Twitter Ceo Jack Dorsey Apologizes To Developers, Twitter For Mac
Co-founder Jack Dorsey took to the stage to kick-off the annual one-day San Francisco-based event with a massive apology to the developer community that it has alienated over the years and a promise to do better. Dorsey, who was clearly setting a new tone that his occupation of Twitter's corner office is going to mean not just a serious attitude adjustment for the company, but in some ways, a return to Twitter's roots and what has long made Twitter so special. Dorsey attempted to symbolize that return to its roots (when the company treated developers like royalty) by wearing the first Twitter t-shirt and saying what an honor it was to be in the physical presence of the more than 1500 developer attendees.
Related: Dorsey also reflected on something that's nostalgic to almost every developer: Hello World. But to Dorsey 'Hello World' isn't just the first app that developers build when starting with a new platform. It's core to what Twitter is about and to the role that its users and developers have played in taking Twitter into the social stratosphere. 'Hello World is the first thing we do when we want to learn to program,' said Dorsey. 'Twitter is one of the fastest ways to say something to the world and is the fastest way to see what the world is saying about any topic. Fundamentally, it's a simple messaging service.
What's unique is how people made it their own, for the people by the people.' Dorsey reminisced about how the ideas of hashtags, tweetstorms, and retweets came from folks outside of Twitter like,. 'People invented new ways to communicate over Twitter' said Dorsey. But in acknowledging the critical role that developers and users have played in turning Twitter into one of the world's top communication platforms, Dorsey also lamented the company's recent history of alienating the very community that's responsible for its success. 'Somewhere along the line,' said Dorsey, 'our relationship with developers got complicated, confusing, unpredictable. It culminated with what Anil Dash called the Matrix of Doom.' And then came the apology.
'We want to apologize, reboot, have a great relationship with developers, open honest, and fulfilling.' Reflecting on how the hashtag bonded the world around an epidemic affliction of American society, Dorsey said 'Twitter stands for something; for freedom of expression. We will not rest until that is recognized as global fundamental human right.
Twitter encourages dialogue that the world needs to see and that the world needs to have and we need to have a better conversation with the developer community. We can't stand alone. We need your help. We have a responsibility to you all to communicate our road map in clear and transparent way.to have an open dialog to make sure we are serving you in the best way.and to power organizations to transparency. We need to listen, to learn and we want to start that today.' Related: Dorsey closed by creating an open communication channel between Twitter and anyone interested in helping the company to improve how it does business.
'Tweet at us what you'd like us to see do today. Tweet with the hashtag. And we will make the right decisions in the right way.' Notwithstanding how millions of 140 character suggestions will get bubbled up to the right Twitter executives for further contemplation, Dorsey's new-sheriff-in-town promise seemed quite sincere and to some extent, was backed up by a truckload of announcements designed to ease many of the challenges confronted by mobile developers. Those announcements included major improvements across Twitter's entire portfolio of development tools and were very much about addressing common developer pain points such as time to market for new applications, real time app diagnostics, application discovery, and in-app monetization (some of which will be covered in other articles being posted to ProgrammableWeb).
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Jack Dorsey, Twitter's newly appointed CEO, took to the stage at the company's developer conference today and basically asked programmers for forgiveness. 'Somewhere along the line, our relationship with developers got a little bit complicated, a little bit confusing and little bit unpredictable,' he said in the keynote of in San Francisco today.
'And we want to come to you today, and first and foremost apologize for the confusion. We want to reset our relationship and make sure we are learning, that we are listening and that we are rebooting.' That, Dorsey said, is what the Flight conference is about. Further reading: While the second Flight gathering is about developer-focused news, Dorsey emphasized that it's also about creating an 'open, honest and transparent relationship' with developers. Zeus Kerravala, an analyst with ZK Research, praised the Dorsey statement as a way to try and reset developers' expectations and mend fences now that Dorsey is firmly in charge. 'This was Dorsey's mea culpa,' Kerravala said. 'He's letting developers know he hears them and he's willing to address their issues.
Developers are the way the Twitter universe can be expanded and if they feel they're not valued or being heard, they might not work with Twitter anymore.' Developers have been frustrated. Three years ago, the company blocked third-party developer access to Twitter's main API - something akin to throwing a bucket of water on third-party Twitter clients and apps that fed off the micro-blogging site.
That move affected a lot of developers, but there have been other, smaller slights to developers over the last several years, according to Brian Blau, an analyst with Gartner. 'Most of the troubles have been centered around smaller issues, ones that focused on ease-of-use, productivity and completeness of platform,' he said. 'Over the past five or more years, Twitter has adopted, changed, morphed, deprecated, and encroached on many aspects of the developer platform.
Its been a tough road.' Those actions, according to Blau, showed that Twitter wasn't putting developers first - even though some of Twitter's development partners have been itsbiggest boosters. Patrick Moorhead, an analyst with Moor Insights & Strategy, said Twitter's 'schizophrenic' relationship with developers have made programmers skittish about making any big bets on the company.
'Twitter needs to let developers know exactly where they fit and where they don't,' he said. 'If they don't fix this, they will find fewer and fewer developers to carry forward Twitter's innovations. Without this, Twitter will grow more slowly.' To help appease developers, Dorsey and his team today made several announcements aimed at making their jobs easier. Twitter talked about updates to the Fabric development platform, easier sharing from apps, and better analytics of Twitter data for information about the people using their apps. Moorhead said the announcements won't be enough to earn back developers' trust. Blau, however, thought the announcements could start easing tensions.
Twitter Ceo Jack Dorsey Apologizes To Developers Twitter For Mac Computer
'Twitter appears to be taking a new approach at the Flight conference,' he said. 'There's been a continual stream of announcements about improvements to Twitter developer tools, and many of those new technologies and products fill in holes and help developers with more than just tweets. And they are providing app developers with a core suite of tools that will help them on their overall app strategies.' Dorsey also noted during his keynote presentation today that developers can use the hashtag #HelloWorld to send in their feedback. The company, according to the new CEO, will listen.