Twitter Expected to Begin Layoffs and Stop Headquarters Expansion
nytimes.com
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I have often wondered what thousands of Twitter employees are doing all day long? Their platform and apps have been stale for a long time.
I don't think WhatsApp introduced any innovation at all, its popularity is derived from network effects, together with the questionable practice of using phone numbers as public ID and automatically adding all your phone contacts as chat contacts without them having any say in the matter.
Their innovation is evolution of WhatsApp past text messages. And in the end, nothing is a true innovation -- most things build on past ideas.
basically they shot themselves in the foot on the mobile market with an half assed implementation, and even today the notification system on skype mobile apps is dumb, especially how they handles balloons (the only app that could do worse on notification balloons is facebook)
whatsapp may not be a cornerstone of reliability, but it has an incredibly frictionless mobile user experience.
My mom back in India finds email address and passwords confusing but she immediately understood watsapp and how to send messages to her sister in US.
The plural is an important side issue. I only have one phone and one public phone number. I'm not sure how many email addresses I have, its definitely more than five but less than two dozen? I do know my broadband provider theoretically gave me an email address about a decade ago that I've never used. I hope no one is sending email to that address...
Skype sometimes hangs on my pc and on the phone. Both my pc and phone have a good configuration yet Skype does not play nice.
Innovation for whatsapp = Simplicity + Reliability
They are adding new complicated features that all users hate to "increase engagement".
Network size is not as important as how messages are distributed within it. Whereas most WhatsApp messages are one to one, on Twitter they're almost always one-to-very-many.
If 10000 Twitter users with 1000 followers each send a tweet, that's 10000000 messages hitting queues. 10000 WhatsApp users sending a single message each are likely to result in 10000-20000 messages (sometimes people have group conversations).
If you want to "do social", do it for small groups. Nobody really has 40 000 friends, so why bother with the use-case that is literally only used by advertising companies?
There are numerous non-company non-celebs-in-the-Hollywood-sense-of-the-word people who have huge followings on Twitter who get a lot of value from that and who their followers also appreciate: people like DHH, John Carmack, Marco, Sam Altman, Scoble..
There is a definite space between "people you know personally" and "blast ads to 2 million customers" in social and Twitter fills it really well.
So... don't?
So you're not wrong, but the people went to Twitter. Even Google killed Reader. I go where my audience is.
RSS is fine for plumbing and pros but has not evolved into anything resembling a user-friendly system.
Twitter has way more features than RSS, but do people really use "favorites" that often? The tweets I "fav'd" I don't really go back and check later, or maybe I'm not the targeted demographic
Twitter is more for information
To be successful, you usually have to do something outside the comfort limits of existing technology.
Twitter innovated by redefining how social interaction works - and then proceeded to slowly grow bloated and cashless.
Every person's new feed is uniquely generated based on their followers. That means you can only at best cache at the individual tweet level -- you still need to uniquely generate a news feed for each user. This means that for every user you need to individually grab information simultaneously from the same high velocity tweets, while still being able to present information to each user uniquely based on conditions regarding how twitter should display tweets for that specific user individually. That's incredibly demanding data wise because it makes horizontal distribution of load much more difficult --- a huge number of people are all making demands on the same set of data resources, and you can't easily cache that data because of how real time and quickly updating it is.
In comparison WhatsApp on Erlang is basically just an example of extremely dramatic real time horizontal scaling. Hosting hundreds of millions of simultaneous chats is relatively trivial in Erlang, given each one is operating under its own separately scalable chat process. Since very few chats share data with one another, horizontal scaling is easy because you don't have the issue of the same resource getting called simultaneously by millions of unique users at the same time, who all need that resource represented back to their own news feed in differently categorized ways.
tl;dr: WhatsApp with the right technology is WAY easier to scale than Twitter.
---------------
(Speaking of the magic of Erlang for chat programs, this funny video "for Ruby/Node.js hipsters" explains how Erlang does this magic quite well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rRbY3TMUcgQ) )
And Twitters core message exchange functionality is conceptually extremely simple.
You need to be able to take a message, and put it into the set of targets, T.
Problem is T can be "unreasonably big". E.g. millions of followers. Solution? If something is too big, see if you can divide the problem. Split T into smaller chunks t1..tn, and distribute them. If those chunks are still too large, split them again.
This reduces your problem to figuring out how to insert and remove and balance a tree, and how to process two kinds of message deliveries: Insert into timeline or reflect message to specified set of targets (each of which can be another reflector, or a final target timeline)
We all know of and use a system that does this at massive scale: E-mail w/forwarding and mailing lists. If you really wanted to (though it'd be extremely inefficient) you can do this with off the shelf mail-servers and other e-mail software. Using mail servers as messaging middleware might sound weird (and there are certainly better alternatives today), but it works just fine.
At Twitter scale there's certainly enough savings to be made from figuring various obvious and not so obvious optimizations (off the top of my head: for some of the users with the really extremely follower counts, it may make sense not to push their messages, but to push them to caches and weave them in dynamically) to justify the salaries of a few software developers to cut down on hosting and ops costs, but the basic problem is not hard.
I tried Googling reflectors but nothing relevant turns up.
If anything, Twitter's operation is significantly easier.
No those acres of employees at Twitter are showing each other powerpoint presentations, ordering lunch for each other, and subdividing again and again tiny slivers of functionality into more and more product management teams, none of whom have sufficient authority to make any material improvement to the product.
if your system design is actually done that way, i.e. that that amount of actual msgs, in one shape or another, hitting actual queues... well, you would definitely inflicted "scale" onto your system. It is like for any powerful data system there is always possible to make a cartesian query that will kill it :)
As long as you first write the tweet to a durable canonical datastore, you can recover from the loss of any queue for individual users by re-processing the timelines of the accounts they follow. Hence you don't need those queues to be particularly durable. You can afford to cache a lot of data in memory, and write compressed updates to disk lazily. How durable you make the system is a tradeoff between the frequency of node failure and the cost of recovering from it vs. the cost of more nodes to handle lower write rates.
The alternative is to pull, but then you inflict polling costs + a lot of caching hassle.
I mean, it's obvious. And WA isn't necessarily a replicable model for all companies.
That may have worked for them, but I suspect it's filled the company with many media-only types in a toxic way similar to how Yahoo got hurt by thinking of themselves as only a media/ads company. That killed them against Google, who as Paul Graham pointed out, was a company that was still successful in feeling like a startup technology company well after becoming large.
Given Twitter's lack of technology innovations, I'm inclined to think they are more towards Yahoo than they are towards Google.
Like he wants to come in with a drop in OPEX such that he has some flexibility with finances by dropping some staff?
