Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey Apologized to Developers for Past 'Confusion'

It has become clear that Jack Dorsey wastes little time getting to the heart of an issue.

During his first earnings call as interim CEO in June, Dorsey called out the Twitter product team, saying the company needed to do a better job “clarifying ownership” over projects. One week after taking the helm as permanent CEO, he laid off more than 300 employees to create a “smaller and nimbler team.”

On Wednesday, at Twitter’s annual developer conference Flight, Dorsey got real again, this time with the developer community that Twitter hasn’t always welcomed with open arms.

“Developers took to our service from day one and [gave] Twitter a much more global reach,” Dorsey said. “But somewhere along the line our relationship with developers got a little bit complicated, a little bit confusing, a little bit unpredictable. … We want to come to you today and first and foremost apologize for our confusion.”

Twitter’s history with developers is checkered at best. On multiple occasions, it has cut off developers with little explanation. The most recent example is when it shut down a series of services that preserved tweets from politicians, known as Politwoops. It also cut off DataSift and essentially forced Twitpics to shutter before ultimately buying it.

In other words, Twitter has a heavy hand with developers. But Dorsey is asking for a second chance.

“We want to reset our relationship and we want to make sure that we are learning, we are listening and we are rebooting,” he said.

Twitter is expected to launch a number of new developer tools Wednesday at Flight. Be sure to check Re/code as we’ll be following along.

This article originally appeared on Recode.net.

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