It's safe to say that Twitter has had a complex and at times contentious relationship with developers that want to integrate with and build on the social messenging service. In October 2015, CEO Jack Dorsey acknowledged the problem and said Twitter wanted to "reset" its developer relationships, as Venturebeat notes:
“Somewhere along the line, our relationship with developers got confusing, unpredictable,” he acknowledged. “We want to come to you today and apologize for the confusion. We want to reset our relationship and make sure that we’re learning, listening, and that we are rebooting."
Twitter conducted fairly extensive developer outreach during 2016, but the picture blurred once again with the departure of several prominent developer advocates from the company, and Twitter's decision in January to sell its Fabric mobile development toolkit to Google.
Now Twitter is taking measure of its developer outreach, announcing a unified API platform and increased transparency through a public development road map. Developer advocate Andy Piper laid out the landscape in a blog post:
We’re excited to announce that we’ll be unifying our API platform to make it easier for developers to build new applications that can smoothly scale as they grow. We’re also launching new APIs and endpoints that enable developers to build on the unique attributes of Twitter to create better experiences for businesses. Developers can see where we’re focusing and what we’re building with our newly-published API platform roadmap.
Twitter values developers because they can help serve new use cases and spark innovation, Piper wrote. He cited examples such as the U.S. Geological Service's use of Twitter data for earthquake tracking, and LikeFolio's consumer service for stock investors.
Of course, the broader intent—as with any developer outreach effort—is to help grow Twitter's center of gravity, user base and ultimately revenue.
What Twitter has lacked, but wants to remedy now, is an API set and strategy that's clear, stable and relevant to developers at all ends of the spectrum, from startups to large enterprises. Piper walked through some examples of the new normal:
Since 2006, we’ve had a set of broadly available REST and real-time (streaming) APIs that provide access to a range of features and functions. In 2014, we acquired Gnip, a partner who built a suite of enterprise-grade APIs for the world’s largest and most demanding software companies to create solutions with Twitter data. The Gnip APIs provide deeper access to public data from the Firehose and greater functionality than the standard REST and streaming APIs, but have a price point that is often out of range for developers just starting to scale their businesses. As we’ve met and listened to developers at events around the world and in our developer discussion forums, we’ve heard that this can be a source of frustration.
This year, Twitter will roll out a new developer experience that combines its REST and streaming APIs "with the enterprise-grade power and reliability of Gnip," Piper wrote. "The goal is to create an integrated Twitter API platform that serves everyone, from an individual developer testing a new idea to Twitter’s largest enterprise partners."
Developers will enjoy a streamlined API experience; rather than having to shift among multiple APIs as their projects scale up, there will be a single tool for a given task, such as filtering data from Twitter's Firehose. There will be tiered access, from free at the low end to paid self-service and enterprise grade, Piper wrote.
Despite his earlier mention of developer frustration over Gnip pricing levels, Piper gave no indication Twitter plans to cut those costs. Rather, he emphasized that Twitter will "clearly define the features and costs at each tier" so developers can make the plans best suiting their needs.
Twitter also has some new products in the works that target data analytics and customer engagement scenarios. There's more detail in Piper's full post, which is worth a read.
Piper characterized Twitter's efforts as a "massive new engineering and product investment" for its platform and developer ecosystem. That may be the case, but it comes after years of missteps and fractious relations with developers, not to mention amid stagnant revenue growth and diminished buzz around the service.
"It's good to see Twitter putting order into its API strategy," says Constellation Research VP and principal analyst Holger Mueller. "It needs to regain the trust it lost a few years ago when changing and reducing API access. And as always with Twitter, monetization is the question. This could open up new alleys."
The bottom line here? Twitter needs developers—many more of them—to start regaining traction. On the face of it, Twitter's unified API plans are welcome and long overdue. The question is how well it can sustain focus on this path.
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