As someone who joined Twitter recently this sucks. I left a great job to come work at Twitter because I believe in what they're building and now a few months in I might be looking again. :-(
To be fair, the first week I was asking myself what all of these people do. I wish the company had been more transparent with this but I understand why they can't start telling people there will be layoffs, people panic and worry like all 4000+ employees are doing now.
Think before you type a rude comment too, most Twitter people read HN and will see it. :-/
Just three days before this leak everyone was told we're doing well, we're going to grow and hire more people and build these great new things. They also had a big talk about leaks and then went on to show 4000+ people the full product plans for the next year. Then, sorry, we're firing a bunch of you. Oh yeah, don't leak anything we just told you. :-O
I find this mindset frankly mind-boggling. I work for a significant corporation, and we recently changed CEOs. The trade press was reporting the change three months in advance; and anyone who cared to know about it on the shop floor probably did. But they didn't tell us ... presumably because it would get leaked. Which it, of course, did anyway. It seems to be almost an unconscious corporate reflex to treat the bulk of your staff like morons.
My feeling about Twitter is that there was an opportunity to seriously monetise it around the moment it started getting serious traction for PR. The celebs had given it critical mass, and Coke and McDonalds had to follow.
Now, however, the shills are basically just given an enormous amount of free advertising space with a not-great premium option on top of that. (A promoted tweet is not as good as an embedded tweet in a 'proper' news outlet, which will be part of the PR package, sold together to a client as advertising-equivalent exposure.)
They could still do something like start charging per tweet per thousand followers for content promoting a specific product or service (a made up back-of-the-fag-packet example, I'm sure there are better ways), of course, but it would be much harder given the expectations that have built up around what the platform is.
EDIT: clarity
My understand is that there are laws about the disclosure of market-moving information make a lot of C-suites paranoid.
The thing is that refusing to answer, or being vague, is itself an answer. The incentives are to lie. If you equivocate, the effect is frequently more destructive because of the amount of rumour and innuendo that builds up.
This is why changes of policy in business and politics are often sudden and contrary to previous promises.
If not, there is a vibrant alumni community who is happy to welcome you and help you network and adjust, even if you were only working at twitter for a week. If you don't find it, email me (in my profile) and I'll help you find it.
Good luck (but you don't need it)!
No criticism? Is it bad if I say that they have a very simple product that doesn't need so much people? Is it bad if I say every feature they add they ruin it more? Is it bad if I say I would rather go back to 2010 Twitter?
Where do you work, lets compare products/people and the impact the product makes on the world shall we?
Product team: not so much.
There are intelligent people that work at many companies. You should avoid rude comments about people in general. Twitter is not special in this.
> Where do you work, lets compare products/people and the impact the product makes on the world shall we?
This is fairly egotistical. Twitter doesn't solve all problems for the world. It's a great service, but your comment is fairly negative and insulting. Especially for someone that only recently joined.
This is probably a very wise move. 4000 employees is just insane for what they do. Grow wisely.
Yes and no. Twitter will make ~$2 Billion in revenue this year (and it's their massive revenue growth that's kept the stock price where it's at). That takes a LOT of sales and marketing people to achieve.
Typically when a company announces layoffs its stock goes up. More mature companies have sometimes slashed headcount on the way to a better market situation. But when younger companies announce layoffs, the markets stop assuming they have lots of growth ahead and adjust expectations accordingly -- usually resulting in a significant drop in stock price.
Remember, back in July, Twitter announced earnings beating market estimates. This was at 4pm, its stock surged 4%. About half an hour later, CFO Anthony Noto said Twitter would not see "sustained, meaningful" user growth for a "considerable period of time." TWTR promptly plunged 10%.
http://www.cnbc.com/2015/07/28/twitter-earnings-7-cents-per-...
The truth is that with modern technology you can build a company that has hundreds of millions of high-volume users and yet is not very expensive to operate. Companies, and their revenue, don't necessarily scale the way we're used to from the experience of industrial companies.
So, I'm genuienly curious. How do they make money by "ramping that shit up"? I've seen a lot of companies that have 'get users' as their M.O., but I have no insight into the "profit!!!" phase. Opening their user base seems contary to "profit!!!", from a laymans perspective.
It seems to me like API/User info availability is their leverage w.r.t. profitability, much as it pains me as a potential developer who would like that information for free. How does decentralization make them (and their investors) money? I can't see a way to do both given the incentives.
1. Open API's, good documentation and community engagement goes a long way in establishing developer trust. I don't believe developer trust is correlated significantly with revenue (directly), but it's absolutely correlated with acquisition. I'd argue that Angular or React were partially successful because of the stickiness of their communities, and that's a powerful self-perpetuating force.
2. Monetization is in the queries. Facebook and Google know this. Throwing aside all of their auxiliary services, emerging markets, hardware, et al... between 70-90% of their respective revenue is from direct advertising. If there's a way to scale or "ramp" their revenue model, this would be the portion to focus on.
An alternative: I agree with everyone that they should have turned the APIs back on - they just should have made it mandatory to carry advertising as part of the feeds in order to access the feeds. They could have also layered on federated advertising for anyone consuming the API - meaning, allow those folks to show their own advertising in-stream. They simply pay Twitter a cut. Both of these may have helped them both grow the audience and advertising at the same time.
The desire by some individuals to make insane amounts of money on an idea are directly responsible for a massive SUCK experience for the end users of the software because those users are then forced to use the software in a way that makes the revenue predictable. I used to love to use Twitter because of all the wide variety of apps and things I could do with it with code. Now it's just unusable and dying. I would pay to make that different, but there isn't anything they offer that's worth my time and effort, so I'll go elsewhere.
Why is the data only valuable if someone has fair access to it? Right now, basically anyone can go license the Twitter data and have access to the full firehose. And I don't know how you know if the data is real opportunity here (vs. advertising).
"The desire by some individuals to make insane amounts of money on an idea are directly responsible for a massive SUCK experience for the end users of the software because those users are then forced to use the software in a way that makes the revenue predictable. I used to love to use Twitter because of all the wide variety of apps and things I could do with it with code. Now it's just unusable and dying. I would pay to make that different, but there isn't anything they offer that's worth my time and effort, so I'll go elsewhere."
Are you offering a better path for Twitter and their shareholders, or are you offering a path that feels better, but may have a much lesser outcome for those parties? If so, why would they take it?
And while I agree with you that Twitter is dying, it's not unusable, it's just not usable in the way that you want to use it.
In 2011, 96% of Google's revenue was from AdWords -- in recent years that has lowered slightly due to their diversification and cloud services, but it's still at least a 70% share of their gross revenues.
Facebook is currently ~80%.
The money is in the ads.
