Twitter’s Chief Technology Officer to Leave Company
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
https://twitter.com/crazyfoo/status/811331557608652800
AKA outside of Dorsey, who is a split / shared CEO, who is in charge of Twitter?
The head of product is Keith Coleman, who was preceded by Edward Ho (interim, now also (interim?) head of engineering) and preceded by Jeff Siebert (both of whom are still at the company).
Edit: Twitter's bylaws suggest that a VP is a company officer.
2 data points from other industries, based on LinkedIn:
1) Ogilvy & Mather: 7,289 employees, 188 with Vice President in the title.
2) Johnson & Johnson: 63,072 employees, 1,154 with Vice President in the title.
3) Microsoft: 129,445 employees, 2,514 with Vice President in the title.
I think Vice President doesn't mean as much as it used to. :-)
Off the top of my head:
Twitter App- Web, IOS, Android, Other
Twitter API
Twitter Firehose
Twitter Advertising
Twitter Analytics
On the other hand, losing this many execs in this short of time almost never bodes well, which means their stock price is going to tumble even further without something drastic happening soon.
Because advertising on Facebook and Google pays off.
Twitter, afaik, has struggled to be a relevant ad platform.
Now, if you want to talk about the $2.5B expense line....
I feel great!!
Actually, since you're queuing up all the tweets to post them in one go, it should be feasible to add the out-of count to every tweet in the storm! That would be neat. But the last tweet should have it by convention.
Since characters are scarce in a tweet, we tried to reduce the number of non-critical text.
I think we can make the numbering type (x/y) an option.
"Twitter is stronger because w#oneteamneteam" != "Twitter is stronger because we are #oneteam"
Or is that my browser?
I like the term storm-view. I'm stealing it. :D
But note that OoTheNigerian's comment eventually became upvoted (hugely upvoted in fact). That community correction often happens when comments are unfairly downvoted—but it takes a little while.
I didn't see the comments that you erased, but based on many things you've posted in the past, I'm sure they were in good faith and driven by concern for the quality of HN, which is something we appreciate even in the rare case of a misfire.
I can't be the only person who sees this potential. Come on, Twitter, build this out... I'll even let you hire me to work on it. :)
Here's this tweetstorm visualized with the tool: https://s3.amazonaws.com/aws-website-staticfiles-25g9k/tvp.h...
So, imagine your timeline is a regular, vertical stream. But any tweet could have paging on the horizontal axis, and you'd hit next or swipe to continue reading. Anyone browsing could read the opening tweet and ignore the rest if they wanted. Subsequent tweets within the first could have a video, image gallery, etc. Analytics would show the writer how many people delved how far into the content.
So, for a sports story, some people might scroll past, or read the first couple of sentences, but a strong fan would read every detail down through the analysis and stats.
Not sure why they haven't tried this. They could supplant some news that currently exists as links outside of the app.
Considering really the only people on Twitter is just Media people...
(Exception I suppose is the live tweetstorm, where someone is just getting on their soapbox)
I can't understand how he was vp product on a social network.
I'd still suggest that, even though twitter obviously needs advertisers, someone with a deep understanding of users and how they use twitter would lead to more user growth / more engaged users. Which is probably the thing twitter needs most.
Maybe they shouldn't try to grow absolute user numbers and instead focus on being a publishing platform for influencers (keep in mind that lots of people who aren't Twitter users see popular tweets on other platforms). Then they could focus on providing great advertising and targeting for companies that want to reach influencers.
At the end of the day Twitter's customers are advertisers. It seems like they are trying to sell these customers a way to reach a mass market audience. Maybe they should play to their unique advantage and focus on selling influencers' and/or business decision-makers' attention.
It's a good way to control the quality of output, but it isn't a good way to make mega millions, as these big companies and influencers only have so much advertising budget to go round.
Consider also for someone like Trump or a Kardashian, the ability to reach 17.6M followers (and however many more through retweets + national news) for free with no filtering is a huge draw. It's hard to get them to pay for what they have already. Start to introduce features (as Facebook did) that make it more difficult for people to see tweets, and both the end consumers and the influencers themselves will revolt.
Focus less on absolute user numbers and the quality of the product declines (you have less data to train your targeting algorithms on), and the site as a whole becomes less of a draw for influencers too.
Not saying T shouldn't offer 'Premium' content to media companies, but going all in on large advertisers seems like a route to the poorhouse.
I think that term describes most of those companies well, as it incorporates their business model. They just vary in what kind of content or service they offer with their ads.
I dont think it's unfair to call a business what it is -- just like we do with farms or investment firms, though they greatly differ in how they go about that business model.
