Twitter is trying to repair the damaged relationship it has with app makers by offering them a more robust service for building applications. Fabric, the company's suite of tools for building apps, added eight new integrations yesterday that should make Twitter a more tempting partner: mobile payments from Stripe, cloud infrastructure from Amazon Web Services, and Mapbox for building custom maps. Twitter announced the partnerships, which include five other partners, at its Flight developer conference yesterday in San Francisco. The software development kits will become available to any developer that utilizes Twitter's free Fabric developer toolkit.
The company wants to court developers back to its platform after years of mixed signals like Twitter shutting off access to services like Politwoops, which archived politicians' deleted tweets. CEO Jack Dorsey, who took the helm in an official capacity earlier this month after an interim role as chief executive, began the Flight keynote address by apologizing to the community. "We want to reset our relationship, and we want to make sure that we are learning, that we are listening, and that we are rebooting," Dorsey told the crowd.
Twitter wants its developers back
But Fabric, which launched a year ago, doesn't take Twitter back to the days where developers could freely build Twitter clients of their own. Instead, it's an effort to make Twitter a major player in the broader app ecosystem, giving it a larger audience to monetize with integrated advertising and other revenue tools. Fabric is undoubtedly more useful today than it was when the week began. But whether developers will trust Twitter to provide the foundation of their apps remains an open question.