Ex-Twitter Employee Didn’t Want to Work for an “Ad Company” | Hacker News Reader

Ex-Twitter Employee Didn’t Want to Work for an “Ad Company”

mashable.com

52 pointshariis47 comments

He's starting a new Bank, "Bank Simple"

From their FAQ:

Why do other banks make it such a pain to transfer money?

Many banks make transferring money from your account painful as they fear losing your deposits. We figure if we make it easy to do the things you want to do, you’ll be happier and less likely to leave. So, transfers are simple with us.

I've always viewed the difficulty of transferring money out of my account as a robust security feature.

hows that a security feature? If someone has access to your account, end of story.

That being said, a bank which spells out the semantics of how different sorts of transaction will work and doesn't relegate understanding how your account works to reams of fine print or reading a subsection of wikipedia would probably be a refreshing experience.

(and thats without looking at how poorly maintained many bank webapps are, i recently had the experience where BOA complained that chrome mac beta was out of date and I should upgrade to netscape navigator!!!!)

How is it "end of story?"

If someone logs into my bank account right now:

1) they can't transfer money; the feature is not available.

2) they can set up a bill pay, but I get an email notice in time to stop it.

How else can they steal from me?

do you mean that a) you have transferring disabled for your account

b) that your bank doesn't let you do that?

Basically it sounds like he's trying to create a non-US style bank, in the US.

Transferring money in the UK is a simple process - login, click transfer, put in the amount and destination, and click [go]. It'll appear in the destination account in an hour or 2 usually. There's nothing insecure about that (Login is done using chip+pin card, pin, or one-time keychain generator thingy etc etc)

How does it work in the US?

The same but not as fast. Usually 3 days to go through the ACH process. I routinely transfer money between my two bank accounts.

Ah, thanks. To be honest, in the UK in my experience the "within a few hours" thing only seems to apply when the transfers are between accounts at the same bank.

Transfers to other banks are the same process, they just take days; especially if it's a weekend or a public holiday. I'm sure all of that's just an excuse to hang on to your money for as long as they can.

Actually, the faster payments system make interbank transfers (for member banks) go within minutes, and intrabank transfers shouldn't take more than a few seconds.

That, at least, is my most recent uk banking experience...

"Within same bank" transfers in the U.S. usually happen by end-of-same-business-day, sometimes within minutes.

I always figured that the 3-business-day wait was because of the interbank settlement process. Banks settle up at midnight between each business day: at that point, there's a shuffle where they figure out how much capital they need to meet reserve ratio requirements after the day's deposits & withdrawals, borrow from other banks at the Fed funds rate, or in the worst case, borrow from the Fed's discount window. If you figure a business day to transfer the money internally, then a business day to settle up with counterparties, then a business day for the money to appear in the receiving account, there's your 3 days.

(I suspect they also pad the times a bit...when I've transferred money, it's usually taken a day and a half to two days for it to appear, which is consistent with the intraday settlement process. They want a little bit of a cushion in case some employee isn't on the ball or things otherwise get hung up.)

Are keychain generators common outside the US? I'm curious why physical measures like this aren't more common.

The situation in Holland is pretty good. Only 1 bank (Postbank) has a system where you can login with a username and password (instead of using a physical authenticator) but you still need to authorize payments etc via your mobile phone (textmessages). All the other banks have authenticators where you insert your debitcard and have to input your 4 digit code to login and make transfers.

Transfers are usually instantaneously except to the aforementioned bank Postbank :-)

For completeness:

You can choose to receive Postbank authentication tokens either on your mobile phone, or a sheet of paper delivered by regular mail.

(also, Postbank has been rebranded to ING Bank, "Postbank" as such no longer exists).

The banks I use in Singapore use dual factor authentication devices or SMS. Not sure if it's mandatory.

UK inter-bank transfers can take over 48hs sometimes.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faster_Payments_Service

since that went live I've managed to send most payments in about 15 minutes.

If your bank is on this list you should be fine: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faster_Payments_Service#Partici...

Strange. Last week a transfer took over 48hs across two banks in that list.

I forget the exact context, but Joel wrote about this exact same thing a while back. By lowering the barrier for users to leave (and take their stuff with them), they will be more likely to join. You keep them with service, not lock-in.

>I've always viewed the difficulty of transferring money out of my account as a robust security feature.

As long as he adds a commit/rollback transaction feature, I'm cool with it.

Interesting. I thought banks made it difficult to transfer money because:

1) The longer a bank possesses your money the more money they make loaning it to other people and 2) when a bank has your money, they've got you over a barrel so you're willing to pay a fee to get it back (see ATM fees, check fees and myriad other "ransom" fees regularly levied on customers)

It seems a little naive to think this wasn't the direction twitter would go. I guess Google would be out of his list of companies to work for?

I don't think he's naïve, since he left. He has no illusion about where Twitter will be soon. Edit: My point being that he worked for the company when it was in the form he liked, and when that changed, he left.

i've never understood why some are so averse to ads as a business model in new media... it seems as if facebook/twitter are in a real place to sell me stuff i might actually want, which could be a great service in and of itself.

sure - the execution isn't quite there yet - but it seems we'll get there in the next 5 years? i don't work in the industry so i could be misguided - will the actuality be more akin to a bunch of spam in my twitter feed?

I think the problem is that currently Ads are shown to you Not as a service to you but a way for the companies to sustain themselves.

