Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Twitter’s Chief Technology Officer to Leave Company

nytimes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 347 posts

Re: Twitter’s Chief Technology Officer to Leave Company

#81

Post by sambe »

danso wrote: post #48
minimaxir wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 limitat…

I tried to use the FB API, expecting a mature API with bindings and libraries all over the place, lots of simplifying modules etc. I was left with the impression that I wasn't really allowed to use it all, because I wasn't writing an "App" (or perhaps because it wasn't running on a "Device"). Totally confusing experience, where – even if I'm not particularly accustomed to walled garden situations – the terminology and workflow just doesn't seem to match expectations at all.

Re: Twitter’s Chief Technology Officer to Leave Company

#82

Post by sulam »

argonaut wrote: post #29

I don't think this is as big a deal as the Twitter departures earlier this year. Several years ago Adam Messinger was already more or less sidelined from the engineering organization when Chris Fry was made VP of Engineering (CTO does not imply the VP of Engineering reports to the CTO). Later Chris Fry would be replaced by Alex Roetter (thanks commenter below). After Roetter left, Messinger was put back in charge of…

It's a bigger deal than that because he was put back in charge of the engineering organization for real. That means that from when I started there to now, the engineering leadership has been:

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.

Re: Twitter’s Chief Technology Officer to Leave Company

#83

Post by josh_carterPDX »

criddell wrote: post #68
josh_carterPDX wrote: post #26

Twitter is a business model that will be studied for years IMHO. No clear path to revenue, viral adoption, and very little product development away from its core competencies. I use Twitter often, but it has always seemed like a platform most useful if you have something to promote. One big flaw has been trying to find value to ordinary users who want to do something beyond typing into an echo chamber. If Twitter goe…

> No clear path to revenue 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.

No you're right. However, aside from having ad revenue I don't see anything they can do to accelerate their revenue growth. But yeah, cut spending, get employee count way down, and they could break even sooner than later.

Re: Twitter’s Chief Technology Officer to Leave Company

#84

Post by sulam »

argonaut wrote: post #80
streblo wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He wasn't even the head of the engineering organization before Roetter. He (Messinger) was sidelined by Chris Fry before Roetter ever took over.

Yeah that sounds about right.

After Mike Abbott left he was responsible for user-facing engineering reporting to Dick. Eventually Chris Fry moved up to SVP and he moved to CTO. So you're mostly right, but there was that weird period in there where he and Chris were peers. Then they were "peers" again, although he didn't have directs.

Re: Twitter’s Chief Technology Officer to Leave Company

#85

Post by sulam »

riffic wrote: post #33

Twitter's failure is a failure to embrace an open web. The next CTO at Twitter should take a deep hard look at decentralization, protocols such as OStatus, and how to provide an open platform (like email) not a walled garden. 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…

I'd love to hear how you think they make money in this world.

Re: Twitter’s Chief Technology Officer to Leave Company

#86

Post by riffic »

sulam wrote: post #85
riffic wrote: post #33

Twitter's failure is a failure to embrace an open web. The next CTO at Twitter should take a deep hard look at decentralization, protocols such as OStatus, and how to provide an open platform (like email) not a walled garden. 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…

I'd love to hear how you think they make money in this world.

advertising, same as any other company.

edit: oh are you talking status quo, or an idealized business model?

Re: Twitter’s Chief Technology Officer to Leave Company

#87

Post by argonaut »

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?

He was A VP of Product. Not The VP of Product.

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).

Re: Twitter’s Chief Technology Officer to Leave Company

#88

Post by AznHisoka »

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.

nope, thats their monetization strategy not their identity. a subtle difference.

Re: Twitter’s Chief Technology Officer to Leave Company

#89

Post by tapoxi »

rahrahrah wrote: post #45
chillydawg wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Financial Times and Spotify make money on subscriptions.

Re: Twitter’s Chief Technology Officer to Leave Company

#90

Post by sandworm101 »

x0x0 wrote: post #39
argonaut wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually, that makes total sense. There are multiple VPs at engineering firms. People always complain about how big Twitter is, how they can't believe how many employees Twitter has, but people don't realize Twitter has two "users": actual "users," and advertisers. Twitter has to dedicate a huge number of engineers, product managers, marketers, account managers, etc. to dealing with advertisers, setting up the ad auc…

good point 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.

They already have more than enough users. Twitter needs more/better advertizers if they want to break even. Users can be got through sponsorships and celeb endorsements, paying advertizers require competative platforms.
Post reply on HN