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ROFL: Twitter apologizes to developers, says it wants them back
Piss-take: “an unpleasant situation that is comparable to a parody.”
Wikitionary.
In what has to be one of the biggest jokes in recent history, Twitter Chief Executive Office Jack Dorsey is appealing to developers to return to the service, despite the fact the company literally burned all previous developers it worked with several years back.
According to TechCrunch, Dorsey made the pitch at a conference Wednesday, telling the crowd that “Our relationship with developers got confusing, unpredictable. We want to come to you today and apologize for the confusion,” which is newspeak for we completely screwed over the lot of you, but now we need you to come back because our growth is anemic and our stock price is dropping like a lead balloon.
Dorsey went on to claim that Twitter is turning over a new leaf and now wants “to make sure we have a great relationship with our developers… that we’re fulfilling and serving everyone’s needs….We need to have a better conversation with our developer community, with everyone in this room… We can’t stand alone. We need your help.”
As part of the so-called peace offering to developers, Twitter has launched a range of new SDKs into Fabric, its allegedly developer-friendly app platform it launched in October 2014.
The new SDK’s include support for Stripe, Amazon Web Services, Optimizely, SendGrid, Nuance, Appsee, GameAnalaytics, Mapbox and PubNub.
Developer Relations for Twitter head Prashant Sridharan also got in on the pitch, supporting Dorsey’s line and noting that “it was a different time in the internet, different time in the mobile landscape, and the dawn of mobile apps” and that the current team at Twitter consists primarily of new employees that have no first-hand context for what happened all those years ago.
LOL
It’s one thing to admit that you burned piles of developers in years past, some of who had whole businesses based on access to the Twitter API, but it’s a completely other matter to turn around years later, beg for forgiveness, and expect developers to come flocking back.
A developer seriously considering doing business with Twitter would have to be nearly insane to even go near the company, let alone work with them, and those that do decide to get into bed with Dorsey and Co. do so at their own risk.
If you are willing to risk your team, hard earned dollars and time working with Twitter, further details about the new SDK’s and their Force app platform are available here.
Image credit: jdlasica/Flickr/CC by 2.0
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