone responds to that tweet with “buy”, Sell Simply facilitates the transaction through PayPal, enabling users to buy and sell an item with one tweet. (Re-tweets, too, are transactionable.)

Beyond allowing consumers and brands to sell directly to their customers on Twitter, the startup also offers its users the opportunity to create their own storefront. Through Sell Simply’s “Simple Shop”, users can aggregate all the listings for items being sold on Twitter so that users can find them all in one place. They can also add descriptions, tags, photos, and edit a number of other fields for each listing. What’s more, the platform has a fully automated shipping calculator, which allows sellers, for example, to set their own shipping options in prices so that shopping costs can be included in the listing price, or can be set for “local pickup only”, etc.

And, as mentioned above, Sell Simply has a Chrome extension to make it easy for those already selling items on Etsy, Ebay and more to import their listings.

To make the process of buying and selling direct on Twitter device agnostic, Sell Simply has launched Chirp, which now allows users to pay anywhere with any device. To make a Chirp payment, all users have to do is send a tweet that says something like “@SellSimply #pay @ThePayee $200 for [said item]“. Users can make payments that are as little as $1 or as high as $2,000. (And this is how Sell Simply makes money: The startup charges a 2 percent transaction fee on every one of those purchases.)

This allows brands and sellers to collect money in under 1 minute, direct to their PayPal accounts. Detailed PayPal receipts are then automatically sent to the buyer via direct message so that they have an extra way of making sure that the transaction has been completed.

And, in terms of security, since all transactions take place through PayPal, customers have no liability for unauthorized purchases when they meet PayPal’s requirements, and, in turn, can take advantage of refunds for incorrect orders or items that never arrive.

Since launching in July, the platform has racked up over one thousand members listing over 10,000 items for sale on Twitter, and Teso says that 75 percent of Sell Simply’s members have connected their PayPal and Twitter accounts to the platform, which he sees as encouraging evidence that people are ready to take that leap of faith and begin using Twitter as a direct sales platform. So far, the average transaction price has been $35 and the most common items being sold are vintage clothing and photography, (as many users are coming from Etsy), but he expects the merchandise to diversify as more people begin connecting to the platform.

As for the road ahead, Teso plans to launch a “T-commerce” platform designed to expand Sell Simply’s possible uses for brands, with features that will include integration with back office e-commerce workflow, analytics, and a recommendation engine that will suggest items based on what a user Tweets about, for example. For brands interested in this kind of functionality, Teso said, there will be a licensing fee.

Obviously, for brands, the value proposition both for Sell Simply’s current offerings and the marketplace features that will be launching by the end of the year could be huge. If you’re a brand, Twitter is the perfect platform on which to broadcast flash sales and time-sensitive deals, and Sell Simply’s buy-with-one-tweet service will make that even easier.

And for non-profits, Sell Simply uses the same formula for transactions to turn Twitter into a donations platform as well, allowing people to donate their charities of choice with one tweet.

Just as brands hope that using Facebook as a social commerce platform can help create scale so that a larger audience will see cool products or sales because users post those items on their wall or share them with friends, Teso said that he sees a similar opportunity for eCommerce on Twitter.

If one happens to be selling their bike on Twitter through Sell Simply, there’s a good chance that a user’s friends will re-tweet the listing, and their followers may follow suit. If those people then, in turn, re-tweet to their followers, well, you get the point. Suddenly your listing might be reaching the eyeballs of someone in a fifth degree of separation, to which they can reply and instantaneously purchase the item. And with Chirp, that can all happen while you’re on the go.

It’s like Square, but you don’t need an extra device (a Square) — or a credit card. Pretty cool.

Check out Sell Simply at home here and let us know what you think.

But the lack of an official conference isn’t stopping some developers. They’ve decided to organize their own developers conference for the Twitter ecosystem. The Twitter Developers Summit will take place this July 26, in San Francisco, an invite informs us.

So who’s participating?

HootSuite, keepstream, KLOUT, CoTweet, and Bottlenose are all on the banner. More will likely come. One name not anywhere to be seen: Twitter. We’ve reached out to the company to see if they plan to participate at all, but as of right now, they’re clearly not involved.