The original poster is talking about queries in a difference sense than a Google query - he's referring to it as an API call in a "firehose" sense - so I'm buying access to the Twitter data for my application. I'm suggesting that the number of people who will pay for those API calls is limited.
But no doubt that money is in the ads - that's why I suggested that they should turn the API back on, but require clients to display the ads. Sadly, I think this opportunity is gone as they have killed their developer ecosystem.
[edit] and perhaps that was a poor choice of words. as a developer of high-volume low-latency exchange feeds, "query" has a bit of a different meaning to me.
You are completely right, there is a huge strategic reason for promoting OAuth API's as a large company.
IMO though the API "shutdown" was shortsighted by Twitter. If people are using a competing interface instead of your own, then maybe you should fix your own rather than just shutting down the API. Of course that's easy to say as an outsider. I'm sure the truth is much more nuanced.
Tinder piggybacked off of Facebook OAuth logins in a useful way, and now Facebook has further cemented their permanence as it will now be very difficult for that dating app to sever themselves from Facebook OAuth.
As for directly monetizing the APIs, one thought that springs to mind is charging for the firehose in a federated way. You could, for example, have a query endpoint that looks like this to guarantee standard issuance of data, identity and payment:
GET /api/v1/status/access
{
"payment_address": "13kU1qPtM3WWXrNugWfRPNM1BniMQDw9Ds",
"rate_bytes_sec": 50000000,
"ask_expires_at": 1444492687,
"access_token": "h458Yf301",
"ask_in_satoshis": 1000000,
"ask_window_secs": 3600
}
GET /api/v1/status/h458Yf301
{
"payment_address": "13kU1qPtM3WWXrNugWfRPNM1BniMQDw9Ds",
"payment_received_address": "13kU1qPtM3WWXrNugWfRPNM1BniMQDw9Ds",
"payment_received": 2000000,
"access_expires_at": 1444499887,
"identity_screenname": "kordless",
"status_data_begins": [
]
}
Well, maybe, but you can't save your way to $2b in revenue. Stock prices don't generally go up on cost savings, they go up because of future revenue AND profit expectations. Silicon Valley and Wall Street both prize growth in revenue way over profit. But you're correct that they might discover another revenue stream - but now you're betting a lot on the value of federation.
"Make a payment to the address, then start querying at 50MB/sec for the duration of your valid token (in this example, 2 hours):"
I think you are vastly overstating the number of people or companies that would be willing to pay for this firehose. While it may be useful to some companies, overall the data isn't likely to be enough to be a $1b opportunity. More importantly, the number of people willing to buy isn't likely to grow - so a B2B play can be a minor part of their revenue but I don't believe they'd be able to depend on it for massive growth.
"And yes, I'm proposing Twitter should use Bitcoin to monetize query traffic. Even better, charge people for posting lots of statuses, or following and unfollowing lots of people. Link ask price to signal/noise ratio."
Given the current cost structure of other services (Facebook/Instagram/SnapChat), I'd argue you're unlikely to get anyone to pay for it, and you're reducing both the size and any potential growth of your audience dramatically.
This is from their Q1 2015 report, so data licensing and other revenue is probably $200M ARR now. Clearly people are willing to pay for access. If they improve the way they provide that, it just might be bigger than a $1B opp.
I would be willing to pay for on demand abilities to control who I follow and unfollow without being throttled.
- That the opportunity is there - and that the growth will continue. This isn't a given, but it is possible. I think the fact that Twitter is obviously investing more in the advertising business tells us what we need to know about the data business - that it is good, growing, but will always remain a relatively small portion of their overall revenue mix. Now you may argue that that is because they're blocking it - but my assumption is that they are investing based on Total Addressable Market (TAM) and experience. - That the problem is the payment system. There's little to support this - there's little sign of demand or willingness from individuals or small companies to spend on this at scale.
The fact that you're willing to pay for on demand controls is great and fine, but it does not mean that anyone else is willing in the same way.
Investors had to dump more than a billion dollars into Twitter to get it to where it is today.
I'd agree though that at least technically, to deliver the core user product, this money simply wasn't needed. (It might have been needed for advertising or building up contracts, etc.)
2) Twitter reported half a billion in revenue last quarter.
And yet managed to lose 136 million dollars. While revenue is interesting, it just doesn't matter if you can't turn a profit.
Time to go read about their OPEX I suppose. Anyone got a link to a good write-up?
People are expensive, office space in their 30+ offices is expensive, hundreds of thousands of servers are expensive...
1. http://money.cnn.com/2014/03/06/technology/social/twitter-ca...
2. http://www.glassdoor.com/Salary/Twitter-Staff-Software-Engin...
Twitter can easily bring in enough revenue to keep doing what it's doing indefinitely. And that's totally fine. But it's unlikely they're going to grow by 10x in a few years or pivot drastically. Yet those unrealistic expectations were built into the current stock price.
Google's stock price would not be at where it is now if the company "just" stopped at search. It's everything else they kept pursuing that's allowed the company to reach stratospheric valuation heights relative to its real revenue.
But is it? Maybe the public is realizing that tweets were just a cool fad for a while. For twitter to be profitable, I am guessing, there has to be people that want to use it, and (very important) people believing that people want to use it (so they'd pay Twitter for advertising).
Compare with Google. Google provides something momre back (gmail, search, calendar, docs, photo storage, directions + many other things I forgot about).
Twitter provides 140 status messages. There is nothing wrong it, that is very cool. But I think there is a realization that it just isn't as cool as it was in 4 years ago. And it just became 3% less cool.
It seems to me that stock price is correlated with more money: if I have X stock options worth Y dollars each, I effectively have X*Y dollars worth of stock. If stock price increase by 1 dollars, I have X dollars more than I did before. No?
Exceeding expectations with a price drop afterwards is inexplicable.
No. Only if you sell it right now. A lot of problems come from people thinking stocks are more liquid than they are.
Sure, but the "market" price of stock isn't really the value of every* share, its roughly the marginal price of the last/next share purchased or sold, but the more you want to trade, the farther from the market price the value will be.
And changes to the market clearing price don't tell you about changes to the supply and demand curves, just where they intersect. So, for any but a small quantity of stock, you can't tell what the real change in the realizable value of your holdings is just from the change in the market price, since there's no guarantee that a change of $1 in market price equates to a change of $1/share in the price you'll get if you try to sell a particular quantity of a stock.
We tend to ignore that when placing a valuation on a portfolio because if you don't ignore it, you can't get a valuation. But those valuations are approximations, at best.
It probably is. But probably not as much as everything believed it would be.
Coolness is about making money in case, but indirectly. If investors see others not being interested in Twitter and not regarding it as cool, they will pull out. I understand Twitter's primary revenue tool is advertisement. That requires users to advertise to.
