Twitter has attracted not just a large quantity of users, but a huge number of developers.  The core utility of having a short messaging service that is both open and connected to an expanding social graph continues to find new uses every day as developers invent new applications that use the Twitter API.

We recognized this early on as we built Twitter-specific capabilities into Apigee (the console and Twitter analytics) and launched it at Chirp on April 14th. We are truly grateful to all our new developers for their adoption and the insights they've offered us about growing the service.

The next logical step is to bring our service to where the developers are, rather than making them come to us.  Today we’re announcing our partnership with Heroku, with Apigee available as a Heroku Add-on.

We want to help Ruby developers scale up their Twitter apps to meet demand.  Heroku makes it easy to scale up a Ruby application and Apigee makes it easy to scale up access to the Twitter API.  Without these kinds of services, developers usually go through a painful rearchitecture process as their application becomes more popular and demand for their computing resources increases beyond their planned limits.

From what we’ve heard we think that this will be a very helpful combination, letting successful Twitter applications rise to meet demand gracefully.

You can try the add-on yourself at Heroku and check out this short video by Marsh on how to use it: