Twitter wants to bring the spotlight back to third-party apps — and win over developers
The company is also open to have an app store
Increasing transparency
In the last few weeks,Elon Musk’s potential bid to take over Twitterhas dominated the news.
A former Twitter employee, Evan Henshaw-Plath, posteda threadabout how another hostile bid affected developers back in 2015.
Bill Gross of IdeaLabs allegedly tried to take over Twitter by aggressively buying third-party clients. As a defense mechanism, the company restricted API access to 100k registered users. If you wanted more, you could apply for special permission, but that was rarely approved.
https://twitter.com/rabble/status/1514793459147677696?s=20&t=bHynVTslKmPKrKwnv7jShg
However, at that time, the social network wasn’t transparent about the issue. So both users and developers that provided unique features with their apps were left disappointed and confused.
With this new program, Twitter’s trying to bring more transparency, and allowing users to experience more features on the platform outside of the native app.
The future of Twitter app discovery
Shevat told TechCrunch that Twitter’s open to experimenting with models like an app store to increase discovery. But he cautiously said that the world’s full of old marketplaces that no one’s visiting:
I need to make sure that users find value — maybe I can just surface it in the product instead of a separate marketplace. Maybe I can create a section within the product that surfaces developer innovation.
As a platform, Twitter still has a ton of problems ranging from hate speech moderation tocrypto spam bots. While it can’t solve all these issues right away, it can rely on clever developers to make some apps to help out.
Story byIvan Mehta
Ivan covers Big Tech, India, policy, AI, security, platforms, and apps for TNW. That’s one heck of a mixed bag. He likes to say “Bleh.“Ivan covers Big Tech, India, policy, AI, security, platforms, and apps for TNW. That’s one heck of a mixed bag. He likes to say “Bleh.”
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