Twitter starts holding bi-weekly office hours on Periscope for developers

Twitter has published a blog post in response to developer feedback following the company’s Flight mobile developer conference. It said that in the first three days after the event, more than 5,700 tweets were sent with the hashtag #helloworld. A fraction of those focused on the platform itself, more were concerned with Twitter’s consumer app and business in general.

But while today’s post summarized the feedback currently received, Twitter isn’t done listening and intends to host bi-weekly office hours starting at 9:30 a.m. PT, on Tuesday. These will be conducted exclusively on Periscope. In attendance will be Twitter’s developer relations team, who’ll be responding to questions both from the #helloworld hashtag and from the broadcast.

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One of the main points made in the post by Prashant Sridharan, Twitter’s global director of developer and platform relations, is about API rate limits, something that has been top-of-mind for a lot of developers. Some in the developer community feel that because the company acknowledges that app makers helped make Twitter what it is today, it should do more to support their efforts and should increase the limit. Sridharan’s response was that it’s “a complicated since a very important thing the current restrictions do is help us combat spam and abuse on Twitter. We need to protect the core Twitter experience for people using Twitter as our first priority.”

However, moving forward, Sridharan wrote that Twitter’s approach to the API will be “a lot more intentional” and that the feeds will “reflect consumer adoption of features and products.”

So what else have developers been telling Twitter that it needs to fix? When it comes to the service, they want to be able to edit tweets (thought Kim Kardashian tried to fix that?), remove the 140-character limit (wasn’t this another thing Dorsey was planning on doing?), and improve the Lists feature. They also asked for better accessibility and improvements on search.

As for the platform, besides the API rate limit request, developers want Twitter to provide more transparency and clarity in upgrading Gnip offerings, and also clarification on the developer agreement and developer policy.

The genesis of today’s blog post comes from events that took place during the Flight conference, when chief executive Jack Dorsey apologized for how Twitter has treated developers. In an effort to “reset” the relationship, he encouraged people to tweet at him and the company using the hashtag #helloworld.

Will developers buy Twitter’s rationale behind its hesitation to increase its API rate limits? Probably not, but Twitter still hopes that they’ll give Twitter another chance, all the same.