Twitter’s CEO Dick Costolo Is Stepping Down
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[0] (warning: auto-play video on page) http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/twitter-ceo-dick-costolo-laughs-off...
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ublock-origin/cjpa...
Note: that's an old version. The current revision is here https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Maintainership-transf...
It doesn't seem to matter which fork you use, but I personally use uBlock Origin
This scheme seems to popular with adblockers, afaik the original AdBlock and the AdBlockPlus had a similar "relationship". And later a German company took over AdBlockPlus in a similar manner and is doing big business in a gray area (whitelisting domains costs ad networks a lot of money and is absurd for an adblocker!?)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=41NrVg-7bQw
[1] Twitter CEO Dick Costolo Q&A: What to Do When People Say ‘You Suck’
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-05-07/twitter-ce...
Twitter is executing on its vision now just fine, but that's just the problem: There hasn't been any vision left in the company. No truly big moves have been made, and the product has remained almost entirely the same (with the exception of fonts and colors constantly moving around the screen and a lot more ads).
We should collectively be critical about how loosely we tend to use superlatives and not base the stories spun by PR machinery to qualify a person or her work. Elon Musk has invested his money, ideas, energy into - Making solar one of largest sources of clean energy - An electric car which is not a joke and probably better than a BMW M5 to drive, self-driving cars? - Satellites to cover entire land on earth with wifi - A plan to go to Mars and setup a camp there - A plan for rapid transit through tubes. Opensourced design blue-prints. - SpaceX
He is not dead and he has long way to go. We should reserve the word visionary for people like him. Let us be honest.
We should also be careful not to base our impressions on sensational stories spun by disgruntled ex-employees who've gone on to do jack squat. Not a lot of "hipsters in a suit" have gone on to found a second multi-billion dollar company (Square). Sure, we can debate how good a business Square is but it's clearly in "visionary" product territory. It changed its industry.
We risk running out of superlatives if we take that attitude. Can we reserve 'visionary' for those 'once in a generation' types and not degrade it to mean 'competent product manager'.
My point was based on the grandparent's own words: "You don't have to be Elon Musk to be a 'product visionary'. It's simply someone who's good at envisioning new products" which sounds to me like an abasement of the English language.
This reminds me of another battle I have apparently lost. Companies that have a "vision".
No you probably don't. You might have a plan, a goal or an ethos but with the exception of a small handful of companies- if you claim your's has a 'vision' then you're deluded or incurably pretentious.
I could just about live with 'mission' as at least that doesn't sound like you're claiming divine providence.
(If it's not immediately obvious that I'm British, bear our famed dislike of overstatement in mind. However plenty of UK companies seem to spout this nonsense: https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=site%3A.co.uk+"our+vision" )
A few interviews with his brother Kimbal takes Elon down a notch, in a fun brotherly way. Kimbal is the more natural and affable of the two.
Anyone slightly out of the ordinary is saddled with that tag.
I remember those days too and the product is much better now. It could be much better still.
We can all disagree about what function Twitter performs for individuals, or in the marketplace, or what have you. But it isn't like there's ever a destination for a company or medium or whatever it is that Twitter is.
Twitter is a business, how were you expecting this to work? For the USG to aqui-hire them?
Where are the open-source softwares for supply-chain management, payment processing, calendar programs etc.. day to day needs of many citizens?
See this comment for a more detailed explanation: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6710602
Also, it's pretty hard not to be "wildly successful" when you get a legally enforced monopoly. Comcast is also "wildly successful", but we certainly don't want to expand that model.
It's been argued, deftly, that even with a decline in volume for mass mailers, raising the price from $0.49 to $1 would not only put the USPTO all the way in the black but enable them to meet obligations for years to come.
But convince Congress that it's a good idea...
You might want to double check your info on that one. The US Postal Service lost $32 Billion over the past four years.
USPS losses:
* 2011: $5.1 Billion
* 2012: $15.9 Billion
* 2013: $5.5 Billion
* 2014: $5.5 Billion
2011/2012: http://money.cnn.com/2012/11/15/news/economy/postal-service-...
2013: https://about.usps.com/news/national-releases/2013/pr13_087....
2014: https://about.usps.com/news/national-releases/2014/pr14_059....
http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/unraveling-the-myth-that-t...
In many ways, stripping the post office of their monopoly had the opposite of the intended effect, because it removed the pretenses that let people pretend that it was somehow magically different and special compared to other essential government services just because it sold stuff.
