If you ask anyone using Twitter about the depth and breadth of third-party Twitter applications, you’re likely to receive a positive response. The appeal of Twitter is so great to third-party developers that they all want to spend their time writing applications for the platform. The number of paths a developer could travel is mind numbing – there are status updaters, stat trackers, and follower counters, just to name a few. What I’m most intrigued by is the status updaters.

As a developer, the goal is not just to create an appealing, functional application, but to also have a solid user base. In a highly saturated market, it’s critical that the application does something better than the competition. So how does a developer know how many people are using their app? One new option is to use the Twitter Update Source Tracker (Tracker for short).

When a developer creates and deploys an application, it’s beneficial to them to know the amount of use it gets. Tracker can determine the number of updates sent by any given source and figure out what percentage share that service has. Devs can also chart their progress by using Tracker’s Trends feature. This allows them to see what kind of progress they’re making on a daily, weekly, or (eventually) monthly basis.

Tracker’s Trends can be used as a success gauge for a third-party application. Success comes in two flavors – moving up the chart and staying toward the top of the chart. Movement up or down the chart is shown with up and down arrows and numbers. Other users can also come to the site to see which applications are hot. Surely some will try the applications that are moving up on the charts to see what the buzz is. This is another way that Tracker can help devs – by giving them free publicity. Is an application rocketing up the charts, or dropping like a rock? Now you’ll know.