Twitter has today announced a major update to its Answers service, a tool which provides developers with real time information on how their app is interacting on the micro-blogging network.
Talking about the recent big update, Twitter senior director of platform Jeff Seibert said,
The more we learned, we saw Answers and these metrics are super good for smaller apps, and that’s all those developers need. For more complex apps, it turns out users have been using answers with others like Flurry or Mixpanel, the reason is they need more functionality. That’s been by far our number one request.
While Answers previously gave minimalistic input to developers about their apps, mostly information like sign ups, new downloads, it now shows more comprehensive data, including Daily Active Users, Top Builds Daily New Users Sessions per Active User, Monthly Active Users Sessions, Retention and a lot of other parameters.
As an example of Answers more robust service, developers can directly monitor purchases and figure out what their forward revenue projections would be. But this is just one event. “We’ve picked the 12 most common [events] and built custom experiences for them,” Seibert said.
You can obviously create your own custom events for whichever metrics you wish to track. “Instead of it being a random custom event, now we know you’re recording a purchase event, and we can make a custom dashboard automatically with the app developer doing no work. Take purchases for example — we present the revenue chart front and center instead of a frequency graph of each purchase.” Siebert further adds.
All of these and lots of other new developer friendly announcements are expected to come out at twitter’s second flight developer conference, scheduled to take place on October 21st this year. Twitter’s Flight conference this year won’t just be focused on developers, but also on the way businesses are using it and its data platform.