The USPS has already become increasingly dependent on commercial spam mail to keep going.
From http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/21/business/pension-plans-inc...
"AFTER years of poor investment returns, the pension funds of the United States’ largest companies are further behind than they have ever been.
The companies in the Standard & Poor’s 500 collectively reported that at the end of their most recent fiscal years, their pension plans had obligations of $1.68 trillion and assets of just $1.32 trillion. The difference of $355 billion was the largest ever, S.& P. said in a report.
Of the 500 companies, 338 have defined-benefit pension plans, and only 18 are fully funded. Seven companies reported that their plans were underfunded by more than $10 billion, with the largest negative figure, $21.6 billion, reported by General Electric."
Private corporations are not held to the same standard as the USPS for pension funding.
If there's something else to it, by all means feel free to state precisely the difference between how these pension funds from the random article you googled operate, and the USPS's requirements. There might be, but the article you linked doesn't imply that.
http://about.usps.com/who-we-are/financials/annual-reports/f...
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2012-08-02/understand...
Because the US Postal Service is viewed as a utility, and required to service every address in the continental US (as well as most of its territories). Fedex, UPS, and other private carriers are under no such obligation, and so can extract profits from the most profitable routes or services, leaving USPS with more less profitable services to provide (first class, bulk mail).
If you don't think the USPS provides a phenomenal service for the price they charge, you're insane. I can send an ounce of paper across a continent for $0.50-$1.09.
The last mile of shipping is the most expensive. In the US, there are tons of last miles that are thousands of miles from very large cities.
Switzerland is a tiny country relative to the US, so it's much cheaper to deliver mail.
How much cost/time does it cost Swiss Post to ship a package 4000km ?
It's at least 3x the price of USPS:
https://www.post.ch/en/private/a-z-of-subjects/prices-sendin...
I read your comment as 'Given USPS can send a package over 4000km in the same country, let's compare that with international charges in Switzerland'¹. Is that correct? Because that would be a liiiittle bit misleading in my world and I'd like to compare Swiss international charges with a USPS delivery from New York to Reykjavik please.
① Apologies if that isn't the case. But 4000km just felt too close to the east coast to west coast distance.
There's also a number of alternate services for the post in a number of other countries. FedEx is not a duplicate of the post - it's for sending small but high value things extremely fast. And between FedEx One Rate and FedEx Smart Post, it's pretty clear that they view USPS as a competitor to be respected.
http://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-mail-does-the-trick-for-fede...
Because as far as I'm aware, Switzerland opened up to DHL et al. I'm not sure about mail/letters tbh.
You have to be kidding! The USPS is a disaster and barely works. I'm about to cancel my prime membership because Amazon started using the USPS although Amazon have finally got the message at least for my account and rarely use them now. Look up Prime and USPS if you want to see pages and pages just how bad service is with the USPS.
Then I moved to Chicago and understood why the USPS gets such a bad rap. Lines a mile long, counter agents that can be called uncaring at best, tons of misdelivered/undelivered mail, etc. It was like two entirely different services.
I'm since back in Minneapolis and the USPS here is just as reliable as UPS or Fedex. 9 out of 10 packages arrive on time, which is about average for all of them.
http://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-mail-does-the-trick-for-fede...
It's so bad, confusing and illogical sometimes I just laugh at the situation. But, it's only a situation that can happen in a government agency.
If you count in taxbreak and other benefits, it actually does, especially USPS finance is in decline.
Hey, I remember such a time. I remember when Twitter was the "in" thing, and "everyone" (read: only techies in the Bay area) was using it. I remember how lots of conventions that are baked into the system today (@ notation for user references, "RT:" for retweeting, etc) were organically generated community standards.
All of that said, Twitter as a system had major hurdles to overcome to become a utility in the way that you want. But assuming that they published a standard, and created some sort of federated system (e.g. XMPP) how would this be anything but a money-sink? Would Twitter still be in use today? Would Facebook have copied most of what the public wants out of Twitter, and that would be it? How expensive would it be for a major provided of "Twitter Protocol Service" to maintain an SMS gateway? Would anyone actually pay for this service? What about inter-node security? Would we see something akin to the joke that is TLS between SMTP servers?
If it goes well they can pull an Apple and say, "The founder is finally coming back!" If not they can quietly find a replacement and say, "Now Jack is going back to Square, just like they said he always would."
