This exactly captures why Twitter is so disappointing.
From my normal user perspective (not advertising, not a celebrity...) they've never been an internally innovative company - @mentions and retweets are community inventions, the best clients for niche, power, and general use have always been 3rd party, and after stumbling onto a private messaging hit they shot DMs behind the woodshed just before the world went wild for whatsapp and snapchat. The community continues to come up with interesting ideas, never to be implemented. There's no doubt Twitter has stellar engineers. It's strategy that needs to be externalized. A shame they've spoiled so many developer relationships.
For the past five years Twitter engineering has been focused on two things: rebuilding the infrastructure and building an ad platform. They nailed both of these. But unfortunately that left little time for product engineering. Add in the revolving door of heads of product and it's no surprise there hasn't been much substantive change to the product.
From my normal user perspective (not advertising, not a celebrity...) they've never been an internally innovative company - @mentions and retweets are community inventions, the best clients for niche, power, and general use have always been 3rd party, and after stumbling onto a private messaging hit they shot DMs behind the woodshed just before the world went wild for whatsapp and snapchat. The community continues to come up with interesting ideas, never to be implemented. There's no doubt Twitter has stellar engineers. It's strategy that needs to be externalized. A shame they've spoiled so many developer relationships.