EngageDigital, the company behind the event, writes on the site:

The Twitter Developer Summit takes place July 26, 2011 in San Francisco. The Twitter developer ecosystem is changing rapidly, and with the cancellation of Chirp, our Twitter Developer Summit is the best place for twitter-focused developers (from startups to Fortune 500) to network with like minded developers and discuss best practices: what is working today, what is changing, and what to expect tomorrow.

Sounds like Twitter would almost be necessary to comment on a lot of that, no?

Another company nowhere to be seen: UberMedia. Twitter’s nemesis would also seem like a natural fit here if Twitter itself isn’t participating. This is pure (juicy) speculation, but perhaps they haven’t been invited yet in the hope that Twitter will agree to participate.

Meanwhile, Twitter has been hosting smaller events for developers, such as the first official Devnest in May. They will also hold one related to the newly announced iOS integration. That event was actually supposed to be tonight but has been changed to tomorrow night.

Registration for the Twitter Developers Summit will begin on June 24.

Attention, geocachers! Garmin has a new device that may be worth your while. It’s called the chirp (yup, lowercase “c”), and it works in conjunction with Garmin phones to ensure a “more interactive and enjoyable geocaching experience.” Sounds fun. Not that I’ve ever been geocaching, but it seems like a swell way to spend an afternoon. It certainly beats trolling message boards all day long.

Chirp, which is available now (for $22.99), is described thus by Garmin’s Dan Bartel, vice-president of worldwide sales:

With Chirp, geocachers have a new tool to enhance the joys of creating and finding caches around the globe. In listening to and participating in the vibrant geocaching community, Garmin created a one-of-a-kind device that builds on popular innovations such as paperless geocaching and downloading cache details directly to the device.

And as you know, geocaching is basically a form of treasure hunting. You walk about the earth with a GPS, aided by geocaching Web sites, and find little bundles of stuff all over the place.

It sounds ludicrous at the outset, but what doesn’t? It’s certainly no sillier than becoming the “mayor” of a café because you’ve “checked into” it more times than anyone else.

The chirp is tiny, described by Garmin as “slightly bigger than a quarter.” It transmits geocaching data to your Garmin handheld device, things like coordinates, how many times a cache has been found before, hints, etc.

It’s your geocaching companion~!

I don’t know, it seems neat. Geocaching is so not my scene, but it sounds delightful.

Mark Otto is one of Twitter’s UI designers. He’s very good. How do I know? Because he shares some of his work on Dribble. Something that he shared about two weeks ago is particularly interesting. It’s a portion of a new site he’s working on for Twitter that looks like it is based around some sort of event, or series of events.

Otto is obviously smart enough not to show the whole site, but he does give a taste of what’s to come. The image he shared has the title “Need a Flight?,” and that echoes the banner at the top of the page he’s created. Also shown are the words “Join Us.” Below that, the text is partially cut-off but it talks about the origin of tweetups (Twitter meetups) and also talks about Twestival, the fundraising events that rely on Twitter. Might Twitter be preparing to launch its own foray into these types of events?

No, says Twitter. Specifically, Twitter’s Carolyn Penner tells us that “It’s neither an event nor a series of events.“

Okay, so what on Earth is it? What are we all supposed to fly to in order to join Twitter somewhere?

With projects like Hope140, and their Fledgling wine label to benefit Room to Read, Twitter clearly enjoys giving back by way of charitable work around the world. It wouldn’t be surprising at all if they started to use their massive social graph to organize events (charitable and otherwise) worldwide. But maybe this is just a mockup of something Twitter is toying around with and doesn’t intend to launch — at least not yet?

That said, another couple of mockups Otto shared a week before the aforementioned one point to a “potential new site” that also may be involved in all of this. He seems to be working on the schedule area of the site (which also points to events), but he indicates in his comments that the schedule part may not get made. He does say that it’s unrelated to Chirp though. Oddly, from the pictures, it sort of looks like a fashion show site — but who knows, these are just mockups.

