With 1 million applications, Twitter's ecosystem has growth significantly in the past 12 months. Just one year ago, Twitter had 150,000 registered applications. Now, the company says it has more than 750,000 developers around the world contributing to its developer community.
"A new app is registered every 1.5 seconds, fueling a spike in ecosystem growth in the areas of analytics, curation and publisher tools," the company writes on its blog.
The highlighted areas of growth are key -- and speak to the type of apps that the company is encouraging its developer community to build.
Twitter has been criticized for encouraging third-party development, then building its own products that compete directly. Twitter's photo-sharing service, which could take away photo-sharing audiences from TwitPic, Yfrog and others, is a recent example of this type of behavior.
Twitter has also acquired app makers such as Tweetie and TweetDeck, making it difficult for other Twitter client makers to compete.
But Twitter has been attempting to clarify its stance toward application makers. In March, the company told developers to steer clear of pure-play Twitter clients. Instead, Twitter would prefer developers focus on social media analysis around Twitter data.