Jack Dorsey wants to ‘reset’ Twitter’s relationship with developers.
In his second public appearance since being named Twitter Inc’s permanent chief executive earlier this month, Jack Dorsey apologised to the developers who work with the social media company to create apps. Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey struck a somber and apologetic tone at the company’s annual developer conference on Wednesday for failing to cater to an important constituency: outside coders.SAN FRANCISCO — The headline may have been the first major public appearance of Jack Dorsey since he was freshly minted as Twitter’s permanent CEO two weeks ago.The company, criticized by investors for slowing user growth, has long insisted that its 316 million monthly active users aren’t indicative of its entire audience.
But the lede was as simple and pure as a 140-character tweet. “We need to serve developers in the best way,” Dorsey, the Twitter co-founder generally considered its inventor, said in brief remarks to kick off a Twitter conference here Wednesday morning. “We apologize for the (recent) confusion, and we want to reset our relationship. At the event, the company appealed to potential advertisers by highlighting Twitter’s ability to determine what people are talking about in any given moment, such as a major news event. Early in Twitter’s history, third-party developers built features that are now fundamental and popular on parts of the service, such as the ability to post photos and shorten Web links.
Dorsey was referring to the company’s decision in 2011 to prevent third-party coders to build apps on top of Twitter, much like they can do with other services like Facebook FB 0.11% . That is what today represents.” His remarks, at the microblogging company’s second annual Flight mobile developers conference, come a week before Twitter reports its third-quarter financial results. As part of that effort, Chris Moody, the company’s vice president of data strategy, announced two new software tools that should provide deeper insights into how the audience on Twitter is responding to an event and how engaged users are. Dorsey noted Wednesday that some of Twitter’s most iconic features — like retweets and hashtags — were inspired by its users. “Fundamentally, Twitter is a simple messaging service,” he said. “What’s unique about Twitter is how people made it their own.” But as Twitter grew, and started building more features and services that competed with third-party developers’ offerings, the relationship got more muddled.
Among the updates: Media organizations will be able to to curate tweets to embed in stories, and mobile applications will be able to fold in entire Twitter timelines. The path to a spike in Twitter’s user base of some 270 million people — far behind Facebook’s 1.5 billion — is likely to include through Twitter content on television broadcasts and through third-party apps.
Consumer clients like Echofon, Twitterrific and Tweetbot were most heavily hit, but it was enough to give Twitter a bad reputation among developers that it has yet to completely shake. Twitter said at the time Politwoops violated the company’s developer policies by preserving deleted tweets, a move that puzzled many onlookers who questioned why Twitter suddenly decided to enforce its developer policy years after the service launched. That ire resurfaced earlier this year when Twitter shutdown Politwoops, a collection of popular Twitter accounts that highlighted tweets that had been deleted by politicians.
Twitter faces a number of challenges including failing to attract new users, executive departures, and, as Chief Financial Officer Anthony Noto explained in a recent earnings call, a product that “remains too difficult to use.” To shake things up, Twitter’s board brought in Dorsey, who initially served as temporary CEO until taking the job permanently. Though Politwoop’s fate remains unclear for now, Dorsey said Wednesday that “Twitter stands for freedom of expression,” and that his company has a duty to support organizations with similar goals.
We are learning, we are listening, and we are rebooting.” Dorsey is working to appeal to the engineers who write applications that tie into Twitter’s platform for sending and sharing 140-character updates. Dorsey pledged more transparency and an open dialogue with developers. “We have a responsibility to continue to power organizations who want to bring transparency like Politwoops,” he said. Such gestures could assuage developers, many of whom were alienated by Twitter in 2012 when it began enforcing stricter rules around the apps that plug in to the service. In the past, the social-media company has shut down popular applications after changing rules about how developers could use its data; now Dorsey is asking developers for feedback on the company’s product.
At last year’s conference—the company’s first in four years—Twitter offered a suite of new tools called Fabric as a way to get developers to come back to the platform. That’s partly why Twitter, over the past year, has reversed its closed strategy and built a development product called Fabric that the company hopes coders will use to build new services and apps. With the new App Spotlight feature, these Install buttons will also start surfacing right underneath the bio in the Twitter profiles of your favorite apps, like Candy Crush Saga.
When Fabric was first unveiled, it consisted of Mopub, a tool to help app makers create native ads; Crashlytics, a tool to help find bugs and make apps more stable; and Twitter Kit, software that enables developers to build Twitter features, like embedded tweets and Twitter sign-ins, into their services. Mentioned briefly, Fabric’s Crashlytics tool will also support tvOS and the new Apple TV, so that app developers can get crash reports from Apple’s forthcoming set-top box. Twitter is helping maximize the visual appeal of embedded tweets on the web by introducing a new responsive grid display, incorporating photos, video, and Vines. The company announced eight new services that will be available through Fabric: Stripe, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Optimizely, Nuance, Appsee, GameAnalytics, Mapbox and PubNub.
For example, Twitter rolled out a new feature for users to create custom polls that can be posted in tweets and a way for developers to embed video advertising into Twitter-related apps. Interestingly, Twitter is also appealing directly to game developers with Game Analytics, which provides analytics tools to game developers, and support for Unity, one of the most popular game engines among developers.
During Flight, Twitter also announced a partnership with JCDecaux, “the leader in out-of-home digital display.” This means that you might start seeing tweets about a train delay while you’re waiting at the station, or see your tweet cheering for your favorite sports team while at a stadium. As it stands now, the publicly traded company is dealing with lackluster user growth, a seemingly endless executive shuffle and just laid off 8% of its workforce.