I can't tell if you're being ironic or facile, but Twitter has become quite a bit more than "140 status messages"(sic). It's a medium where politicians, dissidents, celebrities, the hoi palloi, brands, and anarchists all interact. Its a place of record quoted in headline news briefs and long-form journalism. It is used to organize rebellion and restricting access to it is viewed by many as a human rights violation.
Twitter as a business has problems, but being a fad isn't one of them.
I'd heavily disagree with that. The fad's not over, but it is a fad. The reason it sticks around is that people have an easy way to communicate with celebrities/popular people, and that was certainly not twitter's goal. The moment something better for this comes along, the fad will quickly fade.
Their entire userbase could do a MySpace overnight.
Restricting access to any website (except in some extreme cases) is viewed by many as a human rights violation. I don't see how Twitter is unique in this respect.
Twitter should never have been a publicly listed company. They don't have a business plan, there was never any prof that they would be profitable. But Silicon Vally types, news media and bankers liked using the platform so: hey presto Twitter is a billion dollar company.
Twitter could be profitable if each user paid just $10 per year, but sadly I don't think people like it enough to pay up.
Any fluctuation within 5% is perfectly normal and totally meaningless.
They haven't announced layoffs. The article is very clear about this.
Money has to come from somewhere; if it is not from you, it is by monetizing you. But ... why not monetize the user even when they did pay? It's a whole new revenue stream, that's often orthogonal to the payment stream.
Paid Hulu has ads. Windows Solitaire has ads now. Movie theatres have been showing ads since forever. Cable TV is showing ads.
All that's left in my browsing experience to hint that sites are trying to maintain themselves on advertising are reels of clickbait stories that come at the side and bottom of every traditional media article. I can't help but hope they are only a technocultural shift away from the abyss of anachronism.
The technology can be used to target us, but in the end machines do the work and they are very predictable. We also have machines, and knowledge, and can stand up against the bullshit.
> Paid Hulu has ads. Windows Solitaire has ads now. Movie theatres have been showing ads since forever. Cable TV is showing ads.
The problem with my idealistic vision of the near future is that we are just as likely to accept this as normal. We habitually pay for stuff and still get ads. We have the tools to block the crap but it's much more important that we decide to.
Millions of people gave up eating gluten because they learned about celiac disease. I'd like to imagine that we are just a few headline-grabbing research papers away from swaying the public about the healthiness of exposing ourselves to psychological bombardment.
The apps need to handle it gracefully because they can't tell whether the ad server is legitimately down or just blocked. I've never had an app work any worse with blocked ads.
Although if I were trying to think of business models that seem to be struggling, those would probably have been among the first examples that came to mind. Windows 10 so far appears to be another Windows Vista/8. The movie theatres around here seem to operate under constant fear of closure. We don't have a complete equivalent of US cable TV here, but I get the feeling that on-line, on-demand services are threatening that model as well. In each case, I can't help suspecting that the degree of customer exploitation/price gouging has a lot to do with the waning popularity.
Popular and irritating since (a) it's incomplete (if you're paying, you're increasingly product, too, since companies aren't going to leave rifling through your data as a way of making money alone), and (b) it's become a kind of astroturf ad campaign for certain companies.
Twitter had potential, but it appears stagnate as all they've done is created a new version of an AOL instant messenger chatroom with hashtags and 128char limit. Limiting the API tokens for 3rd party developers was a really foolish move.
Additionally it brought up nonsense click bait.
It looked like they just fed in the front page of yahoo.
Oh well, I don't think Twitter is going away any time soon but I don't really understand some of the steps they've been taking...and 4,100 employees? Yikes!
Fair enough. That probably goes for almost everyone on HN as well I would think but obviously we're an edge case.
> Their goal with these features is not to retain existing users but to acquire ones who wouldn't have otherwise used Twitter.
Hmm, how would this attract new folks? Like Facebook tries to show you things you care about but this I'm not sure how it's really sold to perspective users. Since it's a social network I'm guessing much will be word of mouth but that requires support from existing users.
I wonder if things like increasing the character amount and offering a better, maybe threaded conversational way of interacting with folks would bring in more people. Granted those may not be the best choices philosophically but I wonder if they've done any A/B testing where certain areas got different features like more character counts and how it turned out.
This is such a crazy innovation to the structure of chat programs, that it blows my mind other real time communication platforms haven't incorporated it. Even Facebook Messenger and GChat feel inadequate now that I'm consciously aware that they don't let me edit my chat messages after sending them. It's such a no brainer innovation that nobody has ever done, likely because when you're building a chat program the idea of letting people edit chats after they send them makes the brain of any engineer hurt -- but there's an untapped value to allowing it that many products haven't realized yet.
On the plus side, shorting TWTR has been rewarding. Won't be doing it any more with a founder at the helm, of course.
Companies need to have real revenue and produce real profit and then need a valuation based on sane multiples. Twitter got behind that curve badly and ultimately this is what happens.
Layoff are the result of incompetent management, and nobody wants to work for a company staffed with incompetent managers.
Perhaps I missed it but no where did I see any specific mention that this was either surgical or across the board. Care to elaborate? If they didn't specify it certain could go either way.
It's not going anywhere in the next year or two. But in five years? Ten years?
Twitter's main problem is that it has one product, and it's possible to get bored with that product. It's not really possible to get bored of googling things or buying things off amazon, but it's entirely possible to get bored of twitter.
Remember when every man and his dog had a blog? (Or possibly a livejournal?) Remember when the word "blogosphere" was all over the news? What happened to all the blogs?
> What my vague acquaintance had for breakfast
> What my vague acquaintance had for breakfast
> What my vague acquaintance thinks about politics, which I need to grit my teeth and not reply to.
> Slightly amusing post from a well-known celebrity I follow, which someone will post on facebook later in the day anyway.
> Slightly amusing post from a well-known celebrity I quite deliberately don't follow, but which gets retweeted into my feed anyway.
> A politician I am starting to regret following wants my money.
> What some well-known celebrity I don't follow had for breakfast
Tools do something useful. Twitter doesn't -- at least, not for 95% of users.
They became listservs. Ironic huh?
Their problem is that costs are far out of line, which is why they're cutting. Twitter could turn a significant profit if they design for $3 or $4 billion in sales (rather than pretending they're heading toward $20 billion). Their margins should be comparable to Facebook's, their business is no more difficult to optimize.
They have 12% of the sales of Facebook, with ~38% of the employee base. It's an extremely poorly run, bloated business. They're built to scale to Facebook's size, but they will never achieve that size no matter what happens. Long-term they're a $20 or $40 billion market cap business, instead of $250 billion.
