Twitter CEO Dorsey Apologizes to Developers

Oh, so another cycle starts. Here&#x27;s a note I took back earlier, around the time of the original Twitter fiasco, pasted straight from my quotes file:<p><pre><code> * Sovereign from Mass Effect on using someone else&#x27;s technology &quot;Your civilization is based on the technology of the mass relays, our technology. By using it, your society develops along the paths we desire. We impose order on the chaos of organic evolution. You exist because we allow it, and you will end because we demand it.&quot; Strangely, it seems to describe recent (2012&#x2F;2013) situation with API of Twitter perfectly.</code></pre>

The API Terms of Use haven&#x27;t changed:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;dev.twitter.com&#x2F;overview&#x2F;terms" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;dev.twitter.com&#x2F;overview&#x2F;terms</a><p>The most egregious of which continues to be: &quot;Apps replicating Twitter’s core user experience (what we’ve called “traditional Twitter clients”) are discouraged and have a ceiling of 100,000 users, among other restrictions. Be sure to read the applicable TOS clauses carefully if you’re considering building such an app.&quot;<p>This is really bad as &quot;core user experience&quot; is something open to a very wide degree of interpretation.

The single most important thing that Twitter can do to encourage developers to build on their platform is to completely and unambiguously align interests. If a developer is successful, Twitter should be successful, and vice versa. This is infinitely more reliable than any promise and is how all successful application platforms operate.

So I have a feeling that starting next month they&#x27;re basically gimping their API on purpose to drive developers toward GNIP, which they bought last year for $134 million. Developers who can afford it anyway, because GNIP is not cheap.<p>There is a popular twitter API endpoint which is undocumented and unsupported, yet insanely popular due to its functionality. It&#x27;s the tweet-count-for-URL one; ex: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;cdn.api.twitter.com&#x2F;1&#x2F;urls&#x2F;count.json?url=http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.voanews.com&#x2F;content&#x2F;philippines-woes-arms-manufacturers&#x2F;2953923.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;cdn.api.twitter.com&#x2F;1&#x2F;urls&#x2F;count.json?url=http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www...</a><p>Twitter is now cancelling that endpoint (on 11&#x2F;20) and recommending for thousands of developers to switch to their streams API for the functionality, which requires a program to maintain a constant socket connection and listen for filtered URLs to show up. Which, sure, that&#x27;s a reasonable architecture for some cases.<p>However, what used to be a simple API-query-for-a-known-URL is now going to be a daemon program running 24&#x2F;7 for months and months that listens to all of twitter for all conversations about the base domain, and then tries to emulate a count.

Twitter has huge, huge potential. To me it is 100x more useful than something like LinkedIn - even though this is not its purpose. I connect and interact with people in my industry (in an unobtrusive way). My reputation is my followers list. Twitter is already being used for this purpose (some actors and models value are now determined by the size of their follower base). And that is just one facet of its potential value.<p>But...they really need to focus more both on the needs of their users, and even more so, developers. A simple example - I wanted to upload videos natively to Twitter (to surpass the limits that GIFs impose)+++. Its doable through an iPhone, but I no longer own one (+ you need to transfer the file to your iPhone, which is a bit of a hassle). I had to write my own script to accomplish this, and the API was anything but helpful in this process (I had to randomly tweak video settings until it would accept one of my videos).<p>+++ (Note that this is different from simply linking a Youtube video - twitter videos are auto-expanded and auto-play, which makes a huge difference for interactions in my experience). GIF limit is 5 MB IIRC, and video limit is 15 MB (and 15 MB &#x2F; 30 seconds of video lets you show so much more than a 5 MB GIF). Script is here if anyone needs it (designed to run on a Mac, requires TWURL and Ruby): <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;pastebin.com&#x2F;45h1mx8s" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;pastebin.com&#x2F;45h1mx8s</a>

Translation: &quot;We&#x27;re too in the box to think outside of the box. So other developers please find a way to make Twitter popular again so we can steal that application[0], bar any other third-party from making anything related to that idea so we can be the sole monetizer of said application.<p>[0] Application not being an &quot;app&quot;, but more of a new way to use twitter.

