Twitter Acquires Smallthought Systems (DabbleDB, Trendly) | Hacker News Reader

Twitter Acquires Smallthought Systems (DabbleDB, Trendly)

blog.twitter.com

92 pointssandofsky23 comments

Another cool success story out of Vancouver. Scaling up a business here would have been even cooler, but if you're going to be acquired, Twitter is a heck of a place to go. Congratulations guys!

Yes, it's a great success story. Unfortunately, the brain drain continues for Vancouver. ST will move to SF, leaving Vancouver.

I fail to grasp why this is being hailed as a success story. DabbleDB the product is likely going away. These guys are getting jobs at Twitter, which is arguably better for them than going out of business, but hardly is criteria for a very successful exit. Its cool, don't get me wrong, but thats different than a success story.

Does anyone have any indication of the purchase price? Did investors make anything, or even their money back? It is hard to declare this a success, or much of anything at all, without some information regarding terms of the deal, and future of the product. Even if they lost money but the product was going to continue in Twitter's hands I would argue this may be enough to declare success because of Twitter's likely longevity. But without this and compelling evidence that Twitter had any reason to pay more than salaries to the team, I can't find a reason to declare this a success -- other than kudos to the team for getting jobs at a cool company as their funding ran out (I am assuming this is a primary reason for the change, as is common; please correct me if mistaken).

Anyone have more info to share regarding this? I have always been a big fan of DabbleDB and the team clearly has talent.

Wonder if Dabble will follow the destiny of Etherpad and get opensourced

Hooray, a success story for Smalltalk and Seaside!

I don't know that I would call this a success for Smalltalk or Seaside as much as it is a win for a very smart startup who simply happened to use Smalltalk for some of their products. Furthermore, I doubt they'll be doing much Squeak hacking inside Twitter, so in some ways you could look upon it as a loss for the community.

Regardless, I have a lot of respect for the Smallthought guys. Their presence at Twitter HQ does only good things for my opinion of their business and technical direction.

Considering Avi's contributions to Seaside, I think simply happened is an understatement. I'm sure using Seaside was a very deliberate choice on their part.

> Regardless, I have a lot of respect for the Smallthought guys. Their presence at Twitter HQ further does only good things for my opinion of their business and technical direction.

My thoughts exactly.

My perspective on Seaside may be a little different, because I still remember Avi trying out many of the same ideas in Ruby, and moving to Smalltalk (at least initially) because its continuations didn't leak memory like MRI's did. I also know from personal discussions that the Smallthought guys are very pragmatic about their tools: when Squeak/Seaside were the right tool, they used it, but when Ruby, Java, Javascript, or another language/framework made more sense, they weren't dogmatic about using it.

I'm not trying to downplay the importance of Smalltalk to DabbleDB, but it was just one piece of the puzzle. The same "use the right tool for the problem" attitude seems to be increasingly pervading Twitter these days, which I think has helped as much as anything else in their improved stability and scale over the last year or so.

Thanks for the insight. I didn't realize that ruby's (former?) continuation memory-leaks were the the reason for Seaside being in Smalltalk rather than Ruby.

In this case I wonder whether Smalltalk really is the right tool for the job. Smalltalk isn't a bad language but there aren't a lot of libraries available. I've played around with Seaside a bit and ended up having to rewrite some of the HTTP libraries to do what I needed. Unfortunately I can't think of another language outside of the LISP family that supports continuations well.

Unfortunately I can't think of another language outside of the LISP family that supports continuations well.

Javascript has closures, which you can use to implement continuations. See http://marijn.haverbeke.nl/cps/

First-class functions can be used for continuation-passing style, but to do what Seaside does elegantly you really need first-class continuations.

There's an interesting article on how Seaside uses continuations here: http://blog.fitzell.ca/2009/01/seaside-partial-continuations...

And Twitter. They couldn't have acquired a better team.

They bought Values of N a while back, so this makes at least two companies with top-tier product design chops brought into the fold. I'm a fan of the twitter web UI, and I think they've done a good job with their feature set so far, but I wonder when or if we're going to start seeing stuff that's more than just tweaking the basic model coming out of these talent acquisitions.

I think we have seen things. Twitter's semblance of stability comes directly from the Summize acquisition. And I think Rael from Values of N was behind lists.

Dabble DB though seems like it was acquired for backend analytics (according to the blog post).

At the risk of setting off a pointless semantics wrangling session, iwantsandy and dabbledb were/are both great products that never got the attention they deserved. I think it's hard to make the case that lists (while nice) are in the same ballpark - they fall under the 'tweak' category to me.

The announcement on Dabble DB's website:

http://blog.dabbledb.com/2010/06/140character-dabbling.html

http://dabbledb.com/

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Wow, Twitter just picked up an awesome tech team, and the services are nice also. I don't use DabbleDB very much (only a free account, years ago), but it was very well done. Avi's work and writing on Seaside is also great stuff.

Also, I just noticed that the blog post was by Kevin Weil (who I follow on Twitter :-) who is also an analytics heavyweight.

Anybody care to venture a guess why Twitter would buy them? It is surely not for their business. Is it really only HR acquisition? If not, how could Twitter use their tech?

They're joining the analytics team at Twitter

That makes sense. http://trendly.com/ is their other product.

The parent article makes clear that they will be on the analytics team because of Trendly, sir. I promise it's a quick and easy read.

http://www.avibryant.com/2010/06/life-changing.html

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