It's PR insurance, basically, which Twitter desperately needs considering they go through CEOs faster than I go through freelancers.
Third-party clients have been and are "accidentally" banned and subject to rate limitations, for example.
The Android app is a UX mess.
For chrissake's they are still under their "Code Red", otherwise known as reorg-infinity.
And the cost-cutting will continue (as it should) for an unprofitable public company- get rid of the crossfit instructors, the chef, have less good food, etc.
[Update: On the conference call, Costolo said he initiated internal conversations about leaving at the end of last year, and that following discussions in Feburary and his decision to step down, Twitter decided to begin the CEO search. Costolo said he chose to leave now because he thought staying on through the CEO search would cause scrutiny to intensify. During the Q&A, Twitter execs said that since Costolo voluntarily stepped down, there will be no severance package.]
The line about 'no severance package' seems highly unusual and would lead me to assume that this was a forceful 'push' to step down.
Given that the stock traded at all time lows, no severance was justified. https://www.google.com/finance?cid=32086821185414
Nor did it stop Stephen Elop from collecting $25 million after running Nokia's devices business into the ground/arms of Microsoft (although I think technically that was structured as a "bonus")
Reminds me of some quote I heard somewhere: "CEO: where success is rewarded handsomely and failure only slightly less so"
I'm hoping that Nick Bilton writes a follow-up with this new Costolo to Dorsey transition. I wouldn't be surprised if Jack ends up removing the interim title and stays full time.
It's rather normal for people to not get severance packages when they quit.
Costolo is remaining on the board, and got a ton of stock when he became CEO. Considering that he grew the company's valuation from $3 Billion to $23 Billion (7.6x for those doing the math), I can assure you he doesn't really need a severance package anyway.
That should put to end any doubts about whether Jack's role is indeed truly interim and not a comeback.
[1] Jack Dorsey to forgo salary to lead Twitter
http://www.marketwatch.com/story/jack-dorsey-to-forgo-salary...
Why? The article you link to says: "Dorsey requested no compensation for his role until the company's compensation committee agrees on a package when it conducts its annual assessment and the setting of executive compensation later in the year"
They said interim for a reason. If it doesn't work, they can say "this was the plan all along". If it does work, they can say "this was the plan all along".
Either way, he will be paid very well – they just haven't nailed down the exact details yet, as the contract specifically states.
a) He has another company to save which is in itself a
full time job, given how hot the payments space is.
b) If Twitter should ultimately (and rather ingloriously)
be sold to say a Alibaba or Facebook or (longshots)
Microsoft or Google, Jack wouldn't want to be the guy who
'trimmed the fat' and right-sized it for a sale. It wouldn't
be good for his personal brand.
c) Twitter hasn't yet found an identity - even with
300 MM users (even Costolo hasn't contested this as
recently as May, in an interview [1]). Jack can only
breathe life into it, if he makes one hell of a pivot away
from the way Twitter is perceived by the masses - way
too confusing to use for most [2] and lacking an identity
(People still ask of Twitter what they don't of Facebook -
what Twitter will be when it has finally grown up)[3]
Bonus reason : Twitter has gone through 5 product heads
in the five years while Costolo was at the helm. A part
of me wants to believe that it is not all the fault of
Costolo and that Twitter needs a fundamental rethink.
I doubt Dorsey is willing to do it. I just don't think
he can, unless he gives up his gig at Square.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-05-07/twitter-ce...
[2] Twitter redesigned its confusing, unattractive homepage
http://qz.com/384517/twitter-redesigned-its-confusing-unattr...
Glassdoor: 88% CEO approval rating from 220 ratings.
On a related note Chris Sacca wrote this blog [0] titled "What twitter can be" last week.
[0]: http://lowercasecapital.com/2015/06/03/what-twitter-can-be-2...
Problem of course is that traditional investing is how you get startup funds.
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You can be good to your employees and bad for stockholders.
One way to do this is to hand out bonuses instead of dividends.
Eg: Mass employee exodus results in company going bust while the team can still bootstrap when investors run away with money.
I find it amusing that people who can code think they can do anything and everything. Despite what you like to to believe, those MBAs do have value. Lots of it.
But in my experience (not what I believe) very very few MBAs have value. The few I have seen have been the ones who have done executive MBAs (mainly people with a lot of experience going to get some theory knowledge) and they apply very little and very specific knowledge from their MBA.