Google's original investors were FUMING that the company didn't pursue ads earlier, following with what Yahoo did. In retrospect we now see the insight of that approach.
Twitter's problem is one of product. It's not innovating, it hasn't changed it's core formula in many years. Compare that to Google and Facebook which both made many bold improvements to their platforms after booming into success. (Though facebook one could argue has slowed down in its innovation.)
I wonder how many unicorns lack these criteria. Only Twitter has the discipline of public markets. If it doesn't deliver, public shareholders get burned.
If unicorns don't deliver, private investors get burned, but where do the losses go? VCs, founders, employees, as well as some family offices, banks, university endowments, pension funds...where else? And I sure am curious about the exposure of these last three groups.
Twitter's IPO stock price reflected the promise that the service previously showed. The company was drowning in the possibilities provided by the incredibly valuable real time data it holds. It's not an easy task but what they've failed to do is organise and deliver all that data in a way that provides value.
Specifically, the user experience is horrible. The argument from people who love Twitter is that those who don't enjoy Twitter need to refine their stream, follow carefully and proactively curate their feed. In my opinion that's bullshit, and the onus should not be on users to find value in Twitter's data! Instead they should be able to enter their interests and Twitter should do the heavy lifting to give them relevant and interesting information.
If every time I open my Twitter feed I find interesting news, information and new contacts I'm going to keep coming back and engage with the platform.
For instance, during the recent downtime I wanted to see what Squarespace was saying and what others were tweeting to them. There's now way to do that without doing a search for their username.
Tweets and replies only show replies to what an account tweets, which is virtually redundant when sat alongside the full 'tweets' stream. There was no quick click way to see what others were tweeting to them.
This compartmentalisation is a constant attribute of Twitter that they seem to actively maintain and even design towards. They expect you as a user to know what you want to see.
They need to be much more active about presenting data views to the user and take away the need for the user to try and extract meaning and relevance from the constant stream of data.
The twitter feed reminds me of when GMail did away with colors and made it hard to tell at a glance when one message ended and a new one began. It's difficult to parse tweets vs retweets vs replies at a glance. The UI is somehow both cluttered and a huge waste of space, at the same time.
My feed was boring, so I added people I wanted to follow; race drivers and commentators, tech commentators, etc. Now it's just a firehose of junk.
Yes, if I tried harder, I could make it work. But that's not my problem -- I don't make money from my Twitter use. That's Twitter's problem to solve if it wants to attract more growth.
as a discovery/exploration tool sucks.
if it had interesting suggestion based on hashtags and followers beyond 'follow this three more person' daily mail it could be a nice networking/news tool, but so far it cannot really help me navigate in the millions streams that might be interesting but are accessible only knowing that exact hashtag
I followed a couple news outlet, I guess there are many more that may interest me but I can't be assed to search them and if I discover them myself they go by preference into feedly, not twitter.
on the other hand, it had been great to follow this and that indie game developer :D
http://www.smashcompany.com/technology/rss-has-been-damaged-...
And that is part of the reason why walled-gardens like Twitter sometimes do well. Sometimes open technologies are crippled by politics. Sometimes centralized decision making is faster, and can get more innovative stuff out the door. It took many years for specifications like Atom to mature. Meanwhile Twitter developed a huge eco-system of 3rd party apps.
But there is a counter-argument. Twitter later killed off much of the eco-system of 3rd party apps. And that suggests the weakness of central decision making. No one has the authority to kill RSS. And that suggests the strength of decentralized decision making.
But it seems clear, when an idea is young and immature, centralized decision making often has a speed advantage over what committees the industry sets up to try to work out a specification.
Tons of Twitter's best features were stumbled upon by accident, but a lot of their decisions, especially around limiting third-party clients, were justified in their minds by their user testing that showed just how confusing it was to locate and install a useful Twitter client and sign up for an account. The control they had allowed them to reduce friction to nearly zero. For anyone like Technorati to replicate that with open standards, they would have just exercised the same level of ownership.
This is all a shame, I'm sure there's some alternative universe in which longform content has been saved from invasive advertising by a frictionless, open system. And I certainly don't think Twitter is going to come up with a particularly interesting or successful business model. But I open my Twitter app more than my feed reader, and I think I'm happier for it.
Nonetheless, I've had trouble convincing my parents why they should use Twitter.
Companies such as AT& T, Chase, Citi, Bank of America, Amazon etc..
I have ditched Facebook that's a cesspool of humanity and HR magnet.
But since I started really getting into it last year, I've become so much more knowledgeable by following the best entrepreneurs, VCs, anyone with interesting insight. It's a surprisingly pure channel of news/knowledge if you use it correctly and not go on a follow spree.
It's definitely not the place for social networking as far as communicating with friends/family goes.
Most of my non-tech friends in real life broadly do not have Twitter accounts, or if they do, they follow about eight people (usually including Stephen Fry) and have either never tweeted, or only tweeted about four times, usually starting with, "Well, I'm on Twitter now. What do I do next?"
I'm talking about people in their 20s and 30s here. The same set of people do make a lot of use of Facebook (though a few, like me, find it vastly irritating and have deleted their accounts in recent years - but I'm not sure I know anyone female in that age bracket who doesn't have and use a Facebook account).
A bit more anecdata while I'm at it: Instagram seems pretty popular in cities, where people enjoy posting pictures of their pulled pork burgers and cocktails in jam jars - out here in the countryside, I don't hear much about it. The younger generation definitely do use Snapchat and the like, but I think most people over about 25 have no understanding at all of it. WhatsApp seems to have a very broad and universal appeal, and is a real common denominator for anyone who falls under the category of "I want to keep in contact with a friend who lives abroad" (I don't fully understand how it won out over Skype, apart from Skype being a very poor experience on mobile). Lastly, I'm not sure I know anyone who doesn't work in online media who actually uses Pinterest.
But 4K employees, 2K engineers to support Twitter? If they were still in a rapid growth/innovation phase, perhaps they could get away with this. But rapid growth is over.
As far as I'm concerned, I would not want to go to work for Twitter. Whenever I hear about layoffs, I think of mismanagement. When the managers have run the ship aground to the extent that capable engineers that were hired to build product are now going to loose their jobs, there have been some huge errors and missteps. Getting back from that is going to be very difficult, and imagine now trying to attract technical talent to a company that has just cut technical staff; the best and brightest are going to have better options so Twitter is going to be at a disadvantage in the general labor market. This means they will have a harder time finding people, keeping people, staffing projects. And they will have a harder time completing the projects they do have and with enough speed, creativity and quality to compete against startups and other companies with more agility, motivation and access to better workers.
With Jack coming back as CEO, I don't necessarily agree with layoffs overall being bad. He could have a solid plan and reorganizing and prune workers who perhaps have atrophy from lack of excitement or whatnot can be healthy - even though surely disappointing and upsetting to some.
