Twitter, the communication juggernaut that is said to hit 500M accounts by February took to the streets of Berlin last week for its first Developer Teatime event in Germany. The turnout was great with more than 200 developers, entrepreneurs and product managers attending the event at Mobile Suite in Prenzlauer Berg.

Twitter was impressed with the developer community in Berlin! In fact, a Twitter representative told me that they were surprised when they saw that the attendee list reached the limit of 300 attendees faster in Berlin than at the Developer Teatime events in in London or New York! There you go, Berlin proved once more why international media may be right to hype it so much! Ok, in order to not lack sportmanship: Seoul filled up even faster than Berlin! 

Meet Team Twitter 

Present at the event was a Twitter A-Team consisting of Ryan Sarver (Head of Platform), Jason Costa (Developer Relations Manager), Katie Jacobs Stanton (Head of International Strategy), Thomas Arend (International Product Management and with a Twitter handle many Berlin DJs would die for), Arne Roomann Kurrik (Developer Advocate) and German Twitter newbie Isa Sonnenfeld. 

The presentations

First Director of Platform Ryan Sarver took to the stage, giving a “state of the union” presentation, in which he talked about the growth of the Twitter ecosytem and the opportunities it offers for developers. According to Sarver more than half a billion US Dollars of venture capital went into Twitter ecosystem companies during a period of just six months last year.

He specifically highlighted the opportunities that lie in the field of curation for developers. The importance of curation for Twitter became imminent when the company acquired Canadian startup Summify just this month. Summify allows users to enjoy a summarized version of all their social media streams. 

Another example of a successful startup that builds on top of the Twitter API Sarver mentioned was “Twitter ecosystem poster child” Socialflow, a startup that shows brands how to use Twitter most effectively. 

The biggest news however, came when Sarver confirmed that Twitter will be opening an office in Germany. And you can guess once where that shall be! :-) 

• The Twitter ecosystemhas more than 750.000 developers
• There are a total of 15 Billion API requests per day
• There are more than 1.1M registered applications

Then things got more technical with Developer Advocate Arne Roomann Kurrik giving a deep dive technical workshop on the Twitter API, including the Search API, Rest API and Streaming APIs. Before i make a fool out of myself trying to summarize the technical characteristics of each, I better link to his presentation slides. 

After the technical part, which Travis J. Todd of BuddyBeers who live tweeted for Silicon Allee described as “DevPorn”, two Berlin startups (Soundcloud and Readmill) showed the audience how they incorportate Twitter into their products. Readmill founder Henrik Berggren shared a stat that went down well at this event: “34% of Readmill users sign up to Readmill via Twitter, which is more than sign up via Facebook.”

The event closed with a long Q&A session and enough time to grab some beers and mingle. (Thanks to Early Bird Venture Capital for sponsoring the drinks!) 

The Twitterati that were present 

Sighted at the event were among others: Ingo Hinterding (CPO of Crowdpark), Gunnar Berning (CEO of Twago), Klaus Hartl (CTO of Tweek.tv), Ramzi Rizk (CTO of EyeEm), Zoe Adamovicz (Founder of Xyologic), Stefan Hoth (Organizer of Hack and Tell), Rowan Barnett (Head of Social at Bild.de) and Maike Haselmann (Social Media Editor at Spiegel Online). A special mention goes out to the Skylin.es team that came all the way from Amsterdam just for the event, taking the train back home right afterwards. 

A selection of Tweets from the event (#teatimeBLN) 

I GUESS THE EVENT JUST LEFT ONE QUESTION OPEN:

Many thanks to the whole Twitter team for coming to Berlin and sharing their insights as well as Ciaran O’leary of Early Bird Venture Capital and Frank Spitzfaden of Mobile Suite who helped with the organization of the event. 

by Nikolas Woischnik