From TFA:<p><pre><code> Can developers trust Twitter this time? </code></pre> No.<p>Don&#x27;t get me wrong, back while working at Klout we got to meet Jack Dorsey and he is intelligent and interesting. Personally I like him and have some respect for him.<p>With that said, CEO&#x27;s don&#x27;t stay forever so there are no guarantees about how long the reign of Jack will last. Since he won&#x27;t always be in a position to make good on this promise, how can we trust? What is it actually worth?<p>Where is the olive branch? Words sound nice but I&#x27;ve learned to pay more attention to actions.<p>How about something like free firehose access or at least making it affordable for mere mortals? Just &quot;turning the api back on&quot; won&#x27;t be enough to convince me to sink anymore dev time into $twtr.

I think the picture in the article sums it up perfectly. It would be really hard to ever trust them again unless they were willing to put a contract in place with some sort of financial penalty to them. And even then I&#x27;m not sure I would trust them.

Nothing like an &quot;apology&quot; that doesn&#x27;t apologize for the real wrongdoing. How I love corporate speak.<p>&quot;Our relationship with developers got confusing, unpredictable. We want to come to you today and apologize for the confusion.&quot;<p>Yeah it was the &quot;confusion&quot; that was wrong. Nothing like apologizing but not admitting fault either. He&#x27;s basically saying &quot;we did the right thing, we just didn&#x27;t communicate it clearly.&quot;

The type of &quot;Developers&quot; they&#x27;re trying to reach is NOT people who want to build Twitter apps. That era is over and it ain&#x27;t coming back. Rather, they&#x27;re trying to reach the people who make mobile apps who need good analytics tools, crash reporting tools, etc. It&#x27;s not even related to Twitter.<p>Which is exactly why I am cautious about this. When Google gives away Google analytics for free, we trust that Google will rarely come after our small startup since they already have a very lucrative business model. We know that Google knows the risk of betraying their users is not worth the trouble (unless the opportunity is huge enough that they would actually want to take the risk, in which case it wouldn&#x27;t matter anyway).<p>In case of Twitter we don&#x27;t have that trust. Even looking at Fabric, I really think--as of today--it&#x27;s really THE best analytics&#x2F;crash report tool out there for app developers, but I also tend to think it&#x27;s a trojan horse. It&#x27;s obvious they are trying to penetrate developer mindshare AND their apps through Fabric. When you use Digits, you&#x27;re basically outsourcing your user database to Twitter. When you use crashlytics for your social app, you&#x27;re giving away all your user behavior to Twitter. I just hope Fabric came from Google instead of Twitter, for the same reason I don&#x27;t use Parse from Facebook.

Apology not accepted. Twitter tipped their hand here a long time ago - once the network got strong enough, start locking things down so those crazy devs don&#x27;t do anything cool or interesting that you can&#x27;t monetize, nevermind if it makes the user experience many times better.

I think that horse may have bolted Jack. I am not sure a developer who had the rug pulled from under them once will take the risk of investing their time in the Twitter API again. Fool me once etc...

I hope they don&#x27;t get away with this. As a developer, I want to see the Twitter story set a strong precedent that deters other companies from double crossing the developer community. Between Google+ (which paid a price for never letting developers on board at all) and Twitter (which prospered from their hard work and then betrayed them) I hope future companies will have a new understanding that if you want to be a platform for anything, embracing 3rd party developers and keeping faith with them has to be one of your top priorities.

Anyone burned by twitter will think twice about working on it again, <i>however</i> it is likely too valuable of a platform to not give ample consideration to.<p>I reckon twitter will merge with square and provide end-to-end advertising metrics for impressions --&gt; clicks --&gt; cart additions --&gt; purchases. This will be valuable, and as much as I think twitter is silly, if they provide this they will do well.<p>Platform companies with stroes:<p>* Microsoft<p>* Google Play<p>* Apple<p>* [ empty ]<p>Super conflated and contrived appraisal here, but Twitter better post a strong offering in empty before facebook and they can&#x27;t do that well without square and a platform or decentralized market. All this is to say, Twitter needs developers <i>bad</i> and to the extent they win them from Facebook and other platforms will be tied to the value they provide. I think that value will be provided by purchasing square in a merger of equals and building a dumb pipe platform, letting developers curate the content and providing stores.<p>We&#x27;ll see what developer sentiment is, first few comments lead me to beleive it is <i>not great</i>.