My favorite experience with 'fresh' MBA students (still in university, no real work experience) was when I sat on a panel of local expat business people (in the Czech republic) doing a Q and A for MBA students from the US somewhere. They came off a day of exploring Prague, and had sat through some chamber of commerce and Ministry of Trade and Industry presentations so our panel was up to talk about our real world experiences building businesses out here. We all gave a short speech about what we've done and lessons learned out here-specifically what is great about business out here but also what pitfalls to look out for- then opened up for questions from the students.
The first question came from a student who I think was trying to emulate a hard-nosed, no nonsense businessman, who quite aggressively asked "Hold on, hold on hold on! So, can you just tell me whether I should bring my business here or not? The first presentations are telling me that everything is wonderful out here, now you lot tell me it's not so easy. So which is it then?!?"
I (admittedly a little bit annoyed, as I was doing the panel for free, I just wanted to help some future business people out) said to her: "Your job as a business owner is to gather data, evaluate it and make what you think is a sound decision based on it. You saw basically 2 sets of presentations today, one from people who are selling the Czech Republic, and one from foreigners who have actually built businesses here. So, you need to evaluate both sides of the coin, and come up with your own decision. If you can't do that you may well end up buying a lot of bridges and investing blindly in things that can't fail."
That gathered a few laughs, and even the woman who asked came up to me afterwards and asked me a few more questions (but still in a bullish type of way). But the local Chamber of commerce and the ministry never invited me again to be a panel member.
That was a round about way of trying to say that newly minted MBAs, their heads full of case studies, tends to see the business world in shades of black and white. That theories always work, that the business would be successful if you only did this. But the real world tends to be a little more murky, and until those MBAs gain a little more experience and are granted a little wisdom, they offer very little more value than an interesting tweet.
Education is hard and needs to be worked hard to get your money's worth out of it.
people who can code think they can do anything and everything
Lifting the character limit could make Twitter a publishing powerhouse over night. With the right API support, writers could write their content on Twitter and have it appear as standard blog posts on their own domains. It could completely open up the platform to new opportunities, plus allow for richer expression in content which means they can mine the ever living shit out of it even more accurately to improve their advertising profits.
But retaining the character limit changes the platform entirely. "Lifting the twitter limit" does not a publishing platform make; it changes everything that Twitter is.
I think Jack explained the psychological reasons very well [1]: Imagine you're standing in front of a blank wall, and instructed to paint the entire thing. You hold yourself in a very specific way. You spend a lot of time and effort thinking about how you should do it. You compose your actions in such a way to fill the entire wall.
Now compare that to being given a post-it note. Not only is it less intimidating and more disposable, but it doesn't take as much mental effort to get to a point where your work becomes valuable.
That's why I tweet incessantly, but I rarely blog. To blog I feel like I have to have some continuation of several thoughts that are strung together in a logical way, and all flow to some larger conclusion. Tweeting is a single thought or impression that is off the cuff. It almost flows naturally out of me.
I even find that when I want to write a blog post, it flows the best when I just start out tweeting. Before I know it it becomes a tweet storm, but breaking the work up into very small, bite-sized chunks makes the entire process manageable.
That being said, it makes sense for there to be some way to easily consume a tweet storm other than someone tweeting 1/ 2/ 3/ 4/. But I don't think that solution is saying, "Alright, go nuts, tweets can be as long as you want them to." My hunch is Twitter would lose an order of magnitude more value than it would gain by doing so.
I rather enjoy seeing what's on the mind of the smartest people in the world (and even moreso what they're reading), and that's what I try to structure my Twitter feed for.
I try to tweet things that are at least somewhat insightful, but maybe I really suck at it. The great thing about Twitter is that if people don't think I'm interesting they can unfollow me. I really love that. Being on Twitter is like being in a room with whomever you would like to at any given time.
Well its usually unappealing, doesn't mean always. Look at it this way - would you tell the world to stop writing so many books unless they knew the book they were writing was a bonafide masterpiece?
I think there are ways to allow tweetstorms without lifting the limit, and I love the concept of things like oneshot that allow you to reference something without making it part of your tweet, but still imposing the limit. My guess would be Twitter builds in some features like that.
Just up the limit to what you need for a decent English paragraph and be done with it. Right now, you can't even write a complex sentence.
writers could write their content on Twitter and have it appear as standard blog posts on their own domains
That makes the posts sound very, very large. That's not what I want from Twitter - I want short, sharp posts that make one single point. 140 characters does feel like a meaningless limit, but IMO they'd still want to emphasise short content somehow.
