The tidal wave of changes in the Elon Musk era at Twitter is heading toward the platform’s third-party developer community, as the Twitter Toolbox initiative that debuted in February will be shuttered Dec. 15.
Ivan Mehta of TechCrunch reported that developers involved in the project received emails earlier this week that read, “Thank you for being part of the Twitter Toolbox pilot program. We’ve made a difficult decision to sunset Twitter Toolbox, effective Dec. 15.”
Twitter introduced Twitter Toolbox in February as a way to showcase a set of low-cost, easy-to-use tools built by its developer community for use by anyone.
Twitter Toolbox was organized into three categories.
- Expression tools at launch were Buffer, which lets users organize, plan and schedule content; Chirr App, a way to write and schedule Twitter threads; and Thread Reader, which enables easy reading and sharing of threads.
- Measurement tools providing access to several types of analytics came from Blackmagic.so, Direcon, Follwerwonk, Ilo and Tweepsmap.
- And safety tools to give users access to moderation capabilities came from Block Party, Bodyguard and Moderate.
Twitter is also pausing its pilot test of tiles, an updated version of Twitter cards, which let developers and publishers include customized formats with a tweet by automatically rendering elements such as a button, image, text or video when a URL was posted.
Mehta shared an email Twitter sent to a developer, which said, “We’ve concluded that the best path at this time is to pull back from this pilot and pause broader experimentation efforts related to tweet tiles. We still believe this product concept can offer value to our users and developers like you. We’ll continue to consider this work as we undergo 2023 planning and may opt to revisit it next year.”
The Twitter Chirp Developer Conference—which had been scheduled for Nov. 16 after not being held since April 2010—was canceled shortly after Musk took over the company in late October.