Why would you bother to come back after being kicked in the teeth, to a platform that is now stagnating, showing little signs of growth and has no obvious revenue model for app developers?<p>This is the cart before the horse. They need to fix Twitter so that people want to develop for it again, not say &quot;Hey, here&#x27;s this downtrodden mess, come and make it better for us!&quot;

This seems like it&#x27;s almost too small of a world view. When twitter pulled the rug out, it informed a shift in thinking, everywhere. Not just with twitter.<p>The wisdom became &quot;Don&#x27;t build your business on another one.&quot; and twitter was the primary example of why not. For twitter to turn around and say &quot;Ok, we made some mistakes, and we want to develop that trust again.&quot; is misunderstanding what happened.<p>twitter changed the conventional wisdom, not just wisdom about twitter.

Here are a few things Twitter could do to gain developers trust again:<p>- re-open the firehose. Let more people access it, even Gnip&#x27;s (now Twitter&#x27;s) competitor.<p>- remove the 100000+ users limit. Falcon Pro comes to mind, but since the author now works for Twitter, their are probably other good examples out there<p>- let developers monetize their apps using Twitter; maybe by providing a shared ads model.<p>That&#x27;s not the end of it, but that would be a good start.

Hmm. So here&#x27;s the problem.<p>Company allows others to build cool things on top of it. Sounds good. Then others start making money from the stuff they build but Company isn&#x27;t really making money and the others are selling because they are filling in Company&#x27;s deficiencies around their product.<p>So how do you fix it so Company makes more money? Kill the others. That&#x27;s why the first wave of stuff died on Twitter&#x27;s platform.<p>So what&#x27;s different now? Has Twitter figured out how to make money and fill in the gaps in Twitter? If they have then this could end up working out. If not, how could things be different this time around?<p>Color me skeptical.

If they had announced that developers can make twitter client apps and display foreign services (e.g. instagram) in the same stream with the tweets without limit to the number of end users, I would be interested. I just assume this is a statement to the shareholders and will have very little effect on developers.

The sad thing is that, for a brief period in 2010-2012, the Twitter API was &#x27;hello world&#x27; for new developers. Iterating over friends, getting statuses, etc. They had a great REST API and if you made a good thing you could sell it (and Twitter&#x27;s ecosystem would benefit). Now nobody trusts them.

Words are cheap. Until Twitter stops acting like &quot;find someone using Twitter successfully and punch them in the face&quot; is a business model, it&#x27;s all just hot air.<p>It&#x27;s not good enough for Twitter to &quot;reset&quot; the relationship. That ship has sailed. There&#x27;s going to have to be some serious groveling, wildly-generous concessions, and guarantees of integrity moving forward if they want to recapture what they once had.<p><pre><code> A little less conversation, a little more action please All this aggravation ain&#x27;t satisfactioning me A little more bite and a little less bark A little less fight and a little more spark Close your mouth and open up your heart and baby satisfy me Satisfy me baby</code></pre>

First thing: remove those ridiculous usage limits for individual clients, so that anyone using a 3rd party app can use it like he wants and not having the app suddenly turned off because it reached 100k users.

It&#x27;s not just Twitter. Most popular APIs tend to regulate and constrain use as they grow popular. This has dissuaded developers, and certainly startups from building products on top of APIs. VCs do not like companies depending on third party APIs either, due to the fact that they may be arm twisted by the API service.<p>Twitter&#x27;s attitude towards developers is potentially impacting the uptake of libraries like Fabric, despite having nothing to do with their API. What Twitter may have a shot at, as a result of this effort is to get usage of their libraries like Fabric on par standing ground with libraries and products like Parse from Facebook.

The tough thing is that the calculation developers make is a mixed bag of components that involves not just trust, but fiscal opportunity. People&#x27;s fortunes and livelihoods are tied to developing for a platform. In some ways, this ship may have sailed. Might be a situation where even if devs find a way to regain some trust, the actual perceived value of the commitment these days isn&#x27;t as alluring.<p>The question is, what has <i>fundamentally changed</i> about Twitter&#x27;s <i>business model</i> that has now re-aligned its incentives to better match those of the developer community to <i>enable</i> them to make this promise today?<p>Anything?

Twitter would have to decentralize their system to court developers again. That means creating a protocol and an open source server that implements the protocol.<p>Twitter is basically an inverted email system anyway. So there is no technical reason why it can&#x27;t be structured more like email. They could make money like google does with gmail, but as a user I could sign up with any provider or even host my own server.<p>Then it might get interesting. To me the only thing twitter has of value is mind share (&quot;tweet&quot;, &quot;follow&quot;, etc...) and this approach is the only way they can leverage it to profit in the long run.

