A painting of me

Twitter to Developers: Don't Let The Door Hit You On The Way Out.

   17 August 2012, mid-morning

Twitter published a pretty bizarre post on their developer blog yesterday, outlining changes they plan to make to how developers can interact with Twitter. To say it’s a little bit hostile to their developer community would be an understatement. I think it’s fair to say that much of Twiter’s early success didn’t come from the company itself. I mean, the site could barely stay up for the first few years of its existence. People stuck with Twitter despite the fact it often felt cobbled together. The two most iconic features of Twitter messages, @-replies and #hashtags, were both originated from the Twitter community. They ended up becoming official features because of their wide spread use. All of the good iPhone clients for Twitter were made by 3rd parties — including what became Twitter’s official client. Twitter’s official client is kind of a piece of shit compared to feature-rich Tweetbot or the simple and elegant Twitteriffic. I’ve been a Twitter user forever. Twitter launched on July 15 2006. I joined on July 28th 2006. I am user 3321. It took me a long while to warm up to the site, but I love it now. I find the direction they seem to be moving is more than a little disappointing. I think the best summary of the change comes from Ben Brooks: ‘This is the moment in Twitter’s life where they kicked Steve Jobs out of the company and told Sculley to run it.’

 

Comments

  1. The Hand that Feeds by Chris Bowler is also a great read about this news.

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