14 DAY TRIAL // Evan Williams, Twitter founder and current Medium CEO, has publicly acknowledged that driving the developer community away through its API 1.1 version was a "strategic error," as Business Insider notes.
Speaking at the Fortune Brainstorm Tech conference in Aspen, Colorado, Mr. Williams seems to have finally understood that Twitter's early awesomeness came from the many tools and services developers created using its API and its constant flow of real-time data.
Third-party applications were always better than Twitter at sifting through the massive data stream, and they also put in the effort in categorizing it to address various market niches where Twitter would never even think of spending more than 30 seconds just pondering the idea.
Speaking on stage, Mr. Williams said the API was "one of our strategic errors we had to wind down over time."
He then added, "It wasn’t a win/win for developers, users and the company. [...] Twitter should be more of a platform than it is."
While the original API limits were introduced to drive more traffic to the network and its recently added "Promoted Tweets" feature, they also limited the amount of creativity developers could employ inside their applications, and many were forced to quietly shut down and let developers focus on other projects.
Even if not visible at first, without all the cool apps developed outside the company, Twitter slowly became a mashup of undecipherable rants, which few people had the time and willingness to untangle and explore.
A new company policy towards developers may be put in place with the new CEO hiring
Twitter has recently put up terrible financial reports, which many industry experts have blamed on former CEO Dick Costolo, which eventually resigned from the company last month.
Mr. Williams, currently on the committee tasked to search for the new Twitter headsman, may have leaked a criteria on which the future CEO should be on board with, and that's a more friendly approach to developers.
While the search continues, it is obvious that the company needs to correct lots of things, starting from what its general direction is, and finishing with its approach to developers.
While it's everybody's guess what Twitter will do in the future, the company has acquired lots of smaller startups in the past, each offering different directions and services it can use to shift the social network's entire vision.
As Mr. Williams also said at the Aspen conference, "news is what Twitter excels at," and along with its Project Lightning, this may be probably the best guess of what Twitter will look at in the future.