I met the executive driving this project earlier this year. He explained to me that Twitter only cares about one metric: growth. In particular they are hyper-f

I met the executive driving this project earlier this year. He explained to me that Twitter only cares about one metric: growth. In particular they are hyper-focused on signing up new Twitter users and then "on-boarding" them so that they can follow other users, posts tweets etc. within the first session. That means that products using the Twitter platform need to be focused on that too. Twitter wanted to position themselves around three core features: * the feed itself * the platform (recent third-party hooks/features such as voting (World Cup) and payments (Stripe et al) are part of this) * developer tools It was explained to me that the latter was needed because too often Twitter felt that social/twitter features were "bolted on" too often at the end of projects, meaning that the integration was naturally segregated from the other features. Twitter felt that for developers to create products that were inherently social, they would need to provide the tools to build those products themselves, and that social integration would be encouraged early in the product development cycle. Fabric appears to be the first output of this strategy.