I can't name another medium built around this much respect for the time and attention of readers, down to the character. It's great.
Note: the above started as 2 long paragraphs; as an exercise I edited it down to 2 tweets - I think it's better!
Dick was definitely thrown into the role - it wasn't something he fought for.
This would also be consistent with the employees feeling a significant amount of loyalty toward Ev, and several wanting to quit when he was ousted.
He does have a substantial equity position in Twitter.
From the $2 Billion in revenue and the 74% YOY increase in revenue, mostly https://investor.twitterinc.com/releasedetail.cfm?releaseid=...
Uniqlo? Whole Foods?
There's certainly a lot of competition in the space, but I'm amazed at how different the small business landscape is from 3 years ago. Previously many places that weren't big chains were cash-only; now virtually nobody is, and many of them are using Square (& competitors) to take credit cards.
Of relevance - Square is still a backend payment processor for several companies, even if it doesn't have the device on the front end. They still process payments for Starbucks, in lieu of Bank of America. It is not clear whether they make any money at it, though.
Also their app was one of the worse I had the displeasure of using on a mobile phone. Really.
Instagram did the concept much, much better.
What makes you say that?
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Hence Twitter getting more and more creative with formats: app installs, cards, videos, and have you seen the new "send me spam" ads? http://i.imgur.com/h4H7RQw.png
https://www.google.com/finance?q=NYSE%3ATWTR&fstype=ii&ei=qz... <- Income before tax: -578.350.000 USD.
If Jerry Yang did not have the credentials of Yahoo founder/CEO at the time, do you think Jack Ma would've let him in? Alibaba was growing very fast at that point, and one big reason they let Yahoo in is its brand.
"In 2005, under Yang’s direction but before he took over as CEO in 2007, Yahoo! purchased a 40% stake in Alibaba for $1 billion plus the assets of Yahoo! China, valued at $700 million."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerry_Yang_(entrepreneur)#Alib...
Dorsey's original idea for Twttr was a service that let you group SMS what club you're at to your friends list. If he had been on his own it probably would have been yet another group texting app (maybe eventually WhatsApp). It was Evan Williams (IMHO), with his Blogger experience, that developed Twitter into the "micro blogging" service we came to know. Evan Williams is working on Medium now, another idea broadcasting platform.
http://blog.flattr.net/2013/04/twitter-is-forcing-us-to-drop...
"Twitter users create the favorite and just like they own their tweets they should own the result of their action. If you favorite something we argue that you should be able to decide what you want to do with the data you create. If you want to use it to give Flattr donations to other Twitter users you should be the one to make that decision."
http://thenextweb.com/entrepreneur/2011/11/14/jack-dorsey-do...
Maybe Jack located them close together for a reason.
On one hand, I have ceased to see twitter evolve much at all over the last N years, much like I used to say of Flickr. I eventually left Flickr because I wasn't seeing improvements for photo sharing and browsing that I really wanted as a photographer.
It's a legitimate problem that he needs to solve. I don't think twitter needs to be much different than what it is, because i'm addicted to it, but it not evolving and just investing in scale I think does need to be addressed.
Ways to find more interesting people and content, and to allow people to have more room to link to other pages/sites/things about themselves might be a start. (Without getting to be too myspacey?).
I definitely like that it's a lot more open than Facebook and can read things without always friending everything, but I also want more controls about what type of content I see and get. Lists are ok-ish, but so many things are so marketey from companies versus just being news feeds, I kind of end up not following companies.
Marketers on twitter are I think it's curse, and it's starting to become that kind of platform.
I think Jack taking over for now can only be a good thing.
Talk is cheap but in a way this is what Google did with AdWords. In the past you should have a budget of thousands dollars to advertise on popular sites like Yahoo. Google found a way to keep the required budget at a minimum.
I think Twitter haven't done that because it is always more comfortable to talk to a few customers who can pay a lot of money instead of having an horde using your service, but it is currently unacceptable to think this way if you are Twitter.
The other companies I can think of (FB, Google, Tumblr) utilize the social graph to provide ad-targeting services, but don't charge to access the graph itself. The live nature of Twitter's firehose is probably better suited to sale as a recurring commodity than FB or Tumblr's.
I wonder if there's a price point where they could achieve widespread API usage while still making money with standard infrastructure (no custom datacenters, &c.)