Not their fault they are being laid off you know.
- they're hiring for different specialties and departments than what's being cut
- at least in theory, they're hiring people who would be above-average workers while laying off those below average
- they still need to compensate for normal churn, which is probably exacerbated by the layoffs
- they can try giving new candidates weaker compensation to save costs
Ultimately, workers are not fungible and it requires active effort to maintain a team as people come and go. This doesn't change during layoffs.
Or can appear cheaper to bean counters, at least.
HOW THE WORM TURNS.
completely incomprehensible why they needed such a large headcount. ten times more than whatsapp would be ok - but not this behemoth.
all these designers do what exactly? ignore ipads, macs, etc.
i love twitter, use it constantly to follow journalists, vcs, basically to get faster news than any site. i hope twitter can be cut back to the bone.
No but that's the majority; I simplified on purpose but obviously they have far, far more people there than necessary.
> lots of well-maintained OSS projects (Mesos, Aurora, Finagle, Pants, Bootstrap, Zipkin)
As much as I love OSS it does not pay the bills.
As an example, they could have gone with Zurb Foundation instead of doing Bootstrap. They could have used (redo, cmake, tup, a hundred of other tools) instead of doing Pants.
If Twitter was non-profit, their breadth of products would have been awesome. But it's for-profit, and most of these projects are negative on the P&L summary, even if you favourably take into account intangibles like "help in recruiting people" and "coolness of brand".
google ads is funding the other google, which behaves like a non-profit. and it works, as their ad business is amazing.
but, it sets a really bad example to follow. twitter thought a long time they could operate like google it seems. time to bring back reality.
And they are already reporting profits.
I doubt they will go the way of Twitter.
And that's in an industry where the products are close to fungible, without depending on network effects.
On the other hand, one binding ecosystem with disparate products can easily become either walled gardens or badly-fragmented loose confederations, so it's not the best situation, either.
In terms of Whatsapp, micro-transaction maybe? That I am not quite sure, it is not going to be as straight-forward as Instagram.
This sounds like 90's bubble talk, but "eyeballs" do matter. Investors and the market care about the current social value of a product in terms of the value / growth of their user base.
Ask many millenials/teens and they say they more meaningfully interact with Instagram than Facebook. That fact about social trends is worth its weight in gold in terms of its user base.
Their willingness to hold off for many many years without revenue was now brilliant in hindsight, given they found a much better way to make money on advertising than how Yahoo ever imagined it. But they wouldn't have got there if they caved into short-term thinking obsessed investors who think you need to post immediate revenue.
Twitter's issues are more to do with a lack of product innovation or evolution, not that it has gotten too large. Its problem is that it has gotten too large without expanding its product base to support or justify that growth.
Ask how many millenials or teens have bought something or spent money because of an ad on Facebook or Instagram.
WTF do they spend that much money on?
That made me giggle. Their entire existence is communication.
Our economic system needs revision to be able to handle a non-growth mode.
This isn't a knock on WhatsApp -- I use WhatsApp and don't use Twitter -- but Twitter's scale challenges are vastly more complex than WhatsApp's, which doesn't have many features that can't just very simply horizontally scale.
Back of the envelope calculation: If your messages are 256 char messages, on a 128GB ram server you can fit 500 billion of them in memory; incidentally, that's one day's worth of tweets these days. I recently got a quote for a beefy 256GB ram server from Dell for $6,000. To make things easier, let's assume $10,000 with redundant 1TB SSD and everything else you might need. The data is extremely easy to shard.
With proper caching, you can probably keep 99.9999% of all tweets shown in just one such servers, and serve them within a few ms. I don't have recent experience with web frontends, but a properly configured nginx could probably server on meager hardware can do a few tens-of-thousands requests per second. a Seastar server on beefy hardware can probably handle a significant percentage of Twitter's load.
Search is a little harder, but not by much.
Is this engineering trivial? Far from it. But I've worked with stunt programmers who can build this in a few months with a 3 person team. At least one of them commands a salary of about $500K last I heard.
Is that all Twitter is doing? No, I'm sure they have 10 backend "things" for every user visible "thing". They needed something like Bootstrap for internal use, after all. I don't really believe you can run Twitter with just $1M/year in capex, just $1M/year in opex and just $1M/year in engineering salary - you need a whole lot more than that; In fact, to pull in revenue of $2B/year (which Twitter seems to be on track for), you probably need 50 people just in accounting.
What I am saying, though, is that the technical challenges faced by Twitter (at least those that are visible to users) are highly overrated. If you know what you are doing, Twitter can be run on $50,000 worth of hardware; This has been true since 2007 - Computers were weaker and had less memory then, but Twitter had much less traffic too. I've looked at the numbers every single year since 2007, and at any point in time, the "bare bones essential hardware for interactive response" was in the $50,000 range. Which probably means if they spent more than $1M/year on hardware (or depreciation-equivalent-hosting) at any point in time, they should have hired better engineers.
You will also need space for fulltext indexes, indexes per hashtag (a set which grows constantly and never shrinks, but has a power distribution, meaning that some hot tags will overwhelm any single machine and it constantly changes), the ability to call up any tweet from any point in history (growing by one beefy Dell server per day), the ability to fan out to 1 or 10 or 10 million followers and so on. The fanout problem turns sharding into a lumpy problem because again, there is a power law distribution that can overwhelm any single machine.
Then there's the fun part that Twitter is so reliable these days that when something else on the internet breaks, we check Twitter for updates. Robustness at that scale is more than buying a pair of SSDs and setting up RAID.
One thing I've learnt from being a consulting engineer is to stop assuming other engineers are morons. Sometimes we do things out of ignorance, or out of fear, or out of necessity. But often, when you inquire, there is a solid non-obvious reason for non-trivial diversions from the simplest thing that could possibly work.
I always find it useful to give the benefit of the doubt.
But .. fulltext index done right, including per hashtag, doubles the storage requirements at most. And the ability to call up any tweet from history does not need to be as instantaneous is recent tweets (It's ok to wait 5 seconds for a tweet from 5 years ago).
> The fanout problem turns sharding into a lumpy problem because again, there is a power law distribution that can overwhelm any single machine.
Not really, in the case of twitter (where you only trace edges, not edges-of-edges and edges-of-edges-of-edges like Facebook and Linkedin do). In the simplified model I described, the web frontends all pull from the backend, but for the hot 10-million account followers -- of which there aren't that many --, you can just push them to the webservers so they don't even need to query)
> Robustness at that scale is more than buying a pair of SSDs and setting up RAID.
I most definitely agree. But it is cheaply doable when everything is so perfectly shardable as it is in Twitter.
