Twitter woos mobile developers, debuts tools at Flight

SAN FRANCISCO — Twitter is introducing tools to make it easier for mobile developers to build applications on Twitter and make money from them.

The tools are called Fabric and they play a key role in Twitter's new effort to win over mobile developers in the heated competition with Facebook, Google and other Internet giants.

Chief Executive Officer Dick Costolo made the announcement from the stage of Flight, the company's first mobile developer conference in San Francisco that is taking place Wednesday near Twitter's headquarters.

"We wanted to approach this not from the perspective of what would best for Twitter, but from the perspective of what would make you the most productive," Costolo said.

The announcement reflects the company's high-stakes bid to become a mobile platform, not just a mobile app.

"For them to have this developer conference is more evidence that Twitter wants to be viewed as a top-level consumer service," said Gartner analyst Brian Blau who focuses on consumer technologies.

More than 1,000 mobile developers are attending Flight. It's Twitter's first developer conference in four years.

The goal for Twitter is twofold: to get tools into app makers' hands and repair the sometimes fraught relationship with them.

Twitter and other major Internet players compete for the time and attention of mobile developers who can create apps that extend reach of their services and keep people engaged on them.

In its early days, Twitter relied on apps to create features it didn't have such as shortening Web links and posting photos. Hundreds of thousands of apps crowded the platform.

Then two years ago Twitter tightened rules around what applications could do.

Twitter also started to build or buy apps to create its own features and suggested developers focus analytics and marketing tools and other areas.

Fabric is a set of services compiled in part from acquisitions Twitter has made: Crashlytics, a company that made software which helped developers fix bugs, and MoPub, the mobile advertising exchange that helps place ads inside apps.

One of the tools lets apps authenticate users by SMS. Another offers an easy way to embed tweets on apps.