Taylor, Your job title very much does matter. Any respectable public/"open" API publisher needs to be concerned with the needs, wants and feelings of their developer community. If you are part of Twitter's effort to address this concern, then you need to be doing certain things. If you are not, then you probably should not be labelled as doing these things in order not to produce misleading expectations among aforementioned developer community.
>From the sounds of things, you're somewhere between evangelist and client services, but nowhere close to being in the ballpark of developer advocate. I'm not saying you're not doing a good job, I'm just saying you're not doing THAT job. Unfortunately this just contributes to the idea that Twitter doesn't care about the people who enabled its success, that it's grown too big, too fast, to remember the little people, that it's all about the big money and not at all about the community. I'm sure that's driven in large part by Evil Investors, but somewhere at Twitter, someone needs to take a stand and strike a balance. Apparently that's not you. ∞ Andy Badera ∞ +1 518-641-1280 Google Voice ∞ This email is: [ ] bloggable [x] ask first [ ] private ∞ Google me: http://www.google.com/search?q=andrew%20badera On Tue, Apr 6, 2010 at 7:07 PM, Taylor Singletary <taylorsinglet...@twitter.com> wrote: > Hey everyone, > My job title doesn't matter much. I do what I can and what needs to be done, > whether that's being a contributing programmer on upcoming platform > features, thoroughly testing an API before launch, analyzing implementations > for spec compliance, communicating to and with the developer community, > working closely with partners, writing documentation, or otherwise. My focus > is on making the developer experience a positive one regardless of what > bucket you fit into (hobbyist, corporate contributor, research scientist, or > entrepreneur, or another lovely bucket). I might do that through building > internal tools that make it more efficient and scalable for us to support > you, I might do that by helping people out here who have questions, and I > certainly might do that by channeling feedback generated in this particular > segment of the developer community back to internal teams. > When answering questions or engaging in discussions on this forum, I try to > answer specific questions that are representative of the whole. I might not > answer your specific question, but it's likely I'll answer a similar > question with a response that would also apply to your own. Sometimes I will > be intentionally obtuse. Often I will be overly verbose. If I don't perceive > that I have something meaningful or valuable to add to a conversation or > argument, I won't likely respond. > We're listening. You're always a factor in the decision making process. > Sometimes the community can help change a decision mid-flight (like us > deciding to find another way to keep public_timeline alive, despite our > desire to deprecate). There will be other times that we'll make a decision > that's not in alignment with the perceived popular opinion. All of these > things are true. I'll do my best to be transparent on our thought process > when it's appropriate to do so; there are times when we won't make our > intentions perfectly clear. > The Twitter API will change. You & I will change with it. This is abstract. > This is concrete. This is not a surprise. This is not a pipe. > I'm still learning. > Taylor Singletary > Developer Advocate, Twitter > http://twitter.com/episod > > > On Tue, Apr 6, 2010 at 12:40 PM, M. Edward (Ed) Borasky <zn...@comcast.net> > wrote: >> >> On 04/06/2010 09:31 AM, Raffi Krikorian wrote: >> > all in all - i hope a lot of you are coming to chirp, as i would >> > absolutely >> > happy to have this conversation in person over some beers :P >> >> Black coffee for me, decaf if we're doing this at the "hack session / >> unconference" ;-) >> >> >> >> -- >> M. Edward (Ed) Borasky >> borasky-research.net/m-edward-ed-borasky >> >> "A mathematician is a device for turning coffee into theorems." ~ Paul >> Erdős > > -- To unsubscribe, reply using "remove me" as the subject.
