Taming Twitter's Chaos

“We are so f***ked” was my first reaction. This was back in 2019. Just a couple of months ago, we had acquired the Twitter bot @threadreaderapp. The service was utterly reliant on Twitter. I got an alert that we had not posted for an hour and just found that we had been suspended. Did our six figure investment just go puff?

It turned out to be an automated bot that locked us and we resolved the issue within a day. But if I weren’t already acutely aware that our success was completely dependent on Twitter, this episode was a grave warning bell. I vowed to fix this.

We tried the usual entreaties writing to Twitter, attempting online and offline ways to establish contact. Of course, we just got ignored.

Then our first break came when the Twitter Developer team tweeted

It helped that our little bot was rising in usage and popularity. We encouraged our then almost 400k Twitter followers (now >750k!) to respond to this simple tweet, and gratefully, many obliged! I was humbled and amazed that @ThreadReaderApp was the most cited and liked response to the tweet. 

This helped us get on the radar with Twitter Corp. It was fortuitous that they were developing a second version of their APIs and needed developer feedback. In a nice turn around, they contacted us. We were thrilled to help. Their v2 API was drastically different and much more complex than their first version. I explained how we were using their current APIs and we explored how we could adapt and alter our code in light of their possible changes.

Through the course of this exchange, I was introduced to Daniele Bernardi who would later head up Developer Relations at Twitter. I will always treasure our relationship with him and his team. There would be continued incidents of suspensions and shadow-bans and we were grateful to have a contact to quickly resolve misunderstandings and to unban us when Twitter “automations gone wild”

I recall being ever so impressed and grateful that Daniele was at once both professional with our needs and at the same human and genuine. Unlike many of our other BigTech dealings, he was always super responsive. 

When we came up with an innovative way of presenting Twitter threads like how some newspaper articles were adapting to the web, Daniele was one of the first to notice this and offered words of encouragement.

When Musk acquired Twitter, the transition was chaotic and unpredictable for us. Many developer accounts were suspended without warning including ours. We were asked to fork up a minimum $42,000/month. In the midst of all this confusion, we were grateful that Daniele continued to help us, directing us to the few remaining contacts in developer relations who could still help us.

They say past is prologue. I’m recalling these incidents now because in an amazing moment of serendipity, I met Daniele again a few weeks ago. In my quixote quest to keep up with the latest in AI, I’ve been attending presentations of hot new AI startups. When I heard there was going to be a presentation that just happened to be a few blocks from where I live, how could I not go? To my surprise, the lead presenter was Daniele! He was launching his brand new startup Toolhouse.ai.

I’ll leave why I’m so excited about Toolhouse.ai and how I ended up writing a Twitter Tool on their platform for another piece. But I wanted to end by saying if you build on a platform, having a good relationship is of course crucial. And just as you apply entrepreneurial hustle and creativity to ensuring your product is useful and widely known by your would-be customers, you need to apply that same energy to build good relations with the folks that are building that platform you are so reliant upon. I am grateful we had that with Daniele.