It is completely true. The term tweet, the @ sign, the hashtag, the bird imagery, the concept of the retweet and the quote tweet. Hell, the original Twitter for iOS client was Tweetie (which Twitter acquired), which introduced features like pull-to-refresh (a parent that now belongs to Twitter but is licensed freely to others).
And Twitter did obliterate its relationships with its dev community. Totally killed it. The motives were sort of understandable in the abstract, Twitter wanted to control its experience and the sheer number of third party clients really went against that. Hell, the whole reason they bought Tweetdeck was defensive, because another company wanted to buy it and Tweetdeck had such huge usage in the brand management/large account Twitter space.
The problem was by going scorched earth, Twitter gave the middle finger to not just developers like Iconfactory and others that created core features, but it really had the add-on effect of abruptly killing all the innovation that happened on top of their platform.
The good news is that over the years, Twitter as a company has changed. The new API isn’t going to be a return to the pre-2013 days, but it does give developers a lot more options and freedom than before. Twitter smartly is still charging for API calls past a certain number and for broader access to the firehose — and it should, to be honest — and that means the days of being able to make good money off of a Twitter client are over for good (even Iconfactory and Tweetbot had to go subscription, which I think is fair for what are now very niche apps), but the new API is huge improvement and I do think the current team is really working to build good relationships with devs going forward, even if they can’t rectify the past.
And Twitter did obliterate its relationships with its dev community. Totally killed it. The motives were sort of understandable in the abstract, Twitter wanted to control its experience and the sheer number of third party clients really went against that. Hell, the whole reason they bought Tweetdeck was defensive, because another company wanted to buy it and Tweetdeck had such huge usage in the brand management/large account Twitter space.
The problem was by going scorched earth, Twitter gave the middle finger to not just developers like Iconfactory and others that created core features, but it really had the add-on effect of abruptly killing all the innovation that happened on top of their platform.
The good news is that over the years, Twitter as a company has changed. The new API isn’t going to be a return to the pre-2013 days, but it does give developers a lot more options and freedom than before. Twitter smartly is still charging for API calls past a certain number and for broader access to the firehose — and it should, to be honest — and that means the days of being able to make good money off of a Twitter client are over for good (even Iconfactory and Tweetbot had to go subscription, which I think is fair for what are now very niche apps), but the new API is huge improvement and I do think the current team is really working to build good relationships with devs going forward, even if they can’t rectify the past.