Why are we making everything a question?
The moment Anthony Noto went to Twitter, all wall street could talk about was that he was brought in to sell the company.
Who ever the next CTO is, they're going to have some tough decisions to make. Twitter already has to pay out an extreme amount of compensation in stock options just to get and retain talent.
I don't want this to seem inflammatory to people as twitter obviously has some serious engineering talent, but does anyone consider them to be a big name in tech anymore? They seem to be in the range of say PayPal in that they have a decent reputation but they aren't really a name that gets you any resume recognition anymore.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/27/business/dealbook/twitters...
> By way of comparison, the company reported $2.2 billion in revenue for 2015 — meaning that it paid out 31 cents in stock-based compensation for every dollar of sales it collected.
You're going to be fighting several battles that aren't really engineering related,
- how to finally fix harassment that seems to be much more pronounced on your platform than pretty much any other mainstream social media site.
- how to get alot more advertising dollars on your site to an audience that short of reddit, seems to dislike advertising more than most social media sites.
And on top of all of this, you're probably going to have to shrink your engineering head count to make yourself look more appetizing to potential acquirers.
Yikes......
PayPal doesn't get you "name recognition" anymore? In fact I would expect Twitter would garner more because of their larger open source initiatives but I still hear lots of chatter about PayPal and the people who have worked there.
Maybe I'm just in a weird bubble but I still consider PayPal one of the big tech names.
I do wonder if this word is even appropriate to the situation. Using twitter seems akin to stepping on a soap box on the town square and shouting every single word you say.
Maybe nobody will pay attention to you. Or maybe you'll get a crowd of people who think favorably of you. Maybe someone else will step on his own box and have a conversation with you, but still there for everyone to hear.
And it goes even further, you even have an official scribe who records everything you say and then pins it to the great proclamation board of the city plaza so that everyone who was not there at the time can still follow what you're saying.
This is an incredibly public mode of conversation that people don't realize what they're doing.
And well, if you say something that people disagree with you will get booing, hissing, insults, threats from a whole mob... maybe just because you're too loud. This would be the risk if you stepped on a box of a real place.
You have to realize that the mob shouting you down probably doesn't really mean to attack a person. It is verbally attacking a public speaker on the city plaza. You get treated akin to an unpopular politician, not as regular citizen discussing things with friends.
Or maybe just because you're Jewish.
https://www.judiciary.gov.uk/judgments/sentencing-remarks-of...
> You have to realize that the mob shouting you down probably doesn't really mean to attack a person. It is verbally attacking a public speaker on the city plaza. You get treated akin to an unpopular politician, not as regular citizen discussing things with friends.
The case I linked above put someone in fear of their life.
It's disappointing to see people claim this is not really an attack.
But if twitter is a public, open platform with global reach then you will also get people who react to you like a public speaker. Which includes things that do not meet the legal harassment standards. Just the texual equivalent of booing, hissing and throwing insults at people to get them off the stage.
And I think people need to be aware of this when they state political opinions on the global twitter soapbox instead of doing it among their friends.
I'm sure changes can be made to dampen it. But this is the current situation. And I'm not sure harassment is a good way to describe it.
Which in most public speaking venues will get you thrown out, and if you do it in the open air badly enough you can also get arrested. (America is rather unusual in the amount of this it allows, not always to the good)
And if we look at this particular case it's not "booing", but "Over a period of three months .. cruel campaign of vile racist abuse".
Also: "You are currently serving a sentence of 40 months imprisonment, imposed on 17 the December 2015 for stirring up racial hatred against the Jewish comm unity in Golders Green. That offence was committed whilst you were on bail for the present offence, which in turn was committed whilst you were on bail for other offences of sending malicious communications over the internet and harassment." -- I think maybe this guy should not have been allowed Twitter while in prison.
Oh just read the whole thing on aggravating features:
1. This was extreme racial hostility over a prolonged period, 3 months.
2. There was careful planning.
3. The offence was part of a pattern of racist offending.
4. You were acting, in effect, as a member of a group promoting racist activity.
5. The impact on Ms Berger was very considerable.
6. As a Member of Parliament she was providing a service to the public.
7. The offence was committed whilst you were on bail and awaiting sentence for other offences of hate crime committed over the Internet.
(You know, if there was some kind of agreement that tweets containing only the wood "boooo" were definitely not harrasment, that might actually be an improvement on the current situation. It's the "I'm going to find you and murder you" and "incoherent string of racial slurs with frog emoji" that are the problem.