> Then there's the fun part that Twitter is so reliable these days that when something else on the internet breaks, we check Twitter for updates.
That's possibly an illusion. Yes, Twitter is mostly reliable - but do you have any latency stats? e.g., would you know if, on a daily bases, 10% of tweets take 60 seconds until they appear on a viewer's refresh? The "hot" accounts would be cached and immediately updated, but the long tail might have minutes delay and almost no one would notice.
> But often, when you inquire, there is a solid non-obvious reason for non-trivial diversions from the simplest thing that could possibly work.
> I always find it useful to give the benefit of the doubt.
I do not assume other engineers are morons. In my experience as a consultant, though, those solid non-obvious reasons for non-trivial diversions are much more often than not "historical, do not apply any more", "we didn't have time or resources to do it the right way", "the guy who did the initial design did it wrong for whatever reason, and now we are stuck with it", "there's a legal reason that's not obvious why we can't do it that way", and a few others.
Twitter had the resources to do it better from very early on, and they didn't (I think it was 2012 or so before Twitter became reliable). For all I know, their system now could be the most efficient beast ever, and run on a ZX81 with 1K Ram with ultimate reliability, way better than I could ever hope to build.
I was just pointing out that the user facing side of twitter, technically speaking, is not very impressive. I've been doing it for a while on various technical forums - and not once did anyone offer a reason for why it's much harder than it would seem -- most of the responses were along the lines of "but mysql/pgsql/oracle can't take the firehose load, I tried!". Which is correct, but irrelevant.
By saying it can be done with $12,000 of hardware, you essentially claim it is trivial.
> everything is so perfectly shardable as it is in Twitter.
Shardability, or partitionability, depends on the underlying distribution. It's only "perfectly" partitionable if that distribution is perfectly uniform.
Twitter's traffic patterns are power-laws. Some tags vastly outnumber others. Some users have vastly more followers. Those distributions are unstable across time and space in surprisingly short order.
> Twitter had the resources to do it better from very early on, and they didn't (I think it was 2012 or so before Twitter became reliable).
Twitter wasn't interested in a contest to use the least hardware. They were in a race to keep up with surging load, while migrating from Rails to something that didn't exist yet. Meanwhile they have, under the hood, built infrastructure that could not be bought off the shelf from anyone at the time.
We can't actually come to a conclusion here, because you're arguing a counterfactual. It's always easy to have the ideal solution to a problem you never actually solved yourself, because the visible features of a problem are obvious and the many, many invisible problems are where the bulk of the effort are hiding.
If you want to prove that Twitter doesn't need such large and complex distributed systems, you can probably round up a few hundred thousand in angel funding and sell yourself to Twitter for a nice return.
Not at all. What I'm saying is that, with the proper software (which is not trivial to write), you can do it with very little hardware. I know stunt programmers making $500K/year, and they are in some senses infinitely (not just x10) more productive than bad and even average programmers - because they quickly produce working systems that others just can't.
Whether it makes sense to pay $50K/hardware and $500K/programmer or $2M/hardware and $100K/programmers depends on how you run your business, though - and in many cases, the $2M/hardware+$100K/programmers are the more economical choice (because you risk starving for stunt programmers choosing the first)
> Some users have vastly more followers. Those distributions are unstable across time and space in surprisingly short order.
And yet, as a system designer you actually get to choose what the distribution is of - and a good choice makes it uniform. The power laws may or may not favor sharding on uid specifically, but usually there's a simple way to shard uniformly. And if you can't find a way to programmatically shard uniformly, then shard using a lookup table on the userid - 8 billion user ids require all of 8GB of ram if you have 256 shards or less (and if you bundle users in groups of 256, 32MB is suddenly enough). Migrate around to keep balanced. This has been a solved problem for years. Really, even migration patterns. Look at "consistent hashing" literature -- (it's not the fundamental issue that consistent hashing solves, but the peripheral solutions are well known, common, and apply here: migration, redistribution, redirection).
> Twitter wasn't interested in a contest to use the least hardware.
> We can't actually come to a conclusion here, because you're arguing a counterfactual. It's always easy to have the ideal solution to a problem you never actually solved yourself,
First, I basically agree with you, if it wasn't clear. I know not what problems twitter were facing. I suspect that they weren't technical in nature, though -- because the technical issues have been solved before them. It might be management issues, it might be ego issues. I've seen more projects fail or stumble on those than on technical issues.
I actually did solve those problems myself, on a smaller scale (hence my interest, but with perfect sharding that would have scaled to any size, live migration and redistribution and all). But that startup folded because we sucked at getting traction - which only shows to go you that technical prowess matters not in these issues, or at least not much.
> many invisible problems are where the bulk of the effort are hiding.
Again, to be clear - I totally agree with you. I'm just disagreeing with the aura of engineering excellence that Twitter gets in this (and many other threads). They may have it, or may not - I haven't seen evidence that they do. They can keep twitter running well in the last 3-4 years, which means they are reasonably competent. That's all I have evidence for.
> If you want to prove that Twitter doesn't need such large and complex distributed systems, you can probably round up a few hundred thousand in angel funding and sell yourself to Twitter for a nice return.
As I have mentioned several times in other replies (and other discussions) - twitter's problem is not, in fact, engineering, and hasn't been since 2012 at least (it definitely was 2007-2009). They threw enough money/people at the problem, and solved it.
Right now, they are bringing in $2B/year, but spending $2.5B/year. If they are spending more than $200M/year on user facing hardware at this point, I'd be surprised. I'd even be surprised if they are spending $100M/year. But let's assume that I can save them $200M - that's nice, but won't actually save them - the company needs much more significant changes than that. And that part of the infrastructure only brings in users. I know not what systems they use to actually bring in money -- which is actually much more important to optimize.
And ... what I'm doing now is more profitable than what I can likely get from such a project (and I don't have to gamble or raise money). So, thanks, but I'll pass.
Let me ask you this, though: Look at the healthcare.gov debacle. I assume our discussion would have essentially been the same (including the counterfactuals) up until the point where a team rewrote it in a fraction of the time, with a fraction of the resources, and much much better - and I guess at that point we would be able to agree factuals.
Would you consider the discussion futile in either case? I don't care about agreement (factual or counterfactual), I'm trying to learn about the problems that are invisible to me. So far with Twitter, I've learned non so far over 8 years of the (more or less twice annual) discussion.
Again, I've mentioned several times: Whether or not they now run their infrastructure efficiently is very unlikely to matter -- unless they are horribly incompetent, which I assume they are not. I'm just trying to understand the aura of excellence (or alternatively, the depth of the problems) that Twitter deals with technically.
I assume the average tweet is closer to 80 bytes, and taking advantage of that can let you store twice as much tweets in memory.
