Twitter launches new SDK: wants to penetrate all applications

Twitter today released a new software development kit fabric. According to a foreign media commentary, fabric marks a bold plan for Twitter to penetrate all applications. While Twitter will continue to be the foundation, its new action is a pragmatic strategic change, in many ways similar to Google's strategy of extending its tentacles beyond search.

The following are the main contents of the article:

Twitter today released a new software Development Kit (SDK) at its developer conference called Fabric. It can do a lot of good things, it should win the favor of many mobile application developers. And more importantly, the meaning behind the fabric. Because it's not just a developer tool. Fabric is the cornerstone of Twitter's decision to turn a business based solely on one product into a diversified service for all and all developers. That, in turn, affects every mobile application user.

If Twitter's plan succeeds, it will be irrelevant if you use Twitter. Every time you use your cell phone, you use the Twitter company--even if you don't notice it. So far, the only way companies have been so wide embedded in the mobile world is to produce mobile phones or operating systems. Twitter does not build Twitter or Twitter os. It will not be able to penetrate the mobile field on a large scale-unless it exists in various applications. This is the plan.

The key to the plan is to attract a broad range of developers. To do so, Twitter will provide them with a free set of tools to help them get new users, analyze their usage and stability, and make money. In exchange, developers will need to include Twitter in each app they develop.

If you can convince developers to embrace their advertising product MoPub, Twitter will also get paid because it can get an ad split.

Strategic change

"This is an important step for Twitter," he said. "Twitter is becoming more like a mobile service company," said Kevin Weil, head of the Twitter business product and Fabric project, Kevin Will. We're going to take advantage of the experience we've had over the past seven years as a move into the first company, playing a more powerful role in the mobile ecosystem. If fabric reaches our goal, it will be the first thing developers add when they write their apps. ”

The remark sounded fearless. Twitter is seeking a transformation. It has been trying to move in that direction since the acquisition of Crashlytics company in January 2013. At the time, the acquisition was intriguing. Why does Twitter want to buy a company that helps developers find out why the app is running? A few months later, it went on to buy a mobile ad network, MoPub. The deal is relatively more legitimate, but it is still not part of Twitter's core business.

Now, these acquisitions suddenly seem very important. Together with the new registration system digits (218 countries today, offering 28 languages), they form the backbone of fabric. While Twitter will continue to be the foundation, its new move is a pragmatic strategic change, in many ways similar to Google's strategy of extending its tentacles beyond search.

"It's not a departure from the Twitter product, but a transformation into Twitter and Twitter platforms." "This is about helping define the future of the mobile industry and about developing an application developer platform for the future," said Dick Costolo, Twitter's CEO, Dick Costello. ”

At present, many software development kits are very poor, light settings they often have a long guide to explain. In contrast, fabric is extremely simple. It's just an extension that can be added to your iOS or Android Development environment toolbar. Click on the button to open the Pull-down menu to see the buttons for 3 different kits that are added to Twitter, apply analytics, and add ads to apps. Select the feature you want to add, and fabric scans your existing code to show you where to put it. In most cases, this only involves a few lines of code. For Android, it even supports one-click Embedding. If you're developing apps for iOS, you just need to copy and paste.

3 Kits

Currently, fabric is based on 3 toolkits, and there are 7 tools that can work together and run independently. The Crashlytics Toolkit provides tools for tracking application burst, application usage analysis, and test publishing. The Twitter Toolkit allows developers to embed tweets into their apps and provide landing systems via Twitter, and the most interesting feature is the ability to support mobile numbers rather than email addresses. The last toolkit, MoPub, allows any developer to add mobile ads to the application.

Twitter's digits allows developers to allow users to register their accounts with their mobile numbers. "Digits is a great feature that will bring surprises to the industry," he said. "Costello said.

In many countries, new users do not have a mailbox address. That's why Twitter, Facebook, and many other apps that support people in overseas areas are registered with their mobile numbers. Small app developers certainly want to cover this broad crowd. In theory, allowing your mobile phone number to register is tantamount to allowing your application to face almost everyone on earth.