Granted, we get into international situations and Twitter is private anyway. Just noting that "allowed" is not as black/white as you paint it and I wouldn't have it any other way. Would rather have minority groups be able to display their true selves to be judged than silenced.
On the "booo" comment though, you may have a helping idea. Maybe instead of a knee-jerk reaction to comment some obscenities, others would just be willing to -1 / boo / disagree in some way. One-click would be used over typing out the comment.
It's the word appropriate for the actual rampant harassment on Twitter: the threats, threats, verbal abuse etc.; that's literally what harassment means. It may not be appropriate for everything on Twitter. When people talk about harassment on Twitter, they don't mean the hissing and booing, but more the "we're gonna rape you", which is harassment on any other public forum as well, even if directed at someone on a soapbox.
About the only thing you can do when someone says (or retweets) something totally idiotic on Twitter is either unfollow, or, of course, reply. In other words, there is no way to register disapproval without simultaneously calling attention to the very thing you disapprove of.
One of the absolute best features of HN is the downvote button and the way it is implemented. Downvotes are stronger than upvotes, and the downvoted content gets buried. A community that lets anyone join has to work hard to maintain a high standard. Downvotes don't kick people out, but they kick bad content off. Twitter has nothing like this, so the worst content gets the most attention. You can choose who you follow but users get no negative feedback on inappropriate tweets. So the norms shift towards whatever creates engagement, which is often outrage, fear, and strongly negative emotional content, with or without any rational foundation.
If Twitter wants engaging and constructive dialog, they need a way to take out the trash.
Unfortunately, Twitter's problem is that their potential for social good and their potential for revenue may never align. Since they are failing at turning a profit, it is unsurprising that they seem to be giving no consideration whatsoever to social responsibility.
Twitter is a little different because of its scale and the nature of its social graph. HN is a big room where everyone hears everyone else, Twitter is a giant switchboard where you plug in to choose your own mix.
Reddit seems to be something else, but I don't participate there so I don't know much.
Absolutely you are right that HN has a more mature mix of participants, but how does that situation continue? It cannot be solely by the direct efforts of the admins, however heroic, because the site is already too big for that.
The technical Magic has to complement the characteristics of the community.
I'd be interested to hear about what are the reasons and ways people find Twitter useful/interesting.
The thing I like about Twitter is who you can follow. Where else can you engage with Obama, Trump, etc. in a public forum? Without the big name political users, the press, the public intellectuals, Twitter would have nothing. The way the big shots are effectively equal to ordinary users is very democratic. I can @ the POTUS and at least in theory get a reply. There's nothing else out there that enables that kind of communication.
It's a shame that Twitter has done so little with so much. Think of the great newspapers of the past and how seriously many of them took their civic responsibility, and how they crowed about it in their editorial pages. They understood their role in society and the responsibility that came with the power they had. Yet here Twitter finds itself in possession of an unprecendented opportunity and they totally squander it. Completely oblivious to their social responsibility, they chase after ad dollars, and even there they fail.
The point of Twitter & other social media is empowering the user; they can encourage community members to step up and take civic responsibility, but Twitter's responsibility as such is to provide the platform rather than to run the show. I guess they could openly declare Twitter to be part of the DNC platform, but that would lose a ton of users (although not so much in terms of content). They're better off following a policy similar to Facebook of attempted neutrality.
Big trending hashtags are always going to have a large proportion of garbage in. Report the spam and pick out the gems with RT; it's even possible to make friends this way.
I don't think it's actually appropriate to just decide what random people who haven't @-ed you and are talking among themselves is inappropriate. If it's one person harassing another, then sure step in and/or report. The big problem is when a celebrity turns their followers on someone.
This Chrome extension worked perfectly for me: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/twitter-unfollow/m...
I've unfollowed everyone (eight years worth of following!), and have been slowly rebuilding the timeline. Strangely cathartic, and the FOMO fades quickly.
It's also nice to start from zero again, rebuilding your interests and filling your universe with thoughtful people in a deliberate and considered way. I wish more social networks made un-collecting as intuitive and organic as following/collecting.
I don't think users attempting to moderate others is a solution. It would reduce the diversity of opinions. The largest group would just push out unpopular opinions.
Instead you need tools that allows users to give themselves peace without punishing others. Maybe with the help of the followed/followers, i.e. some assistance from the social graph.
Downvoting on Twitter would need to have very different characteristics for the reasons you mention.
On the other hand, you actually do need users to moderate other users if you want to maintain a civil community. The alternatives are heavy moderation, which doesn't scale and introduces an institutional bias, or a free-for-all, where emotion drowns out thought, which is roughly where Twitter is today.