[0] Does twitter count utf-8 bytes, code points, graphemes, or something else towards the 140-"char" limit? Regardless, the computation would not yield materially different results.
WhatsApp also doesn't provide a CDN, mobile analytics/monetization/debugging platform. WhatsApp also doesn't contribute to open source like Twitter does (Storm, Bootstrap, Aurora).
Describing twitter as a "140-char" mailing list is very reductionist. OTOH WhatsApp problem is very well served by Erlang/Mnesia an open source distributed messaging library developed by telecommunications company who were likely doing WhatApp-scale 10 yeas before WhatsApp came around. While WhatsApp engineers are great, there is very much a "standing on the shoulders of giants" - giants who have well researched the problem of building a system that lets two or three individuals communicate. There wasn't anyone doing Twitter 10 years ago (well, maybe Google).
I don't mean to imply that Twitter is an efficient well oiled machine, but the comparison to WhatsApp is daft.
[1] http://highscalability.com/blog/2014/3/31/how-whatsapp-grew-...
[2] https://www.erlang-factory.com/upload/presentations/601/EUC2...
In any case, my main point isn't that that WhatsApp is simple. When I said the parent posted was being reductionist, I was referring to Twitter's product offering. AFAIK (I could be wrong) WhatsApp is a messaging backend and multiple client frontends. The "50" engineers is deceiving becaus, despite the fact that Mnesia could or couldn't have scaled, there is a very non-trivial amount of engineers who worked on it and Mnesia is a good & proven system. In a similar light, Instagram was 13 engineers (or was it employees) and hundreds of django instances - and that maybe all you need for a photo feed, however Instagram didn't have a trending feature until earlier this year and how knows how many engineers that took.
If WhatApp hired another 200 engineers, likely 195 would either be twiddling their thumbs or working on new features outside what was needed in that acquisition to Facebook. Now we can make the argument that Twitter is bloated because they have too many products (Fabric, Vine, Crashlytics, and their numerous other acquisitions) - and the scaling back of those engineers may mean sunsetting those products - and thats fair. To imply they have 4000 engineers building a glorified 140-char mailing list is not.
Absolutely! You could probably get a single rack to handle storage and broadcast of millions of tweets per minute, perhaps hook it up to a Teradata appliance to handle search and storage at that throughput. Throw it in a nice distributed database indexed by user. Then just another couple of indices for the hashtags and mentions, and the follows/follower graph. Throw in another few tables for handling API permissions, managing schema migrations while ensuring that data from day 1 is still as transparent as yesterday's logs, a highly replicated ad server hooked up to a realtime recommendation engine that analyzes an active user's current stream and recommends the most relevant ad (to maximize revenue of course), set up a few staffed policy teams to comply with the differences in global regulations, handle lawsuits and legal requests, and of course keep competing for more revenue with the likes of Facebook and Google.
It's pretty trivial.
When you have several hundred million users, that adds up. An effective monetization model, if unusual in SV.
Are you suggesting that WhatsApp's model of organization is the norm for a sustainable organization? I think it's a clear outlier in many respects.
Are you suggesting that WhatsApps business model was based on annual revenue?
Silicon Valley mentality at its finest.
The company existed to make a return for the owners. The owners exited with $16 billion. That was the motivation of the owners/employees, not $14 million in annual revenue.
My point is that the transaction must be analyzed from the viewpoint of the owners (as that is what the poster I was responding to cared about, viz a viz total profit/revenue to Twitter). When you do that, WhatsApp cashed (well, assuming FB stock can be treated as cash) out more per employee than Twitter.
Since WhatsApp was a revenue-generation corporation with a board of directors, like any other corporation, before their acquisition, and since I don't like to indulge in conspiracy theories, I'm going to assume that yes -- their business model was based on annual revenue.
Then you'd assume wrong. The goal of the board is to maximize return for investors. In WhatsApp case, it's not hard to see that their goal was to grow as fast as possible, revenue be damned, so they could be a very attractive takeover target for a company like Facebook who could eventually hope to monetize that user base.
They're nowhere near relevant. I keep getting local-to-US ads, and I'm in UK (and geolocate as in UK too). Not as bad as showing alcohol ads to 5 year old children, but still pretty bad.
This doesn't mean that there aren't teams of people trying to constantly make those ads more relevant. And since not everyone at a Twitter can statistically be incompetent, I'm going to assume that the problem is actually quite difficult, and perhaps requires a large team.
WhatsApp had ~30 when they were acquired, and were also huge. ("Huuuuuge!", says The Trump)
Those teams are gods of scalability. Twitter is.... kinda the opposite.
Edit: My apologies if I've offended the HN mystique surrounding the god-like status of WhatsApp. Ask Jan yourself, they weren't geniuses. I know Jan. He won't claim to be this exalted persona.
Edit: I know b/c I've done that before in $previousjob. Storage is hard. Storage is where the money goes. Durability is expensive. Storing ephemeral stuff in a non-durable KV store is easy, cheap, and trivial to scale. This is why WhatsApp didn't have so many people, not because they were geniuses.
Disks are slow. If you don't need to wait for disk, then you can handle a great deal more req/s per node, which means the point at which you need to become a distributed system is further away. Without the state synchronization problem, converting to a distributed system consists of little more than adding a load balancer.
Even in an environment that needs synchronized state, the services that can be stateless are much easier to deal with (and you try to make as much of your infrastructure stateless as possible).
Storage costs are not relevant compared to the costs of engineering distributed systems.
Deciding which ad is the most optimal to show benefits from every input (metadata?) you can make available and analyze.
That must require some multiple of effort vs. making sure 140 chars get shown where they're directed to go.
The twitter tears are flowing in this thread
Also, that was just an example I pulled out of the air. It could be middle management, or a documentation expert whose role is regulating font size. The point is that for a company with a simple product, an API and clients for that API, and monetization through advertising, that's a lot of employees. If the money's not there, cut the fat.
Square has been focusing on invoicing, cash advances, appointment scheduling, marketing features, and slicing and dicing business data, among others[0]
Strip these companies down to core competencies:
* Communications
* Real time information broadcasting
* Financial infrastructure
* Global penetration
* Advertisers/Brands/Companies
Not PG's What Microsoft is this the Altair Basic of?", but "What Apple is this the Ipod of?"* I don't know, but as someone who never got into twitter, I'm interested to see Jack take a shot with:
* both sides of the market in one place
* financial infrastructure
* customer tracking
* brand participation.
Likely result is a Merger of equals with no power struggle at the top levels. Everyone expecting this anyway so expect it to happen soon.
[0]http://fortune.com/2015/08/02/square-reinvention-ipo-dorsey/