There is nothing about the 100,000 token limit that makes any sense. People present it as Twitter wanting to &quot;control the core experience&quot;. That&#x27;s bullshit and always has been.<p>Twitter could have easily said &quot;we will serve ads in this format. All apps that want to use the API must display the ads according to rules XYZ&quot;. Congrats! Now you can monetize and app developers can keep innovating.<p>The whole Twitter client fiasco remains one of the dumbest moves and for nonsensical reasons that Twitter itself could have easily solved.<p>I saw nothing in this announcement that addresses this problem or changes any policies related to it.

&gt; Going forward, the company says it will improve its communication with developers. “We want to make sure that we have a great relationship with our developers, an open and honest relationship with our developers,” he said.<p>I&#x27;m curious why this kind of language hasn&#x27;t fallen out of favor. It sounds so completely empty to me, I have to assume it does for everyone else.

Sorry Jack, I believe in Twitter&#x27;s future as a user, but I&#x27;ll be <i>damned</i> if I give it one ounce of control over mine. That bridge is burnt. If you want us to trust you, go do another startup and toe the line from beginning to end. Because at this point, almost anything cool that Twitter does will be seen as a failure by current investors. Nothing short of being the next Facebook will satisfy them, and Facebook knows damn well it can&#x27;t afford to try anything cool anymore.

The recent Standford ETL talk by Jeff Seibert (Senior Director of Product at Twitter) provides some insight into the development of the Twitter API&#x27;s&#x2F;SDK (Fabric). Overall, I thought it was one of the better and more practical talks.<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;goo.gl&#x2F;WfAiPU" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;goo.gl&#x2F;WfAiPU</a>

Lose the developers, lose the platform.<p>Dorsey is making a smart move here but can it be reversed? When twitter started and now when it is down they wanted&#x2F;want developers, back when it went gangbusters they booted the devs. Engineering lost control of twitter internally, developer love was the first to go.

Here we go again. How many times has Twitter sworn to change and treat developers with the respect they deserve? I&#x27;ve lost count. Actions speak louder than words, for starters Dorsey needs to amend those restrictive terms. Twitter is a great platform with a trove of data not only for research purposes, but for creating third party clients and more.<p>It is time for Twitter and Dorsey to prove they&#x27;ve changed. Twitter will continue to fail without developer support. Look at how successful Facebook has been nurturing the developer community. Basically every site has a login with Facebook button now.

QNX did something like this years ago. They had a free version, then went partially open source, then went closed source, then went fully open source (you could download the kernel sources), then suddenly went totally closed source after being acquired by Blackberry.<p>There are few remaining QNX developers.

I have found Michael Porter&#x27;s Five Forces a useful tool when reasoning about supplier power. I think supplier power and how we respond to it is the interesting topic here.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Porter_five_forces_analysis#Bargaining_power_of_suppliers" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Porter_five_forces_analysis#Ba...</a><p>In general, ya gotta be real careful. Somehow, you have to counteract the entity&#x27;s supplier power with your very own buyer power. If you can&#x27;t do that, you won&#x27;t likely last. Or more specifically: whether or not you last will depend entirely on the other guy. It will have nothing to do with your own efforts (however vigorous), skill (however impressive), or cleverness (however clevererer).<p>One thing I know is irrelevant: whether or not you think the company will act as a &#x27;good citizen&#x27;. Thinking about a company as if it were a person has little predictive value. Thinking about a company as if its &#x27;Hal&#x27; from 2001 -- now we&#x27;re talkin&#x27;. More like a clever psycho no conscience AI on a secret mission that it views as way more important than whatever you happen to be doing with your Saturday&#x27;s -- that&#x27;s more like it. This applies twice to public companies (like, remarkably, twitter) as by that point everyone takes the fiduciary thing really very quite most seriously.

You only get one chance to make a first impression. Apologizing is a good step and most will forgive but never forget.

Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice...

I wish Dorsey&#x27;s apology came with some real change, to their ToS for example and immediate reversal of bad decisions. Rather than just, tweet what would you like to see.<p>Actions speak louder than words, no matter how small.