I absolutely agree the social graph should be leveraged. What if downvotes only by people you follow affect your feed? You already see retweets only from people you follow, so the idea that your followees influence what you see is part of the platform today. This just extends that influence into the negative direction.
Posters absolutely need to see the downvotes they are getting, the point of the feature is to moderate behavior, not just to create a filter bubble.
Obviously it's not a trivial issue and rolling out new features at Twitter's scale isn't easy either. However I'm pretty confident, with all the engineering talent they have, they could make progress if it was actually a priority.
I haven't seen this mentioned before, nor does it match with my observations of behavior on the site, though I admit the calculations of how down/up votes contribute to dimming is not transparent. Do you have a reference of where the relative weighting of up vs down votes is discussed?
Totally anecdotal, it's just my perception that a few downvotes are enough to grey something out, a few more and it gets killed and people stop seeing it. The first-order effect is that the worst content just disappears. This is the best possible outcome for things that you just don't want to see. Of course there are community norms about what gets downvoted and so it works as well as it does partly because we have a pretty good crowd here that values rational, constructive discussion.
The second-order effect is that people don't post things that are going to get downvoted, and even delete or edit posts in response to downvoting. This is the dominant effect and the main reason why the system works so well, because really toxic stuff just doesn't get posted very often. The users that don't care about downvotes can still get banned.
The best thing about downvotes is they represent the community policing itself, so they don't generate the resentment that admin activity tends to. They are inherently democratic. They also scale, which direct moderation obviously does not.
The best thing about downvotes is they represent the community policing itself, so they don't generate the resentment that admin activity tends to.
Agreed!
A post at (+1,-0) is a very different thing from a post at (+6,-5) and treating these equivalently will tend to favor heat over light.
Yes, they could have the courage to not allow neo-Nazis to use their site as a platform.
Twitter has a history of political partisanship. They'll ban "racist" conservatives but allow minority "terrorist" organizations.
Slippery slope and all that, but they un-suspended Richard Spencer for "reasons".
On the other hand, it works pretty well for the Chinese social media.
Donald Trump is making headlines using Twitter every day. I think that once users/victims become immune to Facebook's dark patterns, Twitter will look pretty good. The only thing it can do to screw that up is continue censoring content and allowing botnets.
http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2016/11/...
Most definitely. I think the management logic went something like the following:
- Why aren't twitter's ad impressions worth a fraction of Facebook's?
- Because FB uses an algorithmic feed which allows more precise targeting based on engagement, which has a lot more data points than Retweets or replies.
- OK let's build that.
- Done
- Wait, why is there unsavory content showing up as a trending topic on Twitter?
- Because people engage with it, and due to the shape of Twitter's graph, there's a much greater chance of users encountering content that has not been as thoroughly vetted by the social filter (compared to Facebook).
- We must stop this.
- How, we already offer verified accounts and disallow overt harassment.
- Well, let's just remove unsavory stuff from the trending list.
- Done
- Wait, that didn't really stop it, what else can we do?
- Censorship
- Love it, let's do it. We can help the cause of good by preventing users from seeing content that we deem unsavory.
All Politicians lie. Twitter is not in the business of being a fact checker.
> Asked whether Twitter would ever consider banning key government officials or even the president himself, a company spokesperson responded via email: “The Twitter Rules prohibit violent threats, harassment, hateful conduct, and multiple account abuse, and we will take action on accounts violating those policies.” Pressed on whether that meant that, hypothetically, Trump himself could be suspended were he to violate those policies, a spokesperson confirmed: “The Twitter Rules apply to all accounts, including verified accounts.”
Twitter going out of their way to say that they might ban the US President isn't exactly a sign of the professionalism and maturity people expect from multinational executives.
Are you joking? The press would say "'...', Donald Trump said on Monday".
Anyone who can't infer the "Donald Trump said" part from the Twitter UI shouldn't be unsupervised near a computer or a newspaper.
It also encourages him to publicize views that can withstand press scrutiny. The outrageous stuff we see on Twitter might have been self censored if he had to tell it to a skeptical press that will place them in context.
Prior presidents have been very circumspect in what they say, which has reduced the pressure on this point. Extreme situations pressure us to discard gray areas. In order to maintain a healthy civic discourse, we need everyone to cooperate more and be more generous to the other side, but this can't be done unilaterally or you just get steamrolled.
Apache Aurora, Bootstrap, Storm, Heron, Pants, ThriftMux, DistributedLog, Apache Cotton, Iago, just to name a few.
