This is the third part of a series on the future of Twitter development: Part I, Part II.

In order for Twitter to reach everywhere, a skilled labor force of API developers is needed around the world. Developers make it possible to integrate Twitter into businesses in a more useful and personalized manner. This type of integration will give Twitter ubiquity and longevity, two attributes that are almost impossible for competitors to overcome.

The API developer community is more complex than most realize. New people enter continually as students and self-taught programmers. Others come in as corporate developers who are told to work on Twitter projects. As Twitter related companies in the top tier continue to grow multi-million dollar products, they bring in experienced coders from outside the Twitter world to manage big databases and build enterprise-level tools. This is a dynamic and growing group.

Developer Labor Force

One of the great strengths of the Twitter API is that it can be run by self-taught programmers who quickly turn themselves into productive tool builders. Self-taught programmers often come out of an actual need within a business or other organization. Software start-ups and consulting companies are born as a result of this group’s work.

Students are the other influx of talent I often see in the Twitter world. Doing a research project on Twitter data now seems to be a standard task for Computer Science students. That skill set will mean that Twitter will be an obvious place for this cohort to reach for when adding features to any system. It becomes a generation’s standard for social media data.

Marketing automation companies are doing so well that HubSpot has IPO buzz. Big Data companies based on Twitter are also booming and signing multi-million dollar partnerships.

So we have an established API infrastructure, a billion dollar ad revenue stream to work beside, and a rich set of tools built by a growing and diverse tech community. It sounds like my road trip view of economics is about to play out big-time with Twitter.

This is the second part of a series on the future of Twitter development: Part I, Part III.

Twitter ads are the fuel that will soon run the Twitter API development world. I spent a lot of time thinking about this on my recent road trip. Data from users interacting with Twitter ads can be expanded upon and optimized by API developers. This creates a win-win-win model: developers make money helping clients use Twitter ads more effectively, businesses get a better return on their investment and Twitter sells more ads to happy clients.

The current Twitter for Business marketing campaign is convincing businesses to spend increasing amounts of ad money on Twitter; $600 million last year and over one billion projected this year. You know what’s cool? Breaking that threshold and envisioning how the economics of Twitter ad buying will mature as billions of dollars start flowing.

Developers will be able to make money from this revenue stream by extending and optimizing Twitter ads for businesses. They will be the labor force that helps ad buyers leverage the leads and data they collect. For instance, once you have thousands of screen names and email addresses from Lead Generation Cards, you still need to engage with these people. Ad buyers could simply treat these leads as a normal mailing list, but that misses the whole formula of Twitter.

Leads plus engagement produces relationships. Energy strategically applied to relationships produces communities of loyal customers and supporters.

The integration of API developers with the Twitter ad buying cycle creates a more robust and innovative economy that benefits all parties.

Twitter Economy

We will have an economy where the financial interests of Twitter, businesses and developers are aligned. There will be large third party companies that sell general solutions, and smaller development teams who customize the results from Twitter’s API and Twitter ad data to provide vertical market solutions. I’ll describe this future API developer labor force in more detail tomorrow.

This is the first part of a series on the future of Twitter development: Part II, Part III.

Last week I took a road trip through Utah, across the Rocky Mountains, and into Boulder, Colorado. It gave me a chance to clear my head from Boston’s endless winter and contemplate my next steps for Twitter development. The route brought me past some of the most spectacular natural landscapes in the world, but my attention was also on the roads and towns. I could see patterns that weren’t as obvious in New England.

Back East the density of roads, businesses and residences blends into a solid mass. In the Southwest you can recognize the thin infrastructure of roads people have imposed on the terrain.

Towns along these roads with large clusters of businesses, such as Moab and Vail, show where there is a concentration of capital from tourism. The sudden, confined explosions of restaurants and retail stores made it clear that pumping tourist money into a town practically necessitates the growth of a marketplace.

I got to Boulder at the end of the road trip, my first visit in seven years. The growth of tech in that time is amazing; Pearl Street is now looking a lot like University Ave in Palo Alto. A culture that embraces entrepreneurship and an educated labor force have combined to create a solid tech economy.

Infrastructure, capital and labor. The pattern towards a robust economy plays out repeatedly before our eyes, and we’re now seeing it in the Twittersphere.

Twitter provided a new information highway, and made sure it ran everywhere. Businesses are now starting to invest and put up their billboards, in the form of $600 million spent on Twitter ads last year. This marketplace is only the beginning, a small fragment of the potential Twitter has to offer. The final, essential ingredient is a robust labor force of skilled API developers that will improve and expand upon the Twitter ad market. Once their power is unleashed, Twitter will move from a nascent marketplace to an economy of extraordinary scale.

My next posts will explain how API developers can make money by building in this marketplace, and what the future could hold as they help produce a global economy.