Chirp, Chirp: Is That A Twitter Developer Conference I Hear?

Ryan Sarver, Twitter's director of platform, spoke at the LeWeb conference in Paris Thursday and said the company would step up its efforts to embrace and assist the developer community for Twitter. Among those efforts will be this first official developer conference, which will be held in San Francisco. Details about the date and exact location for Chirp have not been made public, but Twitter launched a dedicated page for the conference where users can sign up for updates.

The free social networking/micro-blogging service has continued to accumulate new members as well as popularity this year, leading to an explosion of third-party applications around Twitter. Sarver said there are currently 50,000 registered applications using Twitter's APIs.

In fact, Sarver said at LeWeb that most Twitter members are interfacing with the service through third-party applications or Web sites such as TweetDeck, Twitscoop, Hootsuite and others. As a result, Sarver told LeWeb attendees that Twitter will have a dedicated Web site for registered developers as well as a "fire hose" of realtime data provided to all developers, big and small.

While Twitter currently doesn't have an established revenue model, that hasn't kept other companies from using the service to make money. Dell, for example, said this week that it generated $6.5 million in revenue from its Twitter feed (@DellOutlet).