Twitter CEO to developers: We messed up
Developers have led the way in innovating with Twitter, Dorsey said. “Developers took our service from day 1 and made Twitter [have] a much more global reach.” He cited applications that enable a plant that tweets when it wants water and a pothole that tweets to local officials when a vehicle runs over it.
“But somewhere along the line, our relationship with developers got a little complicated, a little bit confusing, a little bit unpredictable,” he said. “This culminated in what Anil Dash has named ‘The Matrix of Doom.’ And we want to come to you today [and] first and foremost apologize for our confusion. We want to reset our relationship, and we want to make sure that we are learning, that we are listening and we are rebooting. And that’s what today represents."
Twitter, he said, has a responsibility to communicate its road map in a clear, transparent manner to everyone in the community. He asked the audience to tweet what it would like to see in Twitter to the #helloworld hashtag.
Dorsey emphasized the impact of Twitter and its 140-character message platform, describing it as “one of the fastest ways to say something to the world.” He stressed that people have made Twitter their own, inventing new ways of communicating, including the hashtag, retweets, and hash storms. “All of these became cultural movements, global cultural movements.”
Also on Wednesday, Twitter detailed a Collections API for turning multiple tweets into one story with a single collections ID for publishing and editing the story from any of the tools in the Twitter ecosystem. “Now you can easily turn unique Twitter content into great stories that attract, engage, and retain an audience,” said Mollie Vandor, Twitter senior product manager, in a blog post.
Twitter also detailed a grid display for embedding stories on any site or app. In conjunction with this display option, Twitter announced publish.twitter.com to make it easier to embed Twitter content. “We have big plans for this new tool,” Vandor said. “We want it to be a one-stop shop where you can easily preview all of the different types of displays we offer in Twitter Kit and grab the embed code for any Twitter content you’d like to publish.”