[thanks Ian]

Today, Twitter is putting on sale tickets for the second day of the conference for only $140 (yes, 140, like Twitter’s character limit). To be clear, this is just for the second day of the conference, but for those on a budget, it’s a much better deal to be able to take part in the event. The second day is the hack-a-thon event taking place at Fort Mason in the city. And it actually begins at 7 PM PT at the end of day one of the event, when Twitter buses people over from the Palace of Fine Arts, where the day one events (including the major keynotes from Twitter execs) take place.

(If you want to catch those day one keynotes, you better hurry, Twitter only has about 200 of those tickets left.)

Those who buy these $140 day two tickets will have access to the Ignite event, the breakout sessions, the hack event, and the party which will take place at the end of day two.

And, not to be upstaged by Facebook, which is offering student tickets to its f8 event (which is exactly one week later in San Francisco) at $75, Twitter is unleashing tickets for students to both days of the event for just $50. To get these heavily discounted tickets, student will need to bring a valid student ID.

Much was made early on about the price of Twitter’s conference as compared to the rival f8 event, but actually, f8 is $425 this year (up from even the $325 we initially thought it would be). So Twitter’s conference is just $44 more, and that’s despite no outside partners (which the Facebook event has).

Chirp is being produced by Carsonified, the group behind the popular FOWA events. It runs April 14 and 15 in San Francisco.

The ticket page for f8 was briefly online earlier today at this URL. It appears that Facebook has since put it under password protection. But guess who was able to grab a screenshot? This guy. Notably, it appears that regular f8 tickets will be $325 this year. While that’s still about $140 cheaper (140, get it?) than Chirp, it’s not drastically cheaper, as many had been thinking. In the past, Facebook has sold tickets for $250, or even $150 if you signed up early. But, f8 still has one major price point advantage: tickets for students are only $50.

When asked why tickets were so expensive to Chirp, conference organizers noted that unlike f8, Chirp wasn’t accepting outside sponsors, which f8 has used in previous years to keep costs down. It’s not clear if Facebook is doing that again this year, but judging from the ticketing page, at least Eventbrite is a partner.

f8 will take place this year on April 21 and 22 at the San Francisco Design Center (same as previous years). Again, this is exactly one week after the two-day Chirp conference. We’ve reached out to Facebook about the event, and ticket prices, and will update when we hear back.

Update: Here’s Facebook’s statement to me:

We are preparing a Facebook Connect-enabled registration page with EventBrite in anticipation for f8, and will open it in the coming weeks. Watch the f8 Page for the latest details (www.facebook.com/f8).

In the past, tickets have been $150 for early bird; $50 for student; $250 for regular.

So basically, it sounds like that was indeed the page, and it just went up a bit early. And yes, prices appear to be going up.

[thanks John]

Like the first, this batch contains another 1/3rd of the total tickets. You can probably expect this batch to sell out within hours too. The final 1/3rd of tickets will be sold next month, and Twitter also plans to announce more details about the event at that time — likely other speakers and musical guests, etc. The event itself takes place on April 14 and 15 in San Francisco — probably not coincidentally one week before Facebook’s big annual developer event, f8.

“Demand has been growing as indicated by inbound interest. Everyone is excited about getting the ecosystem’s top developers in the same room as Twitter’s leadership and technical staff for the first time. The planning is going well and Chirp shaping up to be an entertaining and informative event,” is Twitter’s official statement on the conference, which is being put together by Carsonified, the group behind the popular FOWA events (which is taking place in a few week in Miami).

To sign up for Chirp you have to visit this page. To ensure tickets are going to developers who actually want to attend the event, Twitter actually makes you jump through a few hoops using their API to get a password before you can purchase a ticket.

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.

In the end, Triggit was named as the people’s choice for best startup of Launch Pad.

You can read about each contender below.

Acquia – Acquia intends to provide products that improve on the open source Drupal social publishing system. Projects in development include Spokes, a notification system, and Caliper, a spam and content monitoring service.

Chirp – Chirp’s flagship product, chirpscreen, streams media and information from top social networking and media sites to your desktop. Information can be presented as part of either a desktop application or a screensaver, and content is aggregated from top sites including Flickr, Facebook, Twitter, and eBay.

