Dorsey’s direct message to users
CEO assures Twitter is rebooting with developers in sights
The headline may have been the first major public appearance of Jack Dorsey since he was minted as Twitter’s permanent CEO two weeks ago. But the lede was as simple and pure as a 140-character tweet.
“We need to serve developers in the best way,” Dorsey, the Twitter co-founder generally considered its inventor, said in brief remarks to kick off a Twitter conference here Wednesday morning. “We apologize for the (recent) confusion, and we want to reset our relationship. It is rebooting. That is what today represents.”
Dorsey’s call to arms for developers is all about the “U” word. Users, or the relative dearth of them, remain a bugaboo for Twitter.
His remarks, at the microblogging company’s second annual Flight mobile developers conference, come a week before Twitter reports its third-quarter financial results. The path to a spike in Twitter’s user base of some 270 million people — far behind Facebook’s 1.5 billion — is likely to include Twitter content on television broadcasts and thirdparty apps. That’s where developers come in, Dorsey said.
Flight is a clear signal of Twitter’s dogged intent to invest in mobile developer services, as its rivals, Facebook and Google, already have. Software developers have played an essential role in bringing key features to Twitter, such as shortening links and posting photographs.
Wednesday, Twitter said it acquired Fastlane, a maker of tools popular with iPhone developers to test and update their apps.
Twitter also said Fabric — a collection of software products announced last year that make it easier for mobile app developers to add services, such as publishing ads, to their apps — works with Amazon Web Services, payment system Stripe and Optimizely, which makes software-testing tools.
Such gestures could assuage developers, many of whom were alienated by Twitter in 2012 when it began enforcing stricter rules around the apps that plug in to the service. That feud was reignited this year when Twitter shut down Politwoops, which highlighted tweets deleted by politicians. Twitter said the account violated its terms of service.