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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

#141

Post by BinaryIdiot »

Benjammer wrote: post #128
BinaryIdiot wrote: post #34

I'm sure it's simply arm chair quarter backing but I feel like Twitter could be turned around and I think almost anyone could do it as long as they can force them to take action and quickly. Honestly I feel like I shouldn't even post this because it's half on topic and half off topic. But I was thinking about some ideas I think Twitter should do and, well, screw it I'm curious to see what the HN community thinks of a…

Apart from layoffs, how do you see your other ideas adding business value and/or revenue to the company rather than just making the product better for end users? Are you thinking about how Twitter could be a better product or a better business?

Good question. So I think my suggestions would make it a better product but I think if you can create better ways to engage others you can make Twitter more sticky. The more sticky the users are the more ads you can show them.

For example Facebook provides a great way to engage in conversations (the quality of said conversations may or may not be dubious). You can keep track of conversations, where you are in the conversations and mute specific people within one. Twitter has almost none of that which, in my opinion, likely contributes to the less than half of the daily usage that Twitter gets when compared to facebook [1].

But that's just one example. Working better with video and other media and lowering friction to using Live video or capturing it right within the app all help to keep users in their ecosystem.

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/gadfly/articles/2016-02-12/social-...

Re: Twitter’s Chief Technology Officer to Leave Company

#142

Post by maxerickson »

cderwin wrote: post #121
wyck wrote: post #102

There is this thing called the foundation of America and it centres on what's called the 1st amendment. If you think twitter or any social platform should interfere with that and somehow grants him a platform to destroy the world then I suggest you re-evaluate your stance, stop over reacting like a 15 year old, and pick up a copy of 1984.

Before someone comments noting that the 1st amendment only restricts government and is not binding on twitter: please note that free speech is a valuable community principle for the same reasons it is a valuable legal principle. The "marketplace of ideas" is very real and very valuable and ought not be censored. Moreover, it is very hard to consider social networks in this day and age to be acting as anything other t…

On the other hand, it's perfectly reasonable to remove some disruptive individual from a lecture (think someone repeatedly shouting the name of a soda in order to disrupt the lecture, not an invited speaker).

This is the same sort of removal of ideas from the marketplace that you are talking about, it's just probably not one you want to use as a test for what you have articulated.

Re: Twitter’s Chief Technology Officer to Leave Company

#143

Post by rodrickbrown »

blackaspen wrote: post #116
nerfhammer wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think Mesos is the only one from that list they didn't make, they were just an early adopter on that one

You're right, they didn't make it and open source it. But they did work closely on it's creation, as far as I know. (edited above post to remove Mesos mention).

You're actually right Benjamin Hindman now CEO of Mesosphere Inc. started what became the Apache Mesos project while a PHD student at Berkeley, He later left Berkeley, interned at Google, then took a full time role at Twitter where he built out Mesos at scale.

His linkedIn bio: Member of the Technical Staff Twitter March 2010 – May 2013 (3 years 3 months) Built out Apache Mesos (http://mesos.apache.org).

Re: Twitter’s Chief Technology Officer to Leave Company

#144

Post by flukus »

BinaryIdiot wrote: post #34

I'm sure it's simply arm chair quarter backing but I feel like Twitter could be turned around and I think almost anyone could do it as long as they can force them to take action and quickly. Honestly I feel like I shouldn't even post this because it's half on topic and half off topic. But I was thinking about some ideas I think Twitter should do and, well, screw it I'm curious to see what the HN community thinks of a…

> Lay off approx 60-70% of the staff.

How will that go down with investors expecting growth?

Re: Twitter’s Chief Technology Officer to Leave Company

#145

Post by basch »

josh_carterPDX wrote: post #83
criddell wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

bull. twitters growth stalled because its way to hard to join and sort through. look how long you can be part of reddit before you make an account. you can even bookmark http://reddit.com/r/tech+askhistorians+bestof+askscience and have a custom mix without having an account. their logged out front page is a pile of shit. imgur.com is better at what twitter is trying to be, twitter should chase digg/medium not lowest common denominator memegrabs.

