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Twitter’s Chief Technology Officer to Leave Company

nytimes.com

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Re: Twitter’s Chief Technology Officer to Leave Company

#41

Post by slg »

blackaspen wrote: post #24
slg wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Was Twitter ever really about tech excellence? My perspective as an outsider who doesn't live or work in Silicon Valley, it always seemed more of a communications and media company founded on a tech backbone. Beyond their early scaling problems, which they spent a long, long time fighting, what really exciting tech has emerged from Twitter? Google, Apple, Amazon, and Facebook all have much more impressive technology…

Twitter's Github: https://github.com/twitter Apache Aurora, Bootstrap, Storm, Heron, Pants, ThriftMux, DistributedLog, Apache Cotton, Iago, just to name a few.

Can't most of those projects be boiled down to dealing with scaling? Twitter has seemed to have been mostly focused inwards, trying to get themselves more efficient at being Twitter. The other companies I mentioned seem more ambitious in expanding their tech outwards.

Re: Twitter’s Chief Technology Officer to Leave Company

#42

Post by [deleted] »

johns wrote: post #13
aresant wrote: post #7

Bigger to me is the VP of Product - Josh McFarland - just bailed out 30 minutes ago too: https://twitter.com/crazyfoo/status/811331557608652800 AKA outside of Dorsey, who is a split / shared CEO, who is in charge of Twitter?

I hope using a tweetstorm to announce his departure was a subtle shot at the company's inability to ship a product the way people want to use it.

[deleted]

Re: Twitter’s Chief Technology Officer to Leave Company

#43

Post by md224 »

madeofpalk wrote: post #23
johns wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hope using a tweetstorm to announce his departure was a subtle shot at the company's inability to ship a product the way people want to use it.

I know I might sound like a vim user, but tweetstorms are honestly one of my favourite parts of twitter. Maybe there could be a better UI for authoring and displaying them, but there's something I really enjoy about reading a story 140 characters at a time.

I've been saying this for a little while now: Twitter should really try to capitalize on Tweetstorms. What they don't seem to realize is that Tweetstorms enable Twitter to be a kind of inverse annotation platform. Most annotation platforms enable large chunks of text to be dissected by readers, but a Tweetstorm is the opposite: the author specifies the exact segmentation of the text as they release it, and each segment can be individually commented on or shared. It forces authors to present their ideas as a sequence of small interlocking arguments. The medium enforces rhetorical granularity, for better or worse.

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. :)

Re: Twitter’s Chief Technology Officer to Leave Company

#44

Post by minimaxir »

slg wrote: post #41
blackaspen wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Twitter's Github: https://github.com/twitter Apache Aurora, Bootstrap, Storm, Heron, Pants, ThriftMux, DistributedLog, Apache Cotton, Iago, just to name a few.

Can't most of those projects be boiled down to dealing with scaling? Twitter has seemed to have been mostly focused inwards, trying to get themselves more efficient at being Twitter. The other companies I mentioned seem more ambitious in expanding their tech outwards.

That's a No True Scotsman perspective. Scaling isn't easy.

Re: Twitter’s Chief Technology Officer to Leave Company

#45

Post by rahrahrah »

chillydawg wrote: post #21
x0x0 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Josh came in from the TellApart acquisition, an adtech/retargeting/data company, where he was ceo. I can't understand how he was vp product on a social network.

Because it's not a social network? It's an advertising brokerage.

Yeah? And Facebook isn't a social network either, it's an advertising brokerage? And Google isn't a search engine, it's an advertising brokerage? The Financial Times isn't a newspaper, it's an advertising brokerage? Spotify isn't music streaming, it's an advertising brokerage?

Re: Twitter’s Chief Technology Officer to Leave Company

#46

Post by throwaway420 »

MichaelApproved wrote: post #9
rb808 wrote: post #4

It feels like Twitter the company should be imploding, but it must be a secure business if its the next president's primary communication channel.

Trump uses Twitter but he didn't invite them to the tech summit reportedly for not creating a special trending tag for him. 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.

> Trump uses Twitter but he didn't invite them to the tech summit reportedly for not creating a special trending tag for 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.

Re: Twitter’s Chief Technology Officer to Leave Company

#47

Post by lhnz »

md224 wrote: post #43
madeofpalk wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know I might sound like a vim user, but tweetstorms are honestly one of my favourite parts of twitter. Maybe there could be a better UI for authoring and displaying them, but there's something I really enjoy about reading a story 140 characters at a time.

I've been saying this for a little while now: Twitter should really try to capitalize on Tweetstorms. What they don't seem to realize is that Tweetstorms enable Twitter to be a kind of inverse annotation platform. Most annotation platforms enable large chunks of text to be dissected by readers, but a Tweetstorm is the opposite: the author specifies the exact segmentation of the text as they release it, and each segme…

What is there to build out? I guess it could be made more obvious for those that don't get it, but it's already being used in exactly the way you describe by Twitter's power users.

Re: Twitter’s Chief Technology Officer to Leave Company

#48

Post by danso »

minimaxir wrote: post #40
danso wrote: post #31

I hope the best for Twitter, as it's probably been the most beneficial of the social media network services (unless you count GMail) for me. I wish I could devote more of my programming class curriculum to teaching the Twitter API, as it has so many rich use-cases and students really enjoy it, but I expect that if Twitter survives for the long-haul, its API probably won't. At least, I expect it to be constrained in t…

Interestingly, Facebook is surprisingly liberal with their public data endpoints, with no apparent rate limiting for API retrieval from public Facebook Pages and Groups (source: I develop a scraper and have not been yelled at by FB, yet: https://github.com/minimaxir/facebook-page-post-scraper ) Twitter, meanwhile, still has that stupid 3200 most-recent tweet limit on historical data, which is apparently a "technical…

It's been awhile since I've used the FB API, but one thing that's nice about Twitter is that you have a lot of room to crawl networks of users; for example, I always like getting the list of accounts that U.S. congressmembers follow (based on the Twitter account list maintained by the unitedstates project [0]), as a proxy for such things as perceived political bent of media organizations.

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 :).

[0] https://github.com/unitedstates/congress-legislators

Re: Twitter’s Chief Technology Officer to Leave Company

#49

Post by clamprecht »

johns wrote: post #13
aresant wrote: post #7

Bigger to me is the VP of Product - Josh McFarland - just bailed out 30 minutes ago too: https://twitter.com/crazyfoo/status/811331557608652800 AKA outside of Dorsey, who is a split / shared CEO, who is in charge of Twitter?

I hope using a tweetstorm to announce his departure was a subtle shot at the company's inability to ship a product the way people want to use it.

What's wrong with reinventing TCP/IP over twitter? Sometimes they even appear out of order.

Re: Twitter’s Chief Technology Officer to Leave Company

#50

Post by Fiahil »

x0x0 wrote: post #17
aresant wrote: post #7

Bigger to me is the VP of Product - Josh McFarland - just bailed out 30 minutes ago too: https://twitter.com/crazyfoo/status/811331557608652800 AKA outside of Dorsey, who is a split / shared CEO, who is in charge of Twitter?

Josh came in from the TellApart acquisition, an adtech/retargeting/data company, where he was ceo. I can't understand how he was vp product on a social network.

Maybe, because building an adtech company is not something he wants to be remembered for?
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