So here&#x27;s what Twitter should do:<p>1. Allow devs to create third party twitter clients. No limits, no restrictions. The loss of dev trust is so big that they need to do something this huge. If they don&#x27;t do this, I think Twitter will be forced to sell to a bigger company within 18 months.<p>Allowing third party twitter clients will quickly kill the official clients, as they&#x27;re a heap of junk from a UX POV. It doesn&#x27;t matter that Twitter won&#x27;t control that. People who think this matters seem to think that Twitter is another Facebook. I can&#x27;t emphasise strongly enough that Twitter is not a Facebook.<p>2. Make money selling licenses to third parties for data analysis. Change the licensing and make it cheaper. Make it affordable for small developers. Encourage an explosion of innovation in the way tweets are used. Work with these people to offer a better structure for tweets that will help them develop their applications. Then you&#x27;re the data provider for a huge ecosystem, with a feedback loop that ensures the data increases in value over time.<p>People seem to not be able to find specific value in twitter&#x27;s data, but I can see huge potential. Here are some no-brainer examples:<p>- emergency management (this is being done, all over the world, and it works)<p>- data-mining comments about companies for feedback.<p>- recommendation services.<p>I can think of much more valuable ideas, but as I know people working on startups in this area, I won&#x27;t share them.<p>I also don&#x27;t understand why Twitter have not &quot;app&quot;-ed their platform or partitioned it so that companies can have their own subplatforms. Maybe it&#x27;s because the official clients are terrible at handling such data.<p>Man, I could go on... but what a challenge it will be to turn this mess into something meaningful.

Fool me once...<p>I hope many people have instead learned to generalize the earlier message, in the last some years. Crudely but aptly stated: &quot;Don&#x27;t be a sharecropper.&quot;

Maybe they can stop screwing over smaller twitter apps with their stupidly expensive token threshold. Windows had quite a few good Twitter clients, like MetroTwit that Twitter put out of business simply because they priced them out with their token limits.

I&#x27;m sorry that you felt confused by your inability to understand our corporate decisions that were best for us at the time.

Fool me once: shame on you. Fool me twice: shame on me.

I stopped really looking at APIs ever since Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc. started restricting the usefulness and access to them.<p>Its been a long time since I really thought about building any business on quicksand.<p>Now a days when I use an external API, I make sure it is not core to the product. If the relationship changes with the external provider, I need an escape that does not impact my product.<p>Which means of course that the external API cannot be &quot;essential&quot; - and in startup land &quot;not essential&quot; == &quot;do not do&quot;

This relationship has come to an end. It&#x27;s not just that trust is now gone between Twitter and developers, it&#x27;s that developers at around this time came to realise that building on someone else&#x27;s platform always carries the risk that the CEO of the day will pull the rug. Or even worse, that some unnamed front line worker in the &quot;app approvals departments&quot; will pull the rug with no recourse.<p>Twitter is foolish for trying to get this going again. The love affair ended, time for new things.

Sorry, Jack. I had a lot of ideas for leveraging your info 5 years ago.<p>Still do, in fact. It&#x27;s not like Twitter has done any of it.<p>But.<p>I. Simply. Can. Not. Trust. Twitter.<p>So, enjoy your floundering.

He should apologize a bit more sincerely to the developers he just laid off.

Twitter and Facebook are 2 different products, the latter being a social network ,the former a &quot;social network message bus&quot; since relationships and streams are public by default.<p>Well Twitter should embrace that fact instead pulling the plug on successful Twitter based products and offer paid plans for business who want to build on top of twitter.

It&#x27;s not officially Fall until Lucy pulls away the football.

It wasn&#x27;t as he said &quot;confusing and unpredictable&quot; it was manipulative and desperate. Let a bunch of developers figure out ways to monetize on Twitter then cut off their access and duplicate their strategies. Empty words.<p>Let me know if they want to give contractual guarantees that certain APIs will be available.

I thought CEOs were supposed to be decisive. Why don&#x27;t I see anything actionable here.

&quot;Forget it. I&#x27;ll build my own Twitter. With hookers. And blackjack.&quot;

I can&#x27;t think of anything to say here except &quot;Fuck you, dude&quot;.

Too little, too late. But thanks for the important lesson of not building something on Twitter&#x27;s platform when the rug can be pulled out from under you. That lesson applies to other platforms too.

It really seems like this is where you should have some sort of concrete contract&#x2F;agreement to reassure developers. Without that, I can&#x27;t see how anyone could trust them.

talk is cheap. until we see substantive change from Twitter, such as changing their ToS, or re-instating previously suspended apps, its all just talk.<p>I don&#x27;t think the community of developers should be willing to work with Twitter going forward. they blew it. they&#x27;ve done nothing to earn a &quot;reset&quot; in their developer relations. if anything their product now is significantly worse and less appealing to integrate with than it has been in the past.

