• by Gavin O'Malley  @mp_gavin, January 14, 2015

Hoping to hatch the next great app, Twitter is taking “Fabric” on the road. Since it debuted last October, the developer platform has provided a suite of tools to help programmers build and distribute new apps.

 “Our team of Developer Advocates is piling into a Fabric bus to visit cities from Los Angeles to Detroit,” Jeff Sandquist, head of developer and platform relations, explains in a new blog post. The second phase of the tour — which Twitter has nicknamed “Flock” — is a series of half-day events in cities around the world.

Separately, Twitter on Wednesday announced its first worldwide start-up contest, which it’s calling “Hatch.” The winning app can count on a meeting with Twitter executives, potential investors and even some seed money.

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

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.

"Chicken Coming Out Of A Brown Egg" photo from Shutterstock.