Ads as a service, that's a nice idea!

Why can't ads be both a service and a way of making money?

There are people who are adverse to advertising itself, and then there are people who are adverse to working for an advertising company.

I've worked for a variety of online advertising companies, and while no two companies are identical, they do deal with a lot of common problems that some people just might not be interested in implementing.

isn't the base problem one of collaborative filtering? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collaborative_filtering

seems like a fairly interesting problem to me - or am i idealizing? i suppose some developers would rather work on language/framework problems than data analysis problems...

> it seems as if facebook/twitter are in a real place to sell me stuff i might actually want, which could be a great service in and of itself.

As a programmer working in data mining problems, I can certainly concede just don't find the idea of working on an ad platform to be sexy enough to work on.

But when I put my consumer hat on, I think highly relevant ads are just fine and I'm far, far more likely to click them and generate revenue for the person showing them to me.

A few months ago I booked a trip to SF, and alongside the e-ticket confirmation mail in my inbox there was a Gmail context ad for zeppelin tours of Silicon Valley from Airship Ventures. I had absolutely no idea this was available, but it seemed awesome, and immediately went to book a tour.

If you can show me an ad for something I might be interested in (a tour) at the time I'm most likely to make a purchase (I already had my credit card out from booking the airline reservation) then that's awesome. In fact I might even perceive that as a service if the product is something I would have never known about before.

alongside the e-ticket confirmation mail in my inbox there was a Gmail context ad for zeppelin tours of Silicon Valley from Airship Ventures

That is freaking awesome and the best argument for context-sensitive ads I've seen. How was it?

My scheduled zeppelin tour ended up getting rained out, but the next time I'm in the bay area and have the time to spare, I'm totally going to give it another try.

"For a long time, the promise at Twitter was that we were going to look at different ways of making money, and to some degree I feel that hasn’t happened."

In other words, all the hand-waving didn't lead to human-powered flight, so Twitter is looking at the booooring aspect of actually sustaining their business.

This is actually a good timing, there is many people upset by banks behaviour today, that some may be considering moving.

I'm french and I use a bank that was a 2000 internet startup (boursorama ). They didn't start as a bank but as a low cost solution for the money market. So creating a bank as a startup is definitly possible.

It's a better bank than others I have used, but it's still a bank. Their website is powerful but designed like crap though. However all of my money isn't there, as I fear a little bit doing a move I didn't understand (because of crappy design ) and loose everything.

Let's not be snobby about ads. Relevant ads actually help people. I l-l-l-like the ads on google. There I said it.

Why was that so difficult? Simply because my opinion of ads is colored by mass marketed ones that are not relevant the vast majority of the time. I see them, more or less by accident, trapped in a passive moment.

Ads of the future will seem more like helpful suggestions as I go about my day. Look at Kayak. It's essentially nothing but a marketing tool and I love it.

It's an interesting dilemma for every company that is pioneering, isn't it? To Ad or Not to Ad to sustain and to see the idea through.

Looks like another iteration of Dorsey's "move" from Twitter to Square. Being with the same pool of folks who run Twitter, you'd probably assimilate the same notion too and innovate something similar.

What else could Twitter do?

Open Twitter, allow anyone to be a Twitter server, and sell their services to Twitter providers who don't want to deal with Twitter nuts and bolts, as Disqus does for comments and Google does for gapps.

Be an expert in Twitter and sell training to implementers and users, as GitHub does for git.

Have free and paid levels, as GitHub, Disqus, Dropbox and countless others do.

Have all paid services, as old school businesses do.

There's probably more else that I haven't covered.

What type of paid services could Twitter conceivably sell?

What type of paid services would people conceivably want to buy from Twitter?

Cooler Twitter. Enterprise Twitter. Better Personal Twitter management.

"What possibly" and "conceivably" assumes that the current form of Twitter is all it could ever be.

If they're smart enough to do Twitter, they're smart enough to enhance Twitter in a way that people will pay for it.

Keep in mind, this is all based on the linked article's characterization of Twitter as an ad company, and what they might do instead.

Twitter T-Shirts, Twitter mugs. Twitter fail whale plush toy.

I'm joking by the way.

Why joke, merchandising is good business. Look at the Star Wars franchise, over 30 years it's earned an estimated $22B of which $6.68B was generated at the box office. The largest chunk comes from merchandise ($9B). [1]

Granted, kiddies might be less interested in a plush fail whale than a plastic light saber.

[1] http://www.forbes.com/2007/05/24/star-wars-revenues-tech-cx_...

Why, the Twitter service itself. Its called lock-in.

Rewrite the licensing to say for non-commercial use only, except under special license. Allow businesses to opt into a licensing agreement for a few hundred bucks a year. Release the hounds on any unlicensed companies.

Remember that Twitter has a certain 'scale' in terms of expenses (employees, servers, etc) and in terms of VC invested so far. So bussiness models that generate less revenue than required by this scale are not acceptable to them (their investors).

Couple of ideas: I'd love to filter out people who I normally like to follow but suddenly have decided to tweet copiously about some mundane sporting event. And I'd pay for a way to block people who spam my favorite hash tags.

The unfollow button does not work for you?

I don't follow the spammer, i follow the #tag. And they spam with the tag, so I have to skim their nonsense.

I guess working for google would be out of the question.

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