Twitter just announced Flight, its first mobile developer conference set for October 22nd in San Francisco. The event costs $140 to attend. Twitter CEO Dick Costolo will begin the day with a keynote, which will be followed by a series of technical sessions about "how Twitter can help you build the best mobile apps."

Twitter won't help you build just any app, however. The company has a long, storied past giving and taking from developers hoping to make the most of the Twitter platform. Some developers like Tapbots and Tweetro fought with Twitter over building their own Twitter clients, while others such as StockTwits saw their inventions stolen outright by the company. Just this past week, TwitPic decided to shut its doors after being threatened by Twitter. You could chalk up all the drama to a misunderstanding, or to a late admission by Twitter that you can use its data to build all sorts of great things — just not entire Twitter clients or services that compete with Twitter's built-in functionality.

At Flight Twitter is likely hoping to impress a different kind of developer — the platform developer who wants to build Twitter cards with Buy buttons, or better outfit their website to suit embedded tweet streams, or use Twitter's Streaming API to inform decisions at live events. While Twitter will likely never earn back the trust of some of its earliest developers, Flight is a great step towards providing both transparency and communication to today and tomorrow's developers. At Flight, Twitter and developers can finally get talking.