Klout, a startup that measures influence on Twitter, is releasing a new version of its API today. Klout’s API is currently being used by more than 250 companies, including CoTweet, HootSuite, and the newly-launched Tweetup. You can read our previous coverage of Klout here.

Klout’s API, which is free, can be used by developers to identify the Twitter users they need to connect with to spread word about a new product, by publishers to understand how influential their audience is, and to help marketers and advertisers helping target influencers within your a particular market. The new API now allows users to return a Twitter user’s “True Reach”, “Amplification Score” and “Network nScore” as well as a machine learning classification of the type of user a person is (Connector, Persona). Basically, the API gives third-party users a much richer insight into influencers’ behaviors.

Klout is also adding two new benchmarks to measure authority on its platform. The first, Relationship Method, allows the ability to measure influence between relationships on Twitter. So you can determine who you influence across your social graph or who influences you. The second new feature, Influential Topics, highlights topics where a user is considered influential. These features will also be included in the new version of Klout’s API.

With over 250 clients using Klout’s technologies, it’s clear that the Twitter influence startup is gaining traction, especially in third party Twitter clients. There’s always the risk that Twitter will develop its own measure of authority that can be used, but for now Klout seems to be leading the pack in terms of measuring influence on Twitter.

• Twitter’s Project Mayhem Dilemma
• Twitter Has A Business: Job Agency

Twitter has just announced that it acquired Tweetie, the very popular and highly polished Twitter application for the iPhone . The application will now be called “Twitter for iPhone” and will drop from $2.99 to free, with developer Loren Brichter (who makes up the one-man startup Atebits) joining the Twitter mobile team. Twitter also plans to launch Twitter for the iPad, which Brichter will be involved with.

It’s a move that manages to be both jarring and unsurprising at the same time. Unsurprising, because Twitter investor Fred Wilson recently wrote that Twitter developers needed to stop “filling holes” in Twitter’s product and instead build entirely separate businesses. And just this morning, Twitter launched an official Twitter for BlackBerry application, so another mobile application shouldn’t come as much of a shock. And yet, the iPhone is a platform where Twitter has a very strong third party presence, and Twitter has no doubt been benefiting from the contributions of these developers. Tweetie is extremely polished and is arguably the best, but there are plenty of other quality applications that are getting hung out to dry. Still, a move like this seemed inevitable.

In a blog post announcing the news, Twitter CEO Evan Williams explains the logic: people are going to iTunes, searching for a Twitter application, and not finding one so they give up (this sounds like a problem with iTunes search, but perhaps people really just want to see ‘Twitter’ in the application’s title):

Careful analysis of the Twitter user experience in the iTunes AppStore revealed massive room for improvement. People are looking for an app from Twitter, and they’re not finding one. So, they get confused and give up. It’s important that we optimize for user benefit and create an awesome experience.

This all comes less than a week before Twitter’s developer conference, Chirp, where I suspect the company will try to steer developers down a path that they won’t be paving over any time soon.

Of note: Twitter’s post does not mention anything about the Tweetie desktop application, which is available exclusively for the Mac. Don’t be surprised if this becomes ‘Twitter For Mac’ eventually.

• Will Next Week’s Apple Event Finally Bring Background Apps To The…
• Spotify Gets A New Mobile Savvy CTO

During his keynote at SXSW last month, Twitter CEO Evan Wiliams announced an upcoming new platform called @anywhere, which would allow third party sites to integrate Twitter features (he also showed off some of the partners who would be featuring the platform, which you can see in the image at right). Twitter didn’t give a launch date for when sites would start integrating the new platform, but it looks like we’ve just come across the first site to feature @anywhere. Meet Eggboiling.com.

The site, which will almost certainly be pulled down soon after this post is published, is clearly a testing environment for @anywhere, but it’s currently open to the public. Update: Twitter has taken the site down. It features the following (all shown in the screenshots below): various variable states; a button to ‘Connect With Twitter’; buttons to follow twitter users @jack, @biz, and @ev; a test hovercard that allows me to see @wendyverse’s latest tweets and follow counts at a glance, and a test box that lets me tweet. It isn’t particularly easy on the eyes, but it works well enough.

Hitting “Connect to Twitter” pulled in my Twitter profile photo and gave me the option to log out. Clicking on each of the ‘follow’ buttons appropriately changed the status from “Follow @jack” to “Following @jack” the next time I refreshed the page. (it just showed ‘pending’ until I refreshed). And sending a tweet from the tweet box worked properly (it says that my tweet was sent via Egg Boiling).

If you’re fast, you may be able to try it out for yourself.

Before logging in

OAuth to login

Connected to Twitter (but before image/logout link have loaded)

• Why Don’t Teens Tweet? We Asked Over 10,000 of Them.
• Web 2 Summit: Jonathan Miller Is Obsessed With Realtime, Won’t Talk…

A new analyst report from private secondary market SharesPost values Twitter at around $750 million, which is less than the $1 billion valuation it got in its last round of funding and less than the $1.5 billion valuation private shares of Twitter are trading for on SharesPost itself. The report notes that the $1 billion valuation was based on preferred shares, whereas it is looking at common shares.

The analyst report (embedded below) comes up with an enterprise value for Twitter based on projected revenues, margins, and comparisons to other companies. Depending on the method, it comes up with a range of valuations from $656 million (by comparing Twitter’s estimated enterprise value to comparable companies) to $751 million (by estimating revenues, margins, and a discount rate).

It is all pretty much guesswork since Twitter still doesn’t know where the bulk of its revenues will come from. But the report makes a stab at projecting revenues of $45 million in 2010 going to $170 million in 2014. It notes various sources of potential revenue in order of decreasing likelihood, starting with licensing its data feed to search engines (which is where most of its revenue is coming from today) and creating premium accounts for businesses (something else it has already dabbled in). Other options for making money: charging third party apps based on how much API data they use, premium accounts for heavy individual users (limited potential), Web ads on user profiles, or ads in Tweets (these could alienate users).

The best bet for Twitter to make money, says the report, is to continue to become a marketing channel for businesses and start charging for leads. The opt-in model of people following businesses and brands should result in much higher sales per lead than other marketing channels such as email marketing, telemarketing, or bulk SMS marketing. Businesses who use Twitter for social media marketing purposes tend to have many more followers than normal users and also Tweet more often.

Another nice chart in the report show how Twitter’s uptime has improved since its early days (other than when it is under a denial of service attack),

And the report confirms that most Twitter users are passive readers rather than active posters. As I’ve long suspected, people on Twitter tend to consume more than they Tweet. About 68 percent of users login at least once a month, but only 17 percent Tweet. (Although, they do tend to start Tweeting more once they’ve been on the service for 9 months or longer).

[docstoc-embed docId="32285851" mId="274918" width="630" height="550" slideMode="false" showRelatedDocs="true" showOtherDocs="true" allowdownload="true" url="http://www.docstoc.com/docs/32285851/Sharespost-Twitter-Valuation-Report"]Sharespost Twitter Valuation Report[/docstoc-embed]

• Why Don’t Teens Tweet? We Asked Over 10,000 of Them.
• Web 2 Summit: Jonathan Miller Is Obsessed With Realtime, Won’t Talk…