At the company I work at, various of the above projects are integral to one system or another (though to be fair, there are quite a number of ex-Twitter folks floating around). I'm not a Scala expert, but as far as I can tell Twitter also has a large footprint in that community.
(edited above post to remove Mesos mention).
His linkedIn bio: Member of the Technical Staff Twitter March 2010 – May 2013 (3 years 3 months) Built out Apache Mesos (http://mesos.apache.org).
Stop looking at everything with dev eyes.
[full disclosure, I wrote one of the projects mentioned above.]
Google, Apple, Amazon, etc., all have much more interesting products, which in turn gives their technical staff many more interesting problems to solve.
The common advice here is "let Twitter be Twitter," i.e., they don't need to expand into new products, let alone crack VR, or self-driving cars, or drone deliveries. That path will need to accompanied by major restructuring.
It kind of felt weird to me that Twitter went from this platform of literally starting revolutions to managing expectations of its users in the name "fighting harassment".
I now use it simply to tweet out my latest recipes...
do you consider the email protocol or telephone newsworthy daily?
Lay off then no need to pay it.
There are 4000 employees, which is about one order of magnitude too much.
(...he said, not realizing it was on the close order of what someone else here is advocating. Whence comes the idea that Twitter is overpopulated? Do we hear it from current or ex-Twitter-ers?)
I once worked on a product with 5000 programmers. Average production was 1 line of code per day per programmer. While LOC may be a poor measure of productivity, at the 250 lines per year level, you've got a serious problem no matter how you look at it.
With those numbers, we were churning 1.25 million lines of code a year, which obviously could not be done without a very large team. But the cost is crippling. Not only that, but there is just no way in hell you are going to hire 5000 good programmers. Deadwood is going to be a massive problem.
What's the solution? Simplification, prioritisation and diversification. If you have to churn a million lines of code a year to say competitive, then it may be too late. Before it gets to that point you need to simplify your code base and throw away the things you don't need. You need to think very clearly about what makes money and what doesn't and you need to have clear priorities for how to downsize your engineering work to a point where the costs don't eat the profit. Finally, once you've got a handle on that, you can build your business by diversifying into separate business areas -- there is no problem churning a million lines of code if it is not all in one product. 10 products, churning 100K LOC each will be much more manageable. But probably you will be much more profitable than that if you manage 10 products each churning 20K LOC per year (on the assumption that a simpler product will be easier to monetise).
Again, LOC is not a reasonable metric, I'm only using it to indicate approximate scope in terms that most programmers can understand.
I don't know how many programmers Twitter has. Like I said, even if it is only 10% and the rest are ops, sales, etc I think they have got problems. TBH, I have trouble imagining Twitter utilising 3000+ sales people effectively as well, but that's not my area of expertise so I will keep my mouth shut.
Basically, in the least offense terms, doing nothing all day and got nothing to do.
I didn't do the interviews myself, but I watched them, and I was very unimpressed with the applicants.
I can say this about most (70%) Amazon people too... (and am in Seattle, so we see a lot of them).
People use Google for search. People use Facebook to connect with friends and family. Who needs a Twitter account aside from journalists and attention-seekers? my grand mother doesn't need a twitter account. Nobody cares about her cooking a chicken or planting cucumbers in the garden BUT her closest relatives. And there is already Facebook for that.
Twitter's problem is their continued refusal to recognize themselves as a platform. It's probably too late at this point, but I don't think they have anything to lose.
Twitter is what you curate it to be. To me, Twitter is kind of the publishing platform Linked In was trying to build. Smart people posting interesting links (to their posts or others) and people discussing.
However since Twitter is what you make Twitter to be, garbage in garbage out. I quit Twitter for about 2 years but then unfollowed every account and started fresh. Now I use it all the time, way more than Facebook, etc.
At the moment, and since just after I quit Facebook, Twitter has worked for me regarding how I communicate and consume over such "live feed" social media.
edit: before anyone notes it, I'm just thinking about offering it and the relative value of each on a per user basis vs ads. Yes, it would churn their userbase out of existence.
Trifurcate Twitter into three distinct parts:
* The social--what users actually use it for. * The ad platform. * The realtime gestalt/search platform.
The latter is what is inadequately funded and considered.
Twitter has a latency advantage on the pulse of thought across the user base. The user base is already high-value for this relative to the morass of Facebook users. This is the key differentiator. This is what you base the platform and the value of search upon. You don't bury it by restricting the API, or trying to shift it into the realm of the social platform with "Moments"--you build dependency upon it, and monetize that unique value by those who need to keep the pulse. This creates value for the other two parts. It is also woefully underfunded.
