Today, Twitter announced the launch of the Twitter Certified Products Program, which the company says will make it easier to find the “right” Twitter tools.

“As the number of businesses that turn to Twitter to keep in touch with their customers grows, so does the variety of their needs,” says Doug Williams, Twitter’s Manager for Business Development. “We hear continually from companies looking for tools to help them engage with customers, understand what people are saying about them on Twitter, and learn more about their followers so they can share more valuable, timely content.”

“Meanwhile, there is a thriving ecosystem of Twitter developers building products and services that address these needs and help businesses grow,” adds Williams.

In fact, Twitter has been at the center of a fair amount of controversy regarding how it has been treating developers. The company recently released a new version of its API, bringing more regulation to third-party apps.

Twitter stopped displaying the names of third-party clients in tweets, for one.

“Twitter’s latest change, removing the branding of which source or app consumers use to post tweets sends the message that Twitter wants to protect its content and make a clear distinction between tweets that are sponsored and those posted from social hubs and third-party apps,” Jeff Tinsley, CEO of MyLife, tells WebProNews.

For those worried about a loss of branding, the certification program could help to some extent, if they can manage to get certified.

Under the new program, Twitter has three categories, each of which has a seal: Engagement, Analytics, and Data Reseller:

Twitter has launched the program with twelve partners: Attensity, Crimson Hexagon, Dataminr,DataSift, ExactTarget, Gnip, HootSuite, Mass Relevance, Radian6, SocialFlow, Sprinklr and Topsy.

The company says it intends to add more partners, particularly in these three areas.