Twitter’s ecosystem is booming, no matter which way you look at it.  At the helm is Twitter itself, lording over related apps and services that tap into its market.  But even the driver can get distracted, such as Twitter did with its Quick Bar update.  While the microblog has recently made some significant updates to its iOS, making access to photos, trends, and links much easier than before, the update also included The Quick Bar, also called the “Dickbar” that sits above the Twitter feed and displays the day’s top trending topics. What was actually happening is that when a user started scrolling through their feed, it site atop the tweets and then disappeared. As a part of its updates, Twitter fixed the app by bringing it to the top of the tweets and now it sits above the search bar.

Twitter also fixed some crashes experienced by users at the time of launch and use of location services. The updated included several security upgrades, improved performance with multiple accounts, and the addition of a new photo upload option. From now on, you’ll be able to see a menu with camera icon that will allow you to either upload a photo from the computer library or take a photo using camera.

As a result of its developments and enhancements, Twitter has received a high valuation and also introduced new services like Promoted Trends, Promoted Tweets and Promoted Accounts. The company is also investing enough for its workdorce with hiring 250 engineers and appointing Mr. Costolo, former Google executive, as CEO.

Also adding the the overall improvement of the Twitter ecosystem is Tweetdeck, which was also updated with the release of its new iOS app. Giving details on this update, Tweekdeck reported on its blog,

“A major new feature of iOS TweetDeck will be totally flexible columns. You want to create a column blending your Mentions and some Twitter Lists? No problem! Always wanted to see your Facebook feed and Twitter DMs in a single column? We’ve got you covered! New iOS TweetDeck puts you in control of your columns, giving total flexibility over which feeds appear in which columns. Your social world has never been so personal.”

Moving to another Twitter app, HootSuite has launched an all new product named “HootSuite Social Analytics,” which is a pretty important milestone for the company. This is a powerful analytics tool that will provide much more ways to measure the campaign success, and obtain customizable reports. An assortment of thing it allows you to do is:

Track Twitter brand mentions

Measure Twitter profile follower growth

Examine Facebook Likes and demographics

Overlay social link clicks and website visits from Google

Select from over 30 report modules to plug into customizable report templates

The product is really interesting an eye-opener for all social analysts. It comes with top-notch features to create, edit and customize reports. Simple and versatile!

The Twitter ecosystem in general has seen some interesting developments. The mobile sector in particular is buzzing, thanks to the SXSW 2011 Conference – Gowalla & Foursquare both updated their Android apps this week. While Gowalla updates its free Android app, along with push notifications for devices running Android 2.2 or higher, Foursquare also presented the updated version of their app, version 3.0 having features like “Explore” section, new types of deals, and a revamped leaderboard for points earned in the app.  They’re headed to Austin to defend their slot in a hyperlocal war that Twitter started, oh so many years ago!