Someone mentioned an AWS-like model. That is thinking along the right track. Make the gestalt a utility that people will pay for.
Yes, you still have all the spam/hate issues on the social platform, and those need to be solved. But those only become a corporate imperative if Twitter is resigned to merely being a social network rather than a platform.
Maybe it's actually 4 parts--I forgot about the live event deals (e.g., NFL games). There's a raw, traditional media part, but I'd align that with the advertising part.
Like I say, it's a rumor that may have shades of truth, but that's what I heard.
There's a kernel of logic to the original assertion. It has a "gee whiz" irony, coded as a moral story: the biggest brains in the world forgot to get paid. Twitter's perceived revenue problems are juxtaposed with the obviousness of just taking the money they were owed, as if the answer to Twitter's Big Question were there the whole time. Finally, it explains a really major acquisition in Twitter history; it answers an outstanding question in everybody's minds. That little vignette has all the fixings for a great Silicon Valley tall tale.
The fact that it's totally false, by public refutation, seals the deal. I love it!
Honestly I feel like I shouldn't even post this because it's half on topic and half off topic. But I was thinking about some ideas I think Twitter should do and, well, screw it I'm curious to see what the HN community thinks of any of my ideas.
Twitter should:
- Lay off approx 60-70% of the staff. Seriously Twitter is way, way, way over staffed. I mean I don't want to see this happen but Twitter is so employee heavy I don't understand how they can sustain themselves without losing a large amount of employees.
- Longer forms of communication. Yeah yeah I know "Twitter is short it makes people be concise" yadda yadda yadda; look a lot of the top Twitter users constantly do tweet storms. Many post photos of long form content. Sure maybe you keep the same limits but allow a way to stitch together multiple tweets should you want to do something long form. Right now the dialog gets ruined because comments get spliced during the user posting their thoughts.
This has to be addressed somehow. They're losing out on too much conversation and context when people post things like photos of text.
- Need some focus around various types of media. Video is especially important. Look at Instagram, they copied Snap's stories and BOOM, big success. Twitter is positioned to be a messaging pipe for the internet. Let's get more types of media flowing through it! Make Live even faster to start (dedicated button). Make image taking native, too. Single button, type text, posted. Done.
- Better ways of handling discussions. Something threaded, not counting usernames in limits (to a degree; can't have someone spamming hundreds at once). In a similar vein create groups so conversations / discussions can rapidly happen inside of groups.
- More tools for filtering, maybe creating separate views for different types of people you follow (like it would be great to see what my friends are saying versus what news sources are saying etc without going through the cumbersome list UX).
- Verification so if someone wants to use their real name they can have it verified and can even filter by verified so they can filter out the noise if they want. Facebook is pretty damn successful at real names but you can also create alternate personalities via Pages. I think Twitter should mimic this functionality to a degree.
As a company, what's better than having others doing your work for you and promoting your service at the same time? Getting rid of that situation to me was the beginning of the end for them. There was such a rapid enthusiasm for Twitter that died off for a lot of influencers with that.
Stupid mistake from Twitter.
Basically Twitter has a long history of shutting down API access to any product or client that becomes remotely popular. Did they think being unpopular among developers would be something positive ? It's like they didn't realise ALL these twitter clients actually helped create MORE content on Twitter. That was stupid.
1. They should be more like Facebook. Never, ever again allow a third party app to control the primary way to view all of their data. It's too important. Grandfather existing apps in but slowly add new capabilities that they cannot access thus smothering them.
2. If Twitter can become more engaging / sticky it can keep users around for longer which should, in theory, help bring more people to their platform and let them display ads longer. This will ultimately force developers to work with them again, regardless of their feelings around trust.
Look at Facebook. They destroyed many games livelihoods with changes and people not only still use them but other than places like HN you rarely hear about issues with developers trusting them.
Are you thinking about how Twitter could be a better product or a better business?
For example Facebook provides a great way to engage in conversations (the quality of said conversations may or may not be dubious). You can keep track of conversations, where you are in the conversations and mute specific people within one. Twitter has almost none of that which, in my opinion, likely contributes to the less than half of the daily usage that Twitter gets when compared to facebook [1].
But that's just one example. Working better with video and other media and lowering friction to using Live video or capturing it right within the app all help to keep users in their ecosystem.
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/gadfly/articles/2016-02-12/social-...
How will that go down with investors expecting growth?
Overall I would imagine long term investors would have a positive feeling but only if a solid image is communicated to them regarding ways to improve and grow.
Make a mistake and you not only affect revenues (by cutting those contributing to revenue) but also cutting the ability to retain those remaining who actually do contribute to revenue.
