Twitter co-founder and former CEO Evan Williams admits that the company “screwed up” its relationship with third-party developers in the past, and says that happened mostly because the startup didn’t originally plan to become a platform company. Now that it is actually trying to be a platform, Williams says that Twitter will continue to try and provide opportunities for developers, but isn’t ruling out moving into any Twitter-related service or feature area, with the exception of gaming.
Williams, who recently stepped down as CEO and was replaced by former chief operating officer Dick Costolo, told the crowd at the Web 2.0 Summit in ** that Twitter originally released an API — which allows developers to integrate their apps and services with the network — because “we thought it would be neat,” and lots of other web companies had them. But as the company grew, he said to interviewer John Battelle, it realized that it needed to fill some of the holes in its feature set, and that led to the purchase of Tweetie and triggered some bad feeling in the developer community.
Twitter has continued adding features, Williams said, and plans to keep on doing so regardless of whether other companies are already providing services or apps that have those features. For example, Twitter launched an analytics-focused service today, which provides data from the 100 million or so tweets that are published on the network every day to a small group of partners. But the former CEO said that the company wants to ensure that the platform it is building also has plenty of opportunities for outside companies and startups.
Williams also said that the demand for the company’s ad-related services — such as “promoted tweets” and “promoted trends” — has been far greater than the startup has been able to satisfy, and that most of the advertisers who have tried these features have come back again. These monetization efforts have been much more successful than Twitter initially expected. The company also gets revenue from deals it signed with Microsoft, Google and Yahoo to provide the full Twitter “firehose” of data for their search engines, and today announced a similar deal to provide half of the firehose to Gnip, a company that will be reselling the data to outside analytics providers.
Battelle asked the Twitter founder about rumors that Russian holding company Mail.ru might be leading a new ** financing round that would value the company at more than $3 billion, but Williams refused to comment, saying only that Twitter “has plenty of money in the bank” already.