It is where brands, celebrities, and politicians communicate with people, live and in the open.
From 2006 to 2012 developers were able to build a wide range of value-add services for the growing community thanks to the free publicAPI. Data access was curbed after 2012. The developer community was helped by the acquisition of my startup, Reshuffle.
The former CEO and GM of Revenue Products charged me with re- opening the social network's website. I gave a lot of feedback to the leadership of the company about how broken the platform was and the investment needed to fix it.
I told them that we could create a platform that would allow developers to thrive and improve the user experience. "Amir told us how broken it is so we bought his company to fix it."
A small team is working to revive the Twitter developer platform. The team was trying to make sure developers had a growing suite ofAPI endpoints that allowed them to build successful solutions. A lot of developer love and excitement was met with the launch of the newTwitter V2API.
Our ambition was much larger than that.
They had been wanting to build something bigger for a long time, so the board gave us permission to hire 50 more people. The goal was to make it possible for developers to use the platform. Developers were asked to create in-Twitter apps.
We wanted a world in which you could share your favorite song from Spotify and listen to it live with all your followers on social media. We wanted you to be able to share your donation with your followers and get them to give as well. We didn't want you to just share the results of Wordle. We wanted to make it possible for you to interact with developer-powered apps.
We imagined a true decentralization of the timelines on the social network. Developers could create and share timelines.
We were excited and looking forward to announcing our vision to developers at Chirp last month, and now that vision is just an opening keynote document, lost on my bricked Twitter computer.
Are you interested in technology? The timelines werecurated by the techcrunch. Would you like to play a video game? You can see the games and streamers timelines. The development of custom timelines gave developers the power to create their own topics or do so on behalf of others.
We were going to create a discovery mechanism that would allow us to discover and install these apps. The possibility to monetize these experiences was explored.
We started to conduct experiments around these experiences.
The tiles experiment was the beginning of apps.
The first step towards open timelines was launched.
Today we launched a new custom Timeline experiment – just one of the many things we’re working on over at @TwitterDev
There is a lot of potential for the developer community to build features like this in the future, and we are just getting started. Congrats to the team!
pic.twitter.com/sFToIN7a2s
— Amir Shevat (@ashevat) July 11, 2022
The first discovery experiment was launched by the social media giant.
Put the NEW Twitter Toolbox to work for you. These ready-to-use tools are low-cost and built by our developer community to help you get even more out of Twitter.
— Twitter Support (@TwitterSupport) February 1, 2022
During the acquisition period, we pulled all that off. We were wrong to think that Elon would spend time understanding the range of projects within the social network. The developer platform was important to his vision for an "everything app" He was excited to see our vision and we were hoping he would like it.
On November 4th, we were terminated. In the middle of the night, our work computers were bricked and we were told we were fired.
Two people are still out of our organization according to one of our engineers. Our plans for developers were ruined by the wind.
I told Dorsey that we couldn't mess this up. There is only one way to fix the relationship between developers and the micro-blogging site. I wouldn't hire a developer if we blew this chance.
When developers start building on a platform, they make a bet that it will remain stable. It takes a lot of work to build a platform, and developers have been burned in the past by platforms such as Windows Mobile and unreliable ones.
I've worked on some of the best platforms out there, and they all have the same thing in common: openness and trust.
I am sorry I couldn't stop the trust from being broken last month. I wake up in the middle of the night and think about it. We were excited and looking forward to announcing our vision to developers at Chirp last month, but now that vision is just an opening keynote document.
A developer once asked how we could make sure that the platform continued to be maintained and invested in. When that changes, I will let you know, as long as we have this amazing team in charge of building the platform, developers will see that we are serious about it.
I would like to let you know that the team is gone and the investment has been undone. Love no longer lives here.
The team that built the platform is incredible. They will build great platforms for developers. I have worked with many of them.
I plan to invest in developer platforms that are open and trustworthy as I transition into the venture capital world.
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