Third-Party Apps Restriction: Twitter Might Be Confused

Micro-blogging site, Twitter appears to be in an indecisive situation currently as it could be noticed in their recent action on third-party app restriction.

Twitter took a swift movement of late in taking down quite a number of account without as their tolerance for policy violation has gone slope down.

Bloomberg’s Selina Wang diagnosed the problem in an article titled “Why Twitter can’t pull the trigger on new products.” Largely, Wang’s reporting laid the blame at the feet of CEO Jack Dorsey.

Dorsey’s leadership style fosters caution, according to about a dozen people who’ve worked with him. He encourages debate among his employees and waits — and waits — for a consensus emerge. As a result, ideas are often debated “ad nauseum” and fail to come to fruition. “They need leadership that can make tough decisions and keep the ball rolling,” says a former employee who left last year. “There are a lot of times when Jack will instead wring his hands and punt on a decision that needs to be made quickly.”

This view closely tracks my own discussions with current and former employees. They’ve described for me the regular hack weeks that take place at Twitter, in which employees mock up a variety of useful new features, almost none of which ever ship in the core product.

Once upon a time, Twitter let people build whatever kind of Twitter apps they wanted to. For a brief, shining time, Twitter was a design playground. Developers making Twitter apps invented new features, such as “pull to fresh” and account muting, that became industry standards.

Then, in 2012, Twitter reversed course. Under Costolo, the company decided that its feature lay in Facebook-style feed advertising, which meant consolidating everything into a single native app it could control.

But rather than kill off third-party apps for good, it introduced a series of half-measures designed to bleed them out slowly: denying them new features, for example, or capping the number of users they could acquire by limiting their API tokens. While this spared some amount of yelling in the short term, the move — which was still hugely unpopular with a vocal segment of the user base — needlessly prolonged the agony.