Ryan Sarver, Director of Platform at Twitter, took the stage this morning at the LeWeb conference to discuss the developer roadmap and make four big announcements. Sarver mentioned that Twitter application developers have been very vocal about four key themes. They are:

• Transparency. The need for Twitter to be more public, how they engage with 3rd party companies, etc.
• Communications. Be out there when there are problems or new features or give previews.
• Utility. Providing robust APIs to create all sorts of applications.
• Profitability. Provide money to the ecosystem partners, through a shared business model. More details in early 2010.

With this background, came four big announcements.

1. The launch of a program to provide access to the Twitter content firehose to everyone in early 2010
2. The launch in a few weeks of a Twitter developer site in a few weeks including documentation, known issues, API console, status dashboard, etc.
3. The move to OAuth for identity authorization (with its positive impacts on rate limits & authentication). Sarver says that application developers using OAuth will see an increase in rate limits of 10x. They will also introduce an API for browser-less apps to get the OAuth token. Given that announcement, basic auth deprecation will happen in June 2010 (which means all applications will need to use OAuth by that date, otherwise they’ll stop working).
4. The first Twitter Developer Conference, “Chirp” happening in 2010 in San Francisco. They want the conference to be affordable (around $400 a ticket).