No doubt there's room for cuts, but 60-70% seems way on the high side.
Sorry, I didn't mean to imply it would be simple at all. Unfortunately I have no way to give you a good answer here. They have a disproportionately large amount of engineers and other staff compared to the product(s) they offer but without internal information regarding groups, compensations, etc there is no way I could ever begin to answer this as an outside.
> No doubt there's room for cuts, but 60-70% seems way on the high side.
I disagree. The best I can find Twitter currently has 2,900 - 3,000 employees (they had a high of 3,900 the best I can tell). What products and solutions do they have? Almost none with almost no evolution to show for the past 5+ years.
They are extremely employee heavy. Granted I can't know for sure how their internals work but 900 employees should be able to not only run but to evolve the platform without issue, even including sales and marketing.
Far more company have done much more with much less than that.
You have fair points but I think there are redeeming qualities :)
edit: grammar
Twitter, meanwhile, still has that stupid 3200 most-recent tweet limit on historical data, which is apparently a "technical limitation."
An example of the FB limitations I'm thinking about is how you can't query the graph API by username, e.g. http://graph.facebook.com/mark.zuckerberg
There were other changes made before that, that's just one I remember in my latter days of using their API. Granted, I've always been impressed with the analyses you've done with FB data and have put it on my list someday to learn through your examples :).
That is probably for the best as people have messaged me about that functionality, with not-very-ethical intentions.
Twitter is most used for 2 things:
- to promote your own brand (which includes companies like CNN & Google, as well as authors, writers and celebrities)
- to gossip about what you ate for lunch, or how everything is falling apart and the world has never been so bad, or whine about Mondays
The users that do #1 tend to do very little of #2, and vice versa. Listening to #2 will add very little value to your life except extra anxiety and distraction, but #2 is needed because they're the people to whom brands are promoting themselves.
The problem is people keep coming back to Facebook to keep up with friends, and people keep coming back to Twitter to watch and participate in drama. The former will inevitably be more engaged with the advertising than the latter, and Twitter can't change that.
I don't know about that. They have $2.2 billion in revenue last year. Get the employee count down to 300 people and you have a great business.
I think maybe Twitter's growth stalled because it's mostly done growing. Do they need more users? They can already generate billions of dollars every year and maybe that's enough.
Aside from being what I assume to be exceptionally talented individuals, what do you guys think separates these people from their peers to make it to the VP level so quickly?
As someone just getting started in my career, what steps can I take to put myself in a position to grow so quickly?
That said, it sounds like you want to be an executive and let's say one at a larger company (ie: not a paper executive but an actual one). The skills you need for that are going to be leadership, management, charisma, politics, and networking. Since you're not going the technical track your technical skills are secondary at best.
You want a nice title on your resume so pick a top company and join there. Find a manager who is not afraid of your ambition (a career middle manager will likely be, find someone with ambition), act like a leader and get promoted. This will give you pedigree while also teaching you about politics and management. You will eventually hit diminishing returns.
Then, like the people you mentioned, jump to a startup as one of the founders or the person running it. This will teach you how to be a standalone leader, build up a network, and give you some executive-ish experience. It's vital you have the skills at this point to impress people at first impressions and maintain a networking relationship with them.
Then either get acquired by a larger company or switch after a while using your network to find the new position.
Or don't try to be the 1% of the 1% -- you don't seem cutthroat enough.
For reference: Facebook (4.3), Google (3.9), Uber (3.9), Snapchat (3.8), AirBnB (3.7), Quora (3.7), Dropbox (3.6), Abobe (3.6), Apple (3.5), Pinterest (3.5), and Microsoft (3.4).
Hemorrhaging top execs and alienating userbase. Yet his feed is all PC Bro.
After Roetter left, Messinger was put back in charge of the engineering organization. But given he had been removed from it (and passed over) in the past, it's not surprising he would leave, voluntarily or involuntarily.
Mike Abbott
Dick Costolo -> (Chris Fry, Adam Messinger, Mazen Rawashdeh)
Chris Fry
Alex Roetter
Adam Messinger
???
Not as bad as product, but illustrative, and there were far more VP/Director changes in there along the way. In general you knew you were in for a re-org that affected you in a material way every 6 months. I had 10 managers in well under 5 years. It's not surprising many people just crawl in a hole and hope they get ignored while they vest and get stuff done.
Seems that the problems with product, PR, and investor relations got worse when he came back. How much rope will the board give him before he hangs himself?
http://www.recode.net/2016/12/6/13814264/twitter-anthony-not...
