In his second public appearance since being named Twitters permanent chief executive earlier this month, Jack Dorsey on Wednesday apologised to the developers who work with the social media company to create apps. His admission came as he begins a turnaround effort at Twitter, which has struggled with user growth and attracting advertising dollars, while taking public his mobile payments company, Square, by the end of this year.
Somewhere along the line our relationship with the developers got a little complicated, Dorsey said at the companys annual developer conference in San Francisco. We are going to reset our relations and we want to make sure that we are learning, that we are listening and that we are rebooting.
One key to the effort at Twitter is to work more closely with developers who use software tools from the company to create their own apps, and Dorseys apology appeared to be an attempt to set a new tone with them. As part of that effort, Chris Moody, the companys vice president of data strategy, announced two new software tools that should provide deeper insights into how the audience on Twitter is responding to an event and how engaged users are.
At the event, the company also described some of the tools developers have access to in order to see who is using their apps, which Twitter said can help programmers improve their products. The company also unveiled more ways for advertisers to use data from the company and more tools to let publishers embed tweets in apps and websites.
So, you can help them understand things like impressions, which have never been programatically available, no more guessing about impressions. You can also get all kinds of fascinating engagement data around their content. So, things certainly you would expect like favourites and re-tweets but all kinds of interesting click and view and open data thats never been available before, said Moody.
The next product is our Audience API. So the Audience API is about providing aggregated insight about custom audiences. So, again, this is something weve never done before. Were actually going and were servicing internally demographic, encyclographic data analysis that weve never serviced before. So now youll be able to bring your custom audience and look at twitter and get information on things like gender and demographics and location and interests that youve been asking for and now were actually going to be able to deliver, he added.
