Twitter burns bridges with #devnest organisers
It’s a shame to see Twitter acting like this. They’ve always had a slightly difficult relationship with their developers; primarily because they made a mistake early on of encouraging developers to build their own end-user clients, which really made no sense in the long run. This caused a very large percentage of Twitter developers to essentially end up in competition with Twitter, and seemingly made Twitter hesitant of giving any real developer support. Devnest was created and ran by the Twitter developer community in the UK, and has been hugely successful in creating a thriving developer community that backs up Twitter - even through the recent painful clarifications by Twitter of what they want their platform to be.
I believe that the clarifications Twitter made are the right ones - developers should be value add in ways that Twitter isn’t, and not try to replicate their core functionality. Now that they are comfortable with their plans for their platform, they are obviously trying to re-connect properly with the developer community. But chucking out local organisers in this way is completely the wrong strategy, creates ill-feeling and just makes it harder and more expensive for Twitter to run their own events.
It’s a sad comparison with the Facebook Developer Garage. Facebook initially suggested for local developers to run garages in 2007. In London, Toby Beresford took up the call to organise the very first, which became popular, and a number of us joined him to form a committee to start running the events every month. We ran the events completely by ourselves, with support from Facebook in terms of promotion, badges, and stash. We found outside sponsors to cover all our costs. Facebook began to help more in 2008 by covering some of our costs. I took over as Chairman and host in mid 2008, a position I held until the end of last year. During that time, Facebook continued to increase their support for their garage, greatly increasing their sponsorship when we needed - after we lost our free venue at Sun, for example - but always giving us full leeway in terms of how we ran the event.
This was despite the garage morphing into something quite different than they had planned - whereas other garages were more ‘officially organised’ by Facebook every 6 months or so, we were running packed events ten times a year. Attendeeship continued to grow, until now almost 200 people are turning up every month. Facebook now have developer support engineers on the ground in London, and this year they are more involved in helping to support the events, but it is still run independently by the committee.
Facebook now have a big and supportive developer community in London with events running every month, at tiny cost or management overhead. They don’t even have the same level of events in Palo Alto or San Francisco.
Hopefully, Twitter will realise that the way to achieve a similar success will be to really support current communities like #devnest, and not to try and usurp them.
