Next Gen API: Another attempt to mend relations from the side of Twitter towards developers

Twitter has announced to bring changes in its Application Programming Interface (API) which is used by software developers to create services that can work with Twitter. The social media platform has decided to launch a new program named "Developers Labs" where app creators and developers can test the services they have made. Thus, the program will be opened to all registered developers.

According to Ian Cairns, the product manager of Twitter, the company has major changes in strategy which can let developer know that Twitter cares about them and want to know that what they feel. Besides this, he thinks that this 'change in strategy' is the way to decide "longterm plans" for the next generation API after taking feedback and testing it.
"Our initial focus in Labs will be on developers who work with conversational data, including academics and researchers who study and explore what’s happening on Twitter, and social listening and analytics companies that build products for other businesses.", announced Cairns in a blog post on Twitter. Adding further, "Over time, we plan to update significant portions of our existing API, and make some foundational changes like new data definitions and endpoint structures. As always, we are building all of the features in Labs with the privacy and safety of the people who use Twitter in mind. That means that the developers who will be able to participate in Labs will have to go through our developer registration process, and will experience the same level of accountability as with our other public APIs."
Twitter has history of having complicated and disruptive relations with its developers. Take an example of the time when the company devalued their developers, who got fame because of building feature of photo-sharing, and enforce uneven policies on them.

Similarly, in 2015 Jack Dorsey apologized and promised to alter the interface. Therefore, the Fabric was launched. However, it was sold to Google in 2017, and company promised to have a new reset. After this, the series of changes in developer policies was followed in 2018 whose main objective was to remove third party clients of the company.


Thus, it proves that policies and relations were not good. Therefore, the introduction of the feature to get feedback sounds good.

Hence, it can be hoped from Twitter and its whole team that things will get better and history would not be repeated.

Next Gen API: Another attempt to mend relations from the side of Twitter towards developers

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