Twitter’s (News - Alert) ecosystem is certainly blossoming, as reflected in a blog posted by the San Francisco-based social networking site yesterday (Monday). Since last year, Twitter’s registered apps have grown from an impressive 150,000 to an astounding 1 million, as reported by PCMag.com.

The third-party apps, according to Twitter’s blog post, are used primarily for the sharing of tweets and other information on Twitter in alternative ways that the company doesn’t offer through its site or within actual apps that are made for tablet and smartphone devices.

The blog post stated: "Application developers play a fundamental role in helping people get the best out of Twitter. A new app is registered every 1.5 seconds, fueling a spike in ecosystem growth in the areas of analytics, curation and publisher tools."

Out of the 1 million third-party apps currently in existence, there are several front-runners in terms of uniqueness, as reported on LATimes.com. Mass Relevance, for example, “combed through more than 160,000 Tweets to bring the White House's first Twitter Town Hall to life though real-time content curation and visualization."

Another example is Trendrr, an app developed for the tracking of trends across a variety of inputs on social networking sites, blogs and video forums. Most recently, the media solutions app sifted through inputs on sci-fi thriller SUPER8 in an attempt to gauge the movie’s opening weekend.

And, it looks like Twitter’s ecosystem is about to get even bigger. Twitter also revealed on Monday that it would launch a new developer site, “where anyone in the ecosystem can start building with Twitter, connect directly with Twitter team members, exchange ideas with fellow developers, and find all the resources they need to create their own product or business."

Using Drupal and found at dev.twitter.com, the developer portal now boasts a developer blog, more user-friendly documents, an enhanced apps manager and search – basically everything a developer needs to get started.

Tammy Wolf is a TMCnet web editor. She covers a wide range of topics, including IP communications and information technology. To read more of her articles, please visit her columnist page.

Edited by Jamie Epstein