Third party developers got a chance fire questions at Twitter brass yesterday during the @Chirp conference, a week after the website ruffled some feathers when it announced it would be side-stepping many independent developers to launch some of its own apps.

Twitter has long thrived on third party developers, who created immensely popular desktop and mobile clients like TweetDeck and UberTwitter, among others.

Developers were confused over Twitter’s announcement last week that it will acquire Tweetie, a third-party app for the iPhone, making it an official app. This came shortly before Twitter revealed it would be working with RIM to develop an official Blackberry app as well.

The @Chirp conference served as a platform for developers to address their concerns, but undoubtedly some questions still remain as to the relationship between the two going ahead.

On Tweetie, VP of products Jason Goldman said: “Buying Tweetie before @Chirp may not have been great from a headline standpoint, but from a communications transparency standpoint, it was helpful because we’re not able to the discussion here.”

Director of platforms Ryan Sarver said that Twitter needs to communicate better with its developers and give better guidance, CEO Evan Williams agreed, saying: “We do stuff in our own company and we try and tell everyone and people get angry, so we do need to communicate better both internally and externally.”

Williams also announced at @Chirp that an Android app in the works, but did not specify whether it will acquire an existing app or if the company will partner with a developer or mobile device maker, as it did its official BlackBerry Twitter app, or indeed if it will develop the app themselves.

Twitter also revealed that it would be launching its own link shortening service, perhaps signalling the demise of Bit.ly, which has long served as Twitter’s default link shortener (or perhaps not, as Bit.ly has over 6,000 corporate clients, recently cementing a deal with Amazon.com).

But really whatever the case Bit.ly appears to have had a window of opportunity with recent reports saying that both Google and Twitter were interested in snapping it up, but its price was too high. Sources told Silicon Alley recently that:  “Bit.ly’s asking price was under $100m , but still a “big f—ing number”.

The company also gave some details of its new “promoted tweets” ad platform, revealing that the ad (and just one) would appear at the top of the page in the search results in a different colour, with a “promoted tweet” label.

Chief Operating Officer Dick Costolo said that there would be one promoted tweet at the top of the page, period.

“The decision of what to put there is based on resonance factors. As to if a top tweet should supersede a promoted tweet — they are going to explore that issue as they test out Promoted Tweets.”

Williams addressed Twitter’s relationship with Facebook: “There are no lines anymore. There used to be clearly defined categories like spreadsheets and word processors. There were search engines. Now a lot of that is thrown out the window. FriendFeed came along and there were questions — is that a partner or a competitor?”

Williams told developers: “Create the thing that you want to exist in the world on the platform that you like working with. If it’s both (Twitter and Facebook), that’s great. I don’t think you can figure it out by saying they have more users than we do. If you try to make the choice by market dynamics, you’ll mislead yourself.”

In all, the conference has so far echoed the sentiments given by early Twitter investor Fred Wilson, before the company announced its intentions with Tweetie and RIM.

Last week, Wilson told Twitter startups to stop filling holes in Twitter’s products, which is now apparent that Twitter will do itself, and to instead look to launch apps that start entirely new businesses.

A couple of other nuggets:

Twitter will make the users interface easier. Williams, said: “There hasn’t been a decision yet. They like not hosting that data, but it has been a user experience problem. We think it could be a lot easier.  We’re going to make the user interface easier related to rich media. We won’t discount the possibility of hosting. ”

On China, Twitter has no holiday plans there. Goldman, said: ” We have no plans to operationalize in China. Interested in translating interface in Chinese.”