"Our relationship with developers got confusing, unpredictable. We want to come to you today and apologize for the confusion."
Yeah it was the "confusion" that was wrong. Nothing like apologizing but not admitting fault either. He's basically saying "we did the right thing, we just didn't communicate it clearly."
Twitter "hoses" developers all the time who were making money based on apps supporting Twitter. They "hose" the developer because Twitter would rather make that money instead of allowing others to, yet they then fail to capitalize on the vacuum they just created.
Over time, it's made Twitter a seemingly very unattractive platform to try to dev against. Twitter doesn't make much in terms of earnings on their own, it seems it would be in their best interest to allow an ecosystem around their platform.
Happens all the time. App.net was original an "app store" for facebook but they decided to make a competitor called App Center or something and told App.net they could either be acquired or shut down.
They do, but that doesn't slam the door shut on a developer/business purely for the sake of slamming the door shut on a developer/business.
From what I've seen, Facebook encourages API usage. Twitter encourages it until you make money, then they shut you down - often stating they're building a similar app/service and you'd be competing with them -- only then to never launch said app/service.
Twitter as a platform isn't worth much (as evidenced by year after year of not turning profits). The value in Twitter is the data - but they are locking it away.
Why not go the Google route and charge for API usage over a certain threshold. Twitter could stop caring what users do with the data, and make money as their ecosystem grows and becomes more successful.
I think this is what makes people so hostile towards Twitter.
Twitter neither clones successful services nor continues to run those they acquire. Instead they either shut them down, or acquire then shut them down - meanwhile completely missing opportunity after opportunity to capitalize on their massive ocean of data.
It seems, based on history, Twitter is not interested in running many services around the Twitter platform/API/data. Instead they really just want to be "Twitter".
I say, let them do what they do best - acquire data and build great API's. Let 3rd parties build Twitter's userbase and data, but charge them for access to the API. It's a simple monetization plan.
On the other hand, Facebook's earliest users were just college kids snapping pics of each other.
At least he didn't "blame the victim" and make like everything is the developers fault.
That being said, this event is a whole event focused around Twitter developers, and this was seriously just a 9 minute talk by the CEO about a general vision of Twitter, with a 60 second part of it about the "we screwed up" piece. I don't think it's an appropriate situation for a self-flagellation and introspection.
Since then they've gone through and talked about new APIs, new toolkits, new data sources, all for developers.
I get that they still want to control their platform and that is objectionable to some folks, but it's hard to argue that they're not doing anything with developers.
Then, a few years later, the state department says, "Oh shit, nevermind", and pulls everyone's car registration except for the state department manufactured cars. Chaos reigns. People are angry.
A couple of years later, there's a lot of hard feelings, but the state department has changed their tune a little bit. You still have to use the state department cars for your personal vehicles, but you can mod them a little bit, or you can attach trailers to them, or you can pay extra to drive bigger cars, or a lot more to drive 18 wheelers. They make money from these things, and commit to those options with contracts and guidance about what is allowed and what isn't allowed.
At that point the state department says, "Geez, we're real sorry that we didn't think about what we were doing before". They've already demonstrated that they walked back on their earlier policy, and they have set clear guidelines and boundaries about what they do and don't allow.
I realize you still might be mad if you don't want to drive your government-issued car on the road, and you're entitled to that feeling, but what more do you expect the state department to do in terms of apologizing?
Well, according to Jack, we tell him what the steps are by including hashtag #helloworld in our tweets to @twitter. So...yeah. https://twitter.com/jack/status/656885664525357056
"Thank you for holding. You call is very important to us."
It's difficult to understand what Twitter is even talking about.