Twitter has announced Flight, its first annual developer conference

Twitter has announced Flight, a new developer conference focused on mobile. The conference will take place at the Bill Graham Civic Auditorium in San Francisco on October 22, with a keynote from CEO Dick Costolo, followed by technical sessions aimed at helping mobile devs to build on Twitter’s platform. It’s not the first developer conference Twitter has held. Long-time Twitter watchers will remember Chirp, the inaugural Official Twitter Developer Conference that took place back in 2010. However there was no follow up to Chirp, and it’s fair to say that Twitter has had a checkered relationship with developers as its business strategy has shifted, leading the company to encroach upon the territory that developers were initially encouraged to build upon. For instance, Twitter has acquired various third party Twitter apps and clients, such as Tweetdeck and Tweetie, bringing popular third party services in-house where they can be controlled to mesh with its ad-driven business model. It’s also continued to extend its own platform with more features, such as photo-sharing — thereby undermining standalone Twitter services that were offering those services as extensions.