I wonder if Joel Spolsky had some influence on Alex. I really enjoyed his blog.
"Twitter Rolling Out New Website To Kill TweetDeck and Other Third Party Clients"
http://www.businessinsider.com/henry-blodget-twitter-rolling...
It's forgivable if Alex overlooked that perspective but this is by no means techcrunch's fault. They reported what he tweeted.
Partner relationships are very sensitive. I have a product that is being sold by a reseller who has two sales people pushing it. One of the sales people heard a rumor from somewhere(a classmate) that we might be selling directly in the market so he would have to compete with our in-house sales staff for the same business. He contacted us in panic. We had to assure him that while we do plan to do in-house sales, that is for other markets. Point is, when you have good partnerships that are not just fluff, you also need solid communication.
If developers didn't care about the twitter api, they wouldn't give a shit about this tweet. Because they care about it, twitter should be very sensitive to how they communicate with developers.
No, they didn't. They took what he tweeted, gave it a sensationalist headline, and vomited out a few paragraphs of text designed to drive traffic to their site. That is most definitely not reporting.
>> twitter should be very sensitive to how they communicate with developers.
Alex tweeted his opinion about some cool things to come. This is not "communicating with developers", it's making an offhand comment. Twitter communicates through developers through a mailing list, and several official accounts (@twitterapi, for example), not through the personal tweets of its employees.
I don't think it's Alex's responsibility to analyze in advance how every thing he tweets might be interpreted. TechCrunch and Silicon Alley are to blame for the over-sensationalized writing.
Let's just say we have a serious disagreement there. He essentially tweeted about private future plans of twitter, something I'm pretty sure you cannot do. If you are an employee and you tweet about strategy, you have a responsibility to think from all angles. Otherwise you risk hurting the company you are working for out of negligence--never a good thing in any employee.
This was nothing until Techcrunch put their spin on it.
You really, really do.
While I don't think the various tech blogs that "reported" on my tweet did anyone a service by blowing it out of proportion, the onus for communicating poorly and freaking out our developers over nothing is ultimately on me.