In the years that followed, Twitter hit developers harder, pulling those building third-party Twitter clients off their feet. In 2014, Twitter acquired its partner rival Gnip and then dumped its own partners, which had agreements to resell Twitter’s running data — the unfiltered, complete stream of tweets and their metadata.
Today, Twitter acknowledged these past mistakes and acknowledged that it needs to rebuild its relationship with the developer community.
Amir Shevat, head of product for the developer platform at Twitter, said in April: “I think we need to earn trust. I think we need to be transparent. I think we need to be based on openness.” At the time, Shevat also introduced Twitter Toolbox – This is a new product that gives third-party developers the opportunity to be discovered and gain users directly from Twitter’s platform.
The upcoming Chirp conference will be held in person in San Francisco and will be streamed online. Registration will soon be open to the public via Twitter’s developer site.
The company said the new event will include a keynote speech, technical sessions and an opportunity to meet with the Twitter Developer Platform team to get developer questions answered. Community Meetup groups will host regional events after Chirp.
Twitter Marketing Director Amy Udelson wrote in the announcement: “At Twitter, we are committed to building ways for developers to improve the Twitter experience, drive community connections, spark conversation, and empower developers to make change. As part of this, we announced A series of initiatives, including the return of the Chirp Developer Conference, which enables developers to connect with our team and others in the community in real life and online; the launch of the Chirp Developer Challenge to inspire and reward innovation; The developer site is being updated to help the community continue to grow with our platform.”
News of the campaign’s return comes after ongoing changes to Twitter’s API platform. In 2020, Twitter is reported to have finally launched API v2, a completely rebuilt version of Twitter’s base that aims to cover some new features missing from the older API – like conversation threads, polling results in tweets, pinned tweets , spam filtering and more powerful streaming filtering and search query language, and more. In the years since, the company has continued to develop the API, in addition to adding support for newer Twitter features such as Twitter Spaces, Super Follow Conversation Control, Polls, and more.
Related to its changes, Twitter has introduced new pricing tiers designed to make it easier for different types of developers — big and small — to get started with the platform. This includes researchers and academics who require larger datasets. Not all of them are available though — like Twitter’s Elevated+ permissions, which deliver over 2 million tweets a month, they’re still pending.
Now, Twitter needs to really attract developers to use its API platform to build their apps and services.
The timing of the news, however, is somewhat unusual, as Twitter is still accepting buyouts from Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk. It is reported that Musk intends to change the focus and direction of the social media company so that it is more in line with user and revenue growth. It’s unclear how Musk’s ownership of Twitter will affect its developer strategy. But it’s thought that holding a developer conference after the acquisition dust settles and Twitter’s new course is set could make the company better.
