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It might be too late for devs to trust them again, but they had an ideal situation maybe like 5-6 years ago where every developer out there was thinking about a

It might be too late for devs to trust them again, but they had an ideal situation maybe like 5-6 years ago where every developer out there was thinking about and experimenting with the Twitter API and you'd see a cool new project released basically every day. That all stopped when the suits wanted to grab control of Twitter and started discouraging and forcing out lots of companies that were trying to invest on that and build actually innovative software. As a company, what's better than having others doing your work for you and promoting your service at the same time? Getting rid of that situation to me was the beginning of the end for them. There was such a rapid enthusiasm for Twitter that died off for a lot of influencers with that.

BinaryIdiot 10y ago
Facebook has developer APIs but they, ultimately, control the ecosystem. They only let developers kinda play in it. I honestly don't think Twitter needs to win any developers back for two reasons. 1. They should be more like Facebook. Never, ever again allow a third party app to control the primary way to view all of their data. It's too important. Grandfather existing apps in but slowly add new capabilities that they cannot access thus smothering them. 2. If Twitter can become more engaging / sticky it can keep users around for longer which should, in theory, help bring more people to their platform and let them display ads longer. This will ultimately force developers to work with them again, regardless of their feelings around trust. Look at Facebook. They destroyed many games livelihoods with changes and people not only still use them but other than places like HN you rarely hear about issues with developers trusting them.
throwaw12ay 10y ago
> It might be too late for devs to trust them again, Stupid mistake from Twitter. Basically Twitter has a long history of shutting down API access to any product or client that becomes remotely popular. Did they think being unpopular among developers would be something positive ? It's like they didn't realise ALL these twitter clients actually helped create MORE content on Twitter. That was stupid.

BinaryIdiot 10y ago

Facebook has developer APIs but they, ultimately, control the ecosystem. They only let developers kinda play in it. I honestly don't think Twitter needs to win any developers back for two reasons. 1. They should be more like Facebook. Never, ever again allow a third party app to control the primary way to view all of their data. It's too important. Grandfather existing apps in but slowly add new capabilities that they cannot access thus smothering them. 2. If Twitter can become more engaging / sticky it can keep users around for longer which should, in theory, help bring more people to their platform and let them display ads longer. This will ultimately force developers to work with them again, regardless of their feelings around trust. Look at Facebook. They destroyed many games livelihoods with changes and people not only still use them but other than places like HN you rarely hear about issues with developers trusting them.

throwaw12ay 10y ago

> It might be too late for devs to trust them again, Stupid mistake from Twitter. Basically Twitter has a long history of shutting down API access to any product or client that becomes remotely popular. Did they think being unpopular among developers would be something positive ? It's like they didn't realise ALL these twitter clients actually helped create MORE content on Twitter. That was stupid.