> I wonder if there's a price point where they could achieve widespread API usage while still making money with standard infrastructure (no custom datacenters, &c.)
What issue do you see here? can you expand?
Ah, I got a bit muddled in my diction here. I was trying to refer to the firehose. The firehose itself should inherently have some useful graph data though, as you would be able to see all the @reply relationships.
> What issue do you see here? can you expand?
I don't have a great handle on the economics here, but I can envision a scenario where:
cost to deliver firehose (engineering, infrastructure) + (marginal cost/user * users) > market value of firehose/user * users
Again, this may sound silly to someone with a better handle on the numbers behind engineering & maintaining this solution. My salient point was just that I'd be curious to find out what kind of value they could extract from the firehose by selling it directly.
http://uk.businessinsider.com/medium-budget-cuts-and-restruc...
"Medium now wants to become more of a social network rather than a publishing platform. But this comes at a great cost to its full-time and freelance staff ...
“Medium is not a publishing tool,” CEO Ev Williams wrote in the announcement. "It's a network. A network of ideas that build off each other. And people. And GIFs."
Many are still trying to decipher what this means ... Nearly all of Medium's sites are undergoing major upheavals.."
As for the fake accounts I think they flourish on Twitter not just because it is social media, but also because of the follower limits. There is a whole underground business of fake accounts to get real users over the 2000 follower mark initially and even higher as the account grows as followers to following becomes out of whatever proportion Twitter sets. I think if they eliminated or adjusted the 2000 follower limit (there are other ways to detect spam accounts besides limiting the account to 2000 followers until they cross a threshold) it would help some with deterring this issue.
Sorry rant over :)
These fake accounts are quite difficult to detect.
The accounts that are easy to detect are avoided anyway, since users get to manage their own subscriptions. Some are even cherished for their novelty - horseebooks, etc.
Detecting these covert accounts means being a middle man for whichever party lays a claim about source - and this makes Twitter a middleman for other parties' curation.
They will submit requests to have these taken down (as the State Department did to Youtube to take down Al-Alwaki's videos) - though currently Twitter is not very cooperative.
I do not know how Twitter would handle a problem like this itself.
I fear they might be tempted to attack the later by attacking the former.
On one hand it has incredible political clout as free speech tool, is used by most celebrities, etc.
Yet, its very design makes monetization difficult, and in my opinion, unlikely to ever be of great success.
"On Twitter" - http://blog.higg.im/2015/06/12/on-twitter/
----------
Also, you can make up your own mind about this:
http://www.vox.com/2015/6/11/8761731/twitter-trouble-faceboo...
http://lowercasecapital.com/2015/06/03/what-twitter-can-be-2...
https://medium.com/@michaeledwards/re-imaging-twitter-ea4e11...
http://www.novaspivack.com/uncategorized/why-twitters-engage...
https://alexgaynor.net/2014/oct/30/i-hope-twitter-goes-away/
http://blog.higg.im/twitters-self-immolation/
http://techcrunch.com/2015/02/22/twitters-dilemma/
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/04/a-eulo...
http://www.mathewingram.com/work/2015/04/30/twitters-multi-b...
Really though, I'd take a random bum off the street as CEO before Anthony Noto. So there's that.
Medium recently made major strategic changes, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9702651
Twitter really needs a strong product person running it.
Interesting to see what played out and what didn't.
http://techcrunch.com/2009/07/16/twitters-internal-strategy-...
From Wikipedia:
>Although his 2010 takeover as CEO was supposed to be temporary, while CEO Evan Williams was on paternity leave, it eventually became a permanent position
Seriously, the influx of kids who spam around anyone they see with "OMG CUT 4 BIEBER" or other pubertic crap sucks. It's even worse than the followback and other kinds of spambots.
Nothing against Jack, but human beings cannot multi-task. Now maybe Jack and Elon don't think they are human, but the results will bear this out.
Let's see what happens now.
I'm half way through and it's just insane. He spilled the beans for every product that Twitter could build in the coming couple of years for everyone to see.
Couldn't he just have sent those recommendations or feature requests to the top management and spared them the public humiliation or giving the competition free ideas and inteliigence?!!
This is just ridiculous.
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Whoever usurps Dick Costolo, if they pursue 'removing and preventing fake accounts', they are also likely to partner more closely with the Department of State and DoD to support strategic communication and counter-strategic communications efforts - taking down accounts the US claims represent efforts by Russia, other actors, or contain ideas and narratives that harm United States national security.