In fact, for small developers, support for mobile phone number registration is very complex and expensive, even in the United States. You have to be able to send millions of SMS codes around the world to get this done. Since SMS costs up to 6 cents per piece, many developers cannot afford it. As a result, Twitter allows its own system to take on the entire process and all the costs, allowing developers to add a few lines of code to the application's SMS registration function.

In other words, it accepts a costly and complex challenge that simplifies and is free of charge. This is also the experience of fabric purposes. You don't have to go through pages and pages of documentation and you don't need to follow a variety of development toolkit requirements. Its use is very simple and quite feasible.

The experience of applying a user is also very simple. Choose to register with the mobile phone number, enter the country code and mobile phone number, you will receive the Verification code text message, the application to submit the verification code can be completed registration. The developer will get the user's certified phone number and verification credentials. (Contrary to media reports, Twitter says it will not keep the user's phone number information to retain the "shadow" Twitter account.) ）

If you want to add more options, developers only need to select from the Twitter menu. You don't even need to know how to write those new code, because Twitter will do it for you.

"We'll show you the line of code and where to put it." "said Jeff Seibert, Crashlytics co-founder and Twitter mobile platform leader Jeff Sebert.

Applications can run from time to time. For developers, diagnosing the cause of the crash is very troublesome. Sometimes, developers do not even know that there is a problem with the application, or do not know the scope of the problem. The data from the crash reports from iOS and other parties are often confusing.

Crashlytics knows how to run low power in a mobile OS. By doing this, when one of your apps is crashing, the crashlytics wakes up, logs the confusing data as quickly as possible, and sends it to the developer after the user restarts the application.

It is a popular powerful tool. (The total number of application days Crashlytics running is over 1 billion.) Strava and other developers have publicly praised it. Fabric adds a tool named answers to Crashlytics and a new test publishing feature. The two were launched earlier this year, but now three tools are tied to fabric.

The test release option allows developers to recruit testers from any platform they send invitations to. Crashlytics is designed to help developers diagnose the severity and extent of their application. It arranges application problems according to severity (usually the number of people affected), and it can even diagnose specific information, such as whether the user is using the jailbreak's iphone. Answers is like an application version of the Google Analytics Analytics tool. It informs developers of the variety of usage data, such as daily and monthly active users, the number of new users per day, user usage and length of stay, and the prevalence and user volume of each application version.

The last one is the MoPub ad kit. It allows any developer to monetization their applications by joining their trading platform and adding a few lines of code. Developers can choose banner ads or "native" ads that match the layout and format of the application.

If Crashlytics is a fabric-activated booster, MoPub explains why Twitter wants to reinvent its business. If Twitter can attract developers to run crashlytics with fabric, it's only a step away from using MoPub (as well as advertising revenue sharing).

What do you intend to do?

However, this raises the question: Why does Twitter feel the need to expand its business like this? Some think this suggests that Twitter's core business is not growing fast enough. Twitter, of course, refutes this interpretation.

"Our annual growth rate is close to 100%. "We've developed a powerful consumer product that touches every corner of the planet." The advertising business we develop on this basis is growing very fast and there is no sign of slowing down. He added that it was this growth that triggered the current expansion plan.

A source familiar with the Twitter strategy says Twitter's new actions resemble Google's expansion from search to YouTube, Android and Chrome. "You can ask what is Gmail related to Google search?" Does it help Google search? Not at all. But Gmail adds value to Google because it makes Google more important in people's lives. ”

Twitter hopes that all of these features will make fabric the preferred toolkit for developers to start developing mobile apps and become a stronghold. "You can think about a similar situation at the beginning of the web," Costello says. "You have to add a variety of services to your application, or try to launch your own service." As ecosystems mature, they become a robust and simple service layer. ”

That's exactly what Twitter wants to do. It wants to be a simple service layer that exists at the bottom of each application you use.

"Now, Twitter products and Twitter are one thing. "Later, Twitter will be both a Twitter consumer app and a Twitter mobile service company," he said. ”

A long way to go, Twitter has done a lot to win the favor of the vast majority of developers.

Translator: Lebang