Say one manages a government agency or any other large organization -- Why the heck would they put all eggs into a provider's basket rather than set up their own GNU social infrastructure? Does anyone not realize the power of controlling their own namespace?
edit: oh are you talking status quo, or an idealized business model?
Billboard owners
But the president of the United States speaks with the executive authority for an entire nation. It's questionable enough when a company's stock falls because Trump lashes out at them, and means it [0]. But what about the times he makes a typo, or just doesn't have all the info he needs at that moment when his emotions arise? Even asking that he types something to be sent through a Wordpress-powered system would give him the same megaphone, but adding a little more friction so that things that deserved to be trashed/called-out in his voice actually deserve so.
For those who say this amounts to making Trump less "real" of a man...sure. But he's no longer just a man, he's the chief executive of the world's greatest power. He gave up the privilege of "just sayin what I think" for the privilege of being able to unilaterally launch a nuclear war. Keep in mind that there are no checks and balances against this power -- it is utterly unilateral: http://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2016/11/18/the-president-and-...
Giving up frictionless communication in 140-character-sized comments seems like a reasonable thing to pass on, given the many extra responsibilities he has, and the extra weight each of his words have.
[0] http://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/trump-threaten...
The share prices of the companies Trump has bashed have rebounded within the same day, so this is incredibly misleading to say.
Not that I disagree with the core point of your post.
For one thing, Obama's personal account (i.e. not @POTUS, but @BarackObama) explicitly says in its profile: "This account is run by Organizing for Action staff. Tweets from the President are signed -bo. [0]
No such disclaimer has been made about Trump's account, which tweets with the same characteristics and tone as it did well before his current presidential campaign [1]. You're right, though, that Trump's team does tweet for him on occasion. Either that, or Trump, who is famously not a computer user, has mastered the art of using two different mobile operating systems [2]
Trump enjoys being treated like royalty. I doubt he has loyalty to Twitter and would jump ship to another company that puts him on a pedestal. He would enjoy seeing the millions of customers who follow him.
The word reportedly is really interesting. Was this reported by the same media that was wrong about just about everything this election cycle? Could they somehow be wrong about this too?
PS: Twitter is smaller than the other companies and is perceived as a failing (or at best stagnant) company. While Twitter is an important company online, if you were inviting the biggest companies in tech, there's some logic to not inviting them to that conference.
My guess is Peter vetoed Twitter, for sensible reasons.
http://www.businessinsider.com.au/twitter-executives-smoke-t...
That's unfair to say. Trump's own Director of Digital Advertising explained[0] how Trump's campaign signed deals with Twitter, which Twitter didn't honor, without offering a refund.
Sources connected to Trump[1] say he's considering an anti-trust investigation on them because of their role in this election, which includes censoring pro-Sanders and pro-Trump hashtags, and biased censorship of people like Milo.
[0]: https://medium.com/@garycoby/twitter-restricts-trump-eb7e48c... [1]: https://twitter.com/Cernovich/status/798765870172368896
What other company offers a similar broadcast style approach for text content and doesn't require real name registration?
Really though, Trump would fit right in on 4chan.
Regardless, the company doesn't have to exist today. Someone could be working on creating the new company, as we type.
I don't work at Twitter, so it is hard for me to tell how much this exec drain has had an effect on delivery and execution, but I'd imagine a good amount.
The NFL Thursday Twitter has been super disappointing. I wish there was a way to get the video screen mostly full, and have a live feed of MY timeline on the feed. I definitely am tweeting a ton during sporting events, and feel like I never see targeted ads or well thought out products surrounding that.
Looking at IG/Snapchat and I feel like I'm viewing the future world of interactive social media being born. It's not that text based media is incorrect, it just feels like the communication form of the past.
I want to be shown experience, not just read about them.
I feel images/video are the future of digital interaction in the same way that candy is the future of food. It is nice to have in moderation, but try to replace the basics completely and you'll have cavities and bad health.
Somewhere between a real time news platform and wasting time ala social entertainment?
Money today is more valuable than money tomorrow. Tech seems to have been a curious exception as it was in the 2000 bubble.
Not to mention, Facebook is quite the pioneer in tech. React is one of the most used front end libraries and the community around it is super positive.
Then there's VR and their progress in 360 video. The list really goes on with Facebook.
Twitter on the other hand, it's not that they have failed, but probably that they were aiming a bit too high. Investors were likely expecting another Facebook, but Twitter is never going to become that, because it's not perceived as a fundamental part of people's digital lives. Everyone has a Facebook account, but only some use Twitter.
(tell me the future of twitter)