• by Gavin O'Malley  @mp_gavin, April 2, 2015

As part of a broader effort to strengthen developer relations, Twitter has acquired TenXer -- a platform designed to help developers and engineers collaborate more effectively.

“Excited to announce the @tenxer team will be joining @twitter!” Jeff Ma, Tenxer founder and CEO, tweeted on Thursday. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed, but reports put the transaction at around $50 million.

Although not always friendly, Twitter has recently sought to improve relations with the developer community. Late last year, the company debuted a developer platform dubbed Fabric, which features various tools to help programmers build and distribute new products.

By providing a “foundation” for developer initiatives, Twitter CEO Dick Costolo recently said that Fabric -- in unison with its MoPub ad-serving platform -- presented “enormous” monetization opportunities for the micro-blogging giant.

Fabric builds on acquisitions that Twitter made in recent years, including crash-reporting and analysis tool Crashlytics, MoPub, and Gnip, which tracks and analyzes data on Twitter.

Twitter’s relationship with the developer community was strained back in 2012, when it decided to enforce stricter requirements for outside apps. The move was widely seen as an effort by Twitter to gain more control over its core user experience.

In its bid for better developer relations, Twitter is also facing increasing competition from Facebook. Indeed, the social giant just turned Facebook Messenger into a platform for developers to distribute their apps to the service’s roughly 600 million users.

Adding to its developer outreach, Twitter also recently announced its first worldwide start-up contest, which it is calling “Hatch.” Winning app-makers were promised meetings with Twitter executives, potential investors and even seed money.

In July, Twitter plans to fly Hatch 10 finalists to San Francisco to present their start-up ideas at the first annual “Hatch Gala.”

VentureBeat was first to report Twitter’s acquisition of TenXer, on Wednesday. In a letter just sent by Ma to customers -- which was obtained by VentureBeat -- the CEO said his company would no longer exist as a distinct entity.