Oortle – We covered Oortle’s upcoming new product videophlow earlier today, but here’s a recap: Oortle provides products that bring the community aspect back to sharing media. Their current release is photophlow (currently in invite-only beta), which provides an interactive flickr experience.

JobScore – The job hunt can be just as tough on employers as it is on prospective applicants. JobScore aims to provide a comprehensive solution to help facilitate the process. Employers can easily publish ads to all of the top career sites, and JobScore rates candidates by relevant criteria. Employers can also refer candidates to other members of the site (for a price, if they wish), further expediting the process.

TradeVibes – This site provides a community for people interested in startups, allowing users to share opinions, ratings, and discussions about them. Its profiles include brief overviews and other relevant information about companies. (Disclaimer: This site is a direct rip-off of CrunchBase).

Triggit – With a single line of JavaScript, Triggit lets website publishers easily add advertising to their sites with a simple WYSIWYG editor. Ads can be pulled from sites including Shopping.com and the Amazon affiliate program. Users can also easily add content from YouTube and Flickr. The software is especially appealing to publishers in the long tail who might not otherwise have the savvy to monetize their sites. Today Trigit announced support for integration with Google AdSense to widespread applause.

Chirp will let you subscribe to a friend’s photo feed so that it can decorate your screen. Click on a photo and Chirp will take you to the corresponding Flickr page to find out more. This reminds me of the Slide Desktop application, except that it brings in photos and data from other Websites. It basically brings social widgets outside the browser, something we’ve also seen with desktop applications from Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo. The Sidebar in Windows Vista, for instance, lets you bring all sorts of widgets to the desktop, including online photos albums.

Maybe I’m missing something, though, because there is some smart money in the seed round. Greylock Partners, Jeff Clavier’s SoftTech VC and angel investors Reid Hoffman (Chairman and founder of LinkedIn), Jay Adelson (CEO of Digg), and Dave Samuel (founder of Spinner.com and Grouper). CTO David Bill is formerly of Spinner. I guess Chirp’s focus on turning social feeds into a screen saver might give it more mass appeal than just a bunch of desktop widgets.

Phillips explains the difference between Chirpscreen and widgets in the following way:

We’re designed to take over your screen and turn your
computer into a display of the social content of your choosing,
automatically updated with content from your friends – your friend channel.

Taking a step back, if you separate out what we do into three areas:
content aggregation; filtering; and display, most of those desktop
widgets aggregate and then do a limited display. We’re focused on
having highly relevant filtering and a really engaging, interactive
display of that content, as opposed to a desktop widget which is
designed to be a companion to your desktop activities (browsing,
email, etc.).

What do readers think? Try the beta and tell me in comments.

One of my earliest memories of the internet comes from elementary school where I remember seeing PointCast shown on our classroom computers. PointCast was a screensaver popular in the mid-90s that displayed news stories pulled in from over the internet. This hot Web 1.0 service died off in large part due to bandwidth limitations and the company’s inability to transition away from proprietary software and to the standardized Web.

Anyhow, I was reminded of PointCast when I checked out a new application called Chirpscreen that pulls content from Facebook and displays it in a Flash-based screensaver. Chirpscreen is basically PointCast but with personalized content (currently, only your friends’ photos and status updates, and your Facebook notifications).

The enthusiasm for PointCast may have waned because people realized how much better the web browser was for discovering news content online. Chirpscreen may succeed where PointCast failed in this respect, because the amount of online personalized content (i.e. content that relates directly to you or your friends/family members/etc.) is fairly limited, at least for now.

Chirpscreen plans on incorporating more content into the screensaver, such as your favorite RSS feeds and social graph info from other social networks (I’m sure they’re eagerly looking forward to the impending launch of MySpace’s developer platform). Chirpscreen will also be adding more interactivity and user controls that allow you to put more weight on the display of different types of content, as with the Facebook News Feed.

Chirpscreen is currently in private beta, but you can check out the program showcased as an application within Facebook here (warning: they’re still working out the bugs so it might crash your browser; it did for me a few times). If you want early access to the actual screensaver, submit your email to the invitation box on their website.

I’ve got to admit – I’m generally not very keen on Facebook applications, but I may just have to install Chirpscreen if the public beta works without hitches.