Re: Twitter’s Chief Technology Officer to Leave Company

#146

Post by flukus »

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.

They would still be the goto place for most twitter users. If they don't screw it up with censorship.

Re: Twitter’s Chief Technology Officer to Leave Company

#147

Post by basch »

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.

twitter was too small to be there, he wanted companies with money?

Re: Twitter’s Chief Technology Officer to Leave Company

#148

Post by BinaryIdiot »

throwaway420 wrote: post #138
BinaryIdiot wrote: post #34

I'm sure it's simply arm chair quarter backing but I feel like Twitter could be turned around and I think almost anyone could do it as long as they can force them to take action and quickly. Honestly I feel like I shouldn't even post this because it's half on topic and half off topic. But I was thinking about some ideas I think Twitter should do and, well, screw it I'm curious to see what the HN community thinks of a…

It might be too late for devs to trust them again, but they had an ideal situation maybe like 5-6 years ago where every developer out there was thinking about and experimenting with the Twitter API and you'd see a cool new project released basically every day. That all stopped when the suits wanted to grab control of Twitter and started discouraging and forcing out lots of companies that were trying to invest on that…

Facebook has developer APIs but they, ultimately, control the ecosystem. They only let developers kinda play in it. I honestly don't think Twitter needs to win any developers back for two reasons.

1. They should be more like Facebook. Never, ever again allow a third party app to control the primary way to view all of their data. It's too important. Grandfather existing apps in but slowly add new capabilities that they cannot access thus smothering them.

2. If Twitter can become more engaging / sticky it can keep users around for longer which should, in theory, help bring more people to their platform and let them display ads longer. This will ultimately force developers to work with them again, regardless of their feelings around trust.

Look at Facebook. They destroyed many games livelihoods with changes and people not only still use them but other than places like HN you rarely hear about issues with developers trusting them.

Re: Twitter’s Chief Technology Officer to Leave Company

#149

Post by throwaw12ay »

throwaway420 wrote: post #138
BinaryIdiot wrote: post #34

I'm sure it's simply arm chair quarter backing but I feel like Twitter could be turned around and I think almost anyone could do it as long as they can force them to take action and quickly. Honestly I feel like I shouldn't even post this because it's half on topic and half off topic. But I was thinking about some ideas I think Twitter should do and, well, screw it I'm curious to see what the HN community thinks of a…

It might be too late for devs to trust them again, but they had an ideal situation maybe like 5-6 years ago where every developer out there was thinking about and experimenting with the Twitter API and you'd see a cool new project released basically every day. That all stopped when the suits wanted to grab control of Twitter and started discouraging and forcing out lots of companies that were trying to invest on that…

> It might be too late for devs to trust them again,

Stupid mistake from Twitter.

Basically Twitter has a long history of shutting down API access to any product or client that becomes remotely popular. Did they think being unpopular among developers would be something positive ? It's like they didn't realise ALL these twitter clients actually helped create MORE content on Twitter. That was stupid.

Re: Twitter’s Chief Technology Officer to Leave Company

#150

Post by BinaryIdiot »

flukus wrote: post #144
BinaryIdiot wrote: post #34

I'm sure it's simply arm chair quarter backing but I feel like Twitter could be turned around and I think almost anyone could do it as long as they can force them to take action and quickly. Honestly I feel like I shouldn't even post this because it's half on topic and half off topic. But I was thinking about some ideas I think Twitter should do and, well, screw it I'm curious to see what the HN community thinks of a…

> Lay off approx 60-70% of the staff. How will that go down with investors expecting growth?

Considering layoffs typically increase stock prices in the short term, help increase profits in the short term, I would imagine short term investors would be happy. Long term investors it's hard to say because trimming the fat allows you to try much, much longer than you could have before.

Overall I would imagine long term investors would have a positive feeling but only if a solid image is communicated to them regarding ways to improve and grow.

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