Twitter buys company to help third-party app developers

It seems like birds don’t fly the nest at Twitter, they just keep making the nest bigger. The social network acquired Cabana today hoping the team will serve its third party developers.

Cabana provides tools for mobile and web app developers and plants to shut down its “standalone mobile app development environment” on December 1. The team will then join Twitter’s platform division.

Before being bought by Twitter, Cabana took funding from well-known names in the Valley, including SV Angel, First Round Capital, Kevin Rose, Shervin Pishevar, and number of others.

The Cabana team explained in a blog post that its new purpose will be to provide Twitter’s third party developers with tools to “create new experiences on Twitter and empower the larger Twitter ecosystem.” Twitter has recently been in hot water with its developers since it released a new application programming interface.

The API put a kink in Twitter’s data hose, meaning developers are no longer able to access data streams that they used to. It’s detrimental to developers because many of them already built company, relying on that data. Starting last month, developers have six months to move their applications to the new API, which could mean a lot of reworking, reprogramming. It’s a dangerous game to play, however, when your entire business relies on another company’s API, which could be shut off in a snap.

Twitter is by no means completely cutting off the access, however, and it seems the company is trying to come up with new avenues for its developers, starting with this acquisition.

Cabana image via Shutterstock