A decentralized Twitter would bring the company back to its past

Today we’re going to talk about Jack Dorsey’s surprise tweetstorm about potentially decentralizing the service — but first, some history.

Death came to the Twitter developer community on August 12th, 2012. In an infamous memo, the company’s head of product divided potential uses of the Twitter API into four quadrants. In the past, developers had been able to make any sort of Twitter app they wanted to — including a full-featured, ad-free Twitter client that they could customize any way they wanted it to.

It was a policy that led Twitter to become, briefly, a design playground for some of the world’s most talented user interface designers. But the policy also ran counter to the vision of Dick Costolo, who had become Twitter’s CEO two...

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