• by Mark Walsh  @markfwal, September 10, 2014

Twitter on Wednesday announced plans to hold its first conference for mobile developers. The event dubbed Flight is scheduled will take place at the Bill Graham Civic Auditorium in San Francisco on Oct. 22. It will feature a keynote from CEO Dick Costolo, followed by a series technical sessions to help developers build apps using Twitter services.

It marks the first time the microblogging service has held a developer conference of any kind since Chirp, its inaugural developer confab in 2010. While Twitter didn’t release a detailed program for Flight, the page promoting the event highlights various Twitter tools developers can use to create, manage and monetize apps.

The services come from acquisitions the company has made in the last couple of years, including crash-reporting and analysis tool Crashlytics, mobile ad exchange MoPub and Gnip, which tracks and analyzes data on Twitter.

The conference underscores Twitter’s increased focus on mobile in recent years, with the medium accounting for three-quarters of its ad sales and the vast majority of its usage.

So taking steps to forge closer relations with developers could ultimately benefit Twitter’s topline. In that vein, it also rolled out a revamped developer site at dev.twitter.com.

Announcement of the Flight conference comes only a couple of weeks after the company launched an online training program called Flight School, aimed at advertising agencies. It initially tested the offering with Starcom MediaVest Group, MEC and Omnicom Group before launching it widely last month.