Jack Dorsey, Twitter’s newly appointed CEO, took to the stage at the company’s developer conference yesterday and basically asked programmers for forgiveness.
“Somewhere along the line, our relationship with developers got a little bit complicated, a little bit confusing and little bit unpredictable,” he said in the keynote of Twitter’s Flight conference in San Francisco. “And we want to come to you today, and first and foremost apologise for the confusion. We want to reset our relationship and make sure we are learning, that we are listening and that we are rebooting.”
That, Dorsey said, is what the Flight conference is about.
While the second Flight gathering is about developer-focused news, Dorsey emphasised it’s also about creating an “open, honest and transparent relationship” with developers.
The relationship has been fraught with good reason. Three years ago, the company blocked third party developer access to Twitter’s main API – something akin to throwing a bucket of water on third party Twitter clients and apps that fed off the micro-blogging site.
That move affected a lot of developers, but there have been other, smaller slights to developers over the last several years, according to Brian Blau, an analyst with Gartner.
“Most of the troubles have been centered around smaller issues, ones that focused on ease-of-use, productivity and completeness of platform,” he said. “Over the past five or more years, Twitter has adopted, changed, morphed, deprecated, and encroached on many aspects of the developer platform. Its been a tough road.”
Those actions, according to Blau, showed that Twitter wasn’t putting developers first – even though some of Twitter’s development partners have been its biggest boosters.
To help appease developers, Dorsey and his team made several announcements aimed at making their jobs easier.
Twitter talked about updates to the Fabric development platform, easier sharing from apps, and better analytics of Twitter data for information about the people using their apps.
Dorsey also noted during his keynote that developers can use the hashtag #HelloWorld to send in their feedback.
The company, according to the new CEO, will listen.
IDG News Service
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