Now can they bring back RSS feeds?

This is going to sound a bit churlish, but how does Twitter make money? Sure, there are some sponsorships, but what actual product do they sell?

Personally, I have never trusted these social network companies in terms of working with&#x2F;for the platforms. Sure, when they are in trouble, when they need developers, they will say things like this. And when they are strong, they will close up and can&#x27;t care less about their developers. It&#x27;s the same with Facebook, etc.

Here is my request that they actually follow through on their original promise to federate with compatible implementations: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;nerdworldorder&#x2F;status&#x2F;657073820801470464" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;nerdworldorder&#x2F;status&#x2F;657073820801470464</a>

Does this apply to Meerkat ban for example?

Pretty empty apology. If they want to do something meaningful for developers, why don&#x27;t they remove the user login token restrictions, for example? Several famously successful API using apps hit that and suffered. Just apologizing is pointless, you have to actually change the bad policies.

this sounds like a fish flopping around on land, looking for purpose, and developers to help it make money

I predict the &quot;culture of chill&quot; will lead to a substantial minority of younger developers wandering in and giving their stuff away for no benefit a second time.<p>I mean ... you aren&#x27;t ... mad ... bro?<p>Of course not. We&#x27;re cool. Glad we had this talk.

Stupid question, how was Twitter bad with external developers?<p>I&#x27;ve built a few services using Twitter, Facebook and Google+ each time and I didn&#x27;t have anything bad to say about Twitter, they were always the easiest to deal with.

Too late Twitter, <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;jeena&#x2F;Twittia" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;jeena&#x2F;Twittia</a> is dead once and for all!

Why do people feel they are entitled to perpetual API access?<p>If you want to build your business on the back of someone else who is doing the heavy lifting, then don&#x27;t be surprised when they rear up and no longer let you ride.<p>Maybe Twitter should follow the lead that I do - those that license and use many of my APIs pay on a royalty model - they pay a certain percentage of all revenue that their platform generates. Period.<p>I predict that Twitter will regress back to owning their platform after this minor blip.

Well this article is a bit click baity.<p>The original article they reference is from 2012 and talks about the API changes and Twitter&#x27;s choice to shut down apps it feels are competing with its own app.<p>All I got out of the current article was Jack trying to woo developers back without any hint of what exactly they&#x27;re changing to be more developer friendly. If I was burned by them in 2012, I doubt this would get rid of any lingering doubts I had about working on their platform.

So, why is there still only one &quot;Twitter&quot;? Why has it not been forked? Please enlighten me.

Fool me once... (is said 7 times in these HN comments, wonder why)

A day late and a dollar short. I wouldn&#x27;t be caught dead developing on their API ever again. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.<p>Swift death be to you, Twitter.

He speaks like a manger in corporate..

That was quite the big city apology.

If you&#x27;re building a business on Twitter&#x27;s back you&#x27;re fuckin&#x27; nuts. Twitter can&#x27;t even build a business on Twitter.

This company seems to be lurching from one PR disaster to another. I have never seriously developed a twitter API-based application because as long ago as 2012 the restrictions were already on the uptrend, and the writing was on the wall for anybody betting their application on the Twitter ecosystem. Throw in the declining quality of the average tweet and you have a recipe for a company which opened up a new Internet use case, but never capitalised on it (as others adopt its MO). It reminds me of Xerox Parc, in that in invented something awesome without really understanding what it had created, nor how to use it properly.<p>In my view, Twitter = Yahoo. It won&#x27;t die, it got there first, but it didn&#x27;t really &quot;get it&quot;, and so it will never win.

Didn&#x27;t they just fire a bunch of their own?

Nah, what Twitter <i>really</i> needs is moar ideology-based censorship. That&#x27;ll fix evvverything.

Why are so many developers naive about this?<p>Twitter has a responsibility to its employees &amp; shareholders to turn a profit. In some stages, courting developers will make sense, and in others, not. A lot of developers are taking it like a jilted lover. This is a business relationship, and it is neither personal nor permanent. If you can build on their platform today, reap the success while it lasts. For some of you, that uncertainty is not worth the investment. Great! Just stop expecting Twitter to sacrifice business health to keep one group of partners happy.