Wednesday was the first Twitter Talk in a series arranged by the Innovation Center. They have asked leaders in the Twitter community to come to the Innovation Center monthly to share information on important topics and issues going on in social media and on Twitter specifically. Wednesday’s talk was by Jim Moffitt, who is a Staff Partner Engineer at Twitter. He discussed APIs and how Twitter was building platforms to allow companies to better take advantage of all Twitter has to offer. Especially important to this process is the new Twitter Developer Platform, which allows anyone, even students, to try out coding in Twitter. This platform is located at developer.twitter.com.

According to Moffitt, this platform is extremely useful, user friendly, and encourages consumer feedback. It allows users to suggest new ways to improve Twitter itself, making it more convenient for general users and increasing it’s function in all areas of life. Moffitt commented that Twitter was already planning on redesigning it’s site from the ground up, and any input from outside developers was extremely likely to be considered as a valuable suggestion. In addition to being able to suggest updates to Twitter, the platform contains 5 different types of labs along with other opportunities for free coding. These labs include “Get Tweets”, “Tweet Metrics”, “Filter Streams”, “1% Measure”, and “DataBots”. Each of the labs create unique opportunities for all use cases, and are especially helpful in areas where data is applicable and helpful.