Ondrej Holzman The popular social network Twitter has experienced relatively turbulent years. On the one hand, it recently lost its executive director, tried to find its own identity, solved sources of income and, last but not least, started a battle with third-party application developers. Now Twitter has acknowledged that it was a mistake.
It was thanks to third-party applications such as Tweetbot, Twitterrific or TweetDeck that Twitter became more and more popular. That's why it's been a little surprising in recent years to see Twitter start to significantly restrict developers and keep the latest features only for their own apps. At the same time, they usually fell far short of the qualities mentioned above.
Repairing relations with developers
Now Twitter co-founder Evan Williams has said he realizes this approach to developers was a mistake and plans to make things right. Although the social network is without a CEO after the recent departure of Dick Costol, when the position is temporarily occupied by the founder Jack Dorsey, but the social network still has quite big plans, mainly it wants to correct its past mistakes.
"It wasn't a win-win situation for developers, users and the company," he admitted Williams for Business Insider on the topic of restricting access to developer tools. According to him, this was "one of the strategic mistakes that we have to correct over time". For example, Twitter disabled access to its API for developers when they exceeded a certain user limit. So once a given number of users had logged in to Twitter, for example via Tweetbot, others could no longer log in.
The initially inconspicuous war with third-party developers began in 2010, when Twitter bought the then very popular Tweetie client and gradually rechristened this application on iPhones and desktop as its official application. And as he began to add new functions to it over time, he kept them exclusive to his application and did not make them available to competing clients. Of course, this raised a lot of questions for both developers and users about the future of popular clients.
Information network
Now it looks like the fears will no longer be misplaced. "We are planning many things. New products, new revenue streams,” explained Williams, who hinted that Twitter plans to rebuild its platform to be much more open to developers. But he was not more detailed.
Twitter is referred to as a social network, a microblogging platform, or a kind of news aggregator. This is also one of the things that Twitter's offices have been dealing with significantly in recent years - their identity. Williams is probably most fond of the third term, calling Twitter a "real-time information network." According to him, Twitter is "guaranteed to have all the information you're looking for, first-hand reports, speculation and links to stories as soon as they're published."
Sorting out its own identity is quite important for Twitter to continue its development. But clients for mobile devices and computers also go hand in hand with this, and we can only hope that Williams lives up to his word and developers will be able to freely develop their Twitter applications again.
