I’ve been seeing a definite trend towards more and more Twitter staff responding to questions on the developer mailing lists. This is another in a series of positive signs for the future of the API. What I especially like is an apparent specialization by support staff, with some people seemingly assigned to specific areas of API functionality. Twitter’s investment in developer support proves they want the developer community to grow.
Now that I said something nice, I’d like to make a minor complaint. You can see a certain level of equivocation in the previous paragraph with words like “apparent” and “seemingly.” This uncertainty is based on the odd practice of the support staff to not identify themselves as working for Twitter in their response. Back in the day, it was traditional to use a signature like “Twitter Developer Advocate.” The new crowd rarely include any signature or other sign of their role, so you have to guess their status based on the context of their message. I’ve tried figuring out who is who, but many of them have perfected a tragically hip and ironic stance in their Twitter bios and tweets. I guess job titles are too 20th century. It would be great if everyone doing Twitter dev support at least had a signature that showed their messages are “official” in some way. But then I’m an old, crotchety, and totally unhip guy.
I still appreciate how much help we are all getting. Thanks, everyone at Twitter, even if I’m not sure who you are.
