Jack Dorsey's Twitter is attempting to make a strong comeback.
At the company's Flight developer conference, the Twitter cofounder and returning CEO took to the stage and shared that he wanted to reset its relationship with developers which had grown "complicated and confusing" over the years.
In the past, Twitter built up walls between itself and the developer community by hoarding its data for itself and pushing its own in-house products. In rebooting Twitter, Jack Dorsey is breaking down those walls and opening up its free mobile application suite, Fabric, to new partners which include Amazon Web Services, Fastlane and Stripe.
A year into its release, Twitter wants Fabric in the hands of even more developers. Currently, the toolkit is being used by over 225,000 developers on a billion devices. It helps developers by showing them where to place code in the app development process, allowing them to drag and drop SDK components into their projects, and thus streamline their entire development process. On top of that, Fabric allows devs to get deep down into their programs with Crashlytics to find the bugs that are making their apps crash.
"We've been blown away by the positive response from the community to these tools, and have seen a number of other key needs within mobile development: scaling infrastructure, integrating payments, and running A/B tests, among others," Twitter says on its blog.
Now the developer community can do even more with Fabric because Twitter has made the services of Stripe, Amazon Web Services, Optimizely, Nuance, Appsee, Mapbox, Pub-Nub, and GameAnalytics all available in one single toolkit. Fastlane is also included in the suite of services available under the Fabric umbrella. Fastlane was actually acquired by Twitter and its only employee, Felix Krause, was absorbed into the company's workforce. He built Fastlane to help developers ship more apps faster and more easily test and update those apps.
Ultimately, Twitter's peace offering to developers also benefits the company in more ways than one. By offering a newer, souped up Fabric, developers will want to create their apps using Twitter's tools. Should those developers want to include in their apps a way for their users to have a conversation that allows sharing content and real-time discussion, then they could also use the service of the same company they're getting help from to build their apps, Twitter.
Photo: Robert Scoble | Flickr
