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Twitter starts testing 'Fleets,' its version of Stories

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Re: Twitter starts testing 'Fleets,' its version of Stories

#31

Post by baddox »

throwaway724 wrote: post #20
ilamont wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They've done quite a bit on the product front, although it's fair to question the utility to average users: - Increased tweet length to 280 chars - Tweet threads - GIF integration - Multiple UI revisions of desktop and mobile apps There's also been a fair amount of work on ads and security, although these changes will be less apparent to most users.

None of those things strike as 1) important or 2) indicative of a high-performing product development team given their size. But we can agree to disagree!

Ads and security are both extremely important to Twitter. It's hard to imagine any product concern being more important than those two, other than perhaps uptime.

Re: Twitter starts testing 'Fleets,' its version of Stories

#32

Post by advaita »

throwaway724 wrote: post #14

I really don't get it. Twitter has five thousand full-time employees. I have to assume at least 20% of them are in product development in some capacity. What exactly are these people doing all day? I can't point to a single notable product innovation they've had in years. And they continue to ignore the drumbeat of user asking for an edit button, and are completely unable to come up with any kind of reasonable soluti…

Could it be that they're just bogged down in fire fighting and paying off the tech debt accumulated over years? (Genuine question, as someone who has never worked in >50 eng company, I always wonder how those companies tackle stuff like this.)

Re: Twitter starts testing 'Fleets,' its version of Stories

#33

Post by baddox »

Zenst wrote: post #6
OedipusRex wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You cannot prevent that and it cannot be policed.

I concur about preventing, though T&C's could enable policing. Also a nice (c) notice would enable self-policing upon such infractions to some extent. But certainly it will not be a fluid process currently. Let's see if they update T&C's to accommodate that aspect.

Why would they want to police it? Surely Twitter is perfectly fine with you posting screenshots of things of interest (obviously within obscenity and legal restrictions).

Re: Twitter starts testing 'Fleets,' its version of Stories

#34

Post by mumblemumble »

throwaway724 wrote: post #14

I really don't get it. Twitter has five thousand full-time employees. I have to assume at least 20% of them are in product development in some capacity. What exactly are these people doing all day? I can't point to a single notable product innovation they've had in years. And they continue to ignore the drumbeat of user asking for an edit button, and are completely unable to come up with any kind of reasonable soluti…

> What exactly are these people doing all day?

Maintaining the infrastructure needed to deliver ads that are targeted based on real-time event streams collected from users' interaction with the website and app. Stuff like that.

That's my guess, anyway. It's the kind of thing that can keep a lot of developers very busy, but not something they'll be talking about much in public.

Re: Twitter starts testing 'Fleets,' its version of Stories

#35

Post by danShumway »

ilamont wrote: post #18
throwaway724 wrote: post #14

I really don't get it. Twitter has five thousand full-time employees. I have to assume at least 20% of them are in product development in some capacity. What exactly are these people doing all day? I can't point to a single notable product innovation they've had in years. And they continue to ignore the drumbeat of user asking for an edit button, and are completely unable to come up with any kind of reasonable soluti…

They've done quite a bit on the product front, although it's fair to question the utility to average users: - Increased tweet length to 280 chars - Tweet threads - GIF integration - Multiple UI revisions of desktop and mobile apps There's also been a fair amount of work on ads and security, although these changes will be less apparent to most users.

But is any of this really stuff that should take 1000 engineers to build? Tweet length? GIFs?

I don't question that those engineers are working hard. I'm sure they're not sitting around twiddling their thumbs. And I don't question that there aren't some genuinely hard, complicated problems to solve at Twitter, particularly around scaling and security. But from a structural perspective, I do still kind of wonder if companies the size of Twitter and Facebook aren't just an extended, very public example of Brooks's Law.

Anecdotally, I've been in large teams and small teams and I work equally hard in both environments. But even with the same amount of work, somehow, more stuff gets done and more products get shipped from the smaller teams.

Re: Twitter starts testing 'Fleets,' its version of Stories

#36

Post by strictnein »

ceejayoz wrote: post #24
throwaway724 wrote: post #14

I really don't get it. Twitter has five thousand full-time employees. I have to assume at least 20% of them are in product development in some capacity. What exactly are these people doing all day? I can't point to a single notable product innovation they've had in years. And they continue to ignore the drumbeat of user asking for an edit button, and are completely unable to come up with any kind of reasonable soluti…

I don't understand why anyone wants an edit button. Delete the tweet if you made a typo. I'd really prefer I not retweet a funny joke and an hour later discover it's been edited into a neo-Nazi recruitment link or something.

An edit button should only be allowed if it removed all Likes/Retweets/Comments a tweet had. And at that point, what's the point

Re: Twitter starts testing 'Fleets,' its version of Stories

#37

Post by chadlavi »

throwaway724 wrote: post #14

I really don't get it. Twitter has five thousand full-time employees. I have to assume at least 20% of them are in product development in some capacity. What exactly are these people doing all day? I can't point to a single notable product innovation they've had in years. And they continue to ignore the drumbeat of user asking for an edit button, and are completely unable to come up with any kind of reasonable soluti…

They're making tons of innovative new features for their customers, who are advertisers. People who write and read tweets aren't the customer, they're the product.

Re: Twitter starts testing 'Fleets,' its version of Stories

#38

Post by sli »

strictnein wrote: post #36
ceejayoz wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand why anyone wants an edit button. Delete the tweet if you made a typo. I'd really prefer I not retweet a funny joke and an hour later discover it's been edited into a neo-Nazi recruitment link or something.

An edit button should only be allowed if it removed all Likes/Retweets/Comments a tweet had. And at that point, what's the point

I wouldn't mind if editing was only available for maybe 5 minutes or something. I pretty much only delete/rewrite to fix typos.

Re: Twitter starts testing 'Fleets,' its version of Stories

#39

Post by anticensor »

throwaway724 wrote: post #14

I really don't get it. Twitter has five thousand full-time employees. I have to assume at least 20% of them are in product development in some capacity. What exactly are these people doing all day? I can't point to a single notable product innovation they've had in years. And they continue to ignore the drumbeat of user asking for an edit button, and are completely unable to come up with any kind of reasonable soluti…

Editing tweets is against the core concept of Twitter.

Re: Twitter starts testing 'Fleets,' its version of Stories

#40

Post by cronix »

creaghpatr wrote: post #13
sleepychu wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Snapchat has all these problems and people still enjoy the ephemeral nature of them.

Snapchat sends a notification to the sender when someone screenshots their content, will be interesting to see if Twitter does the same.

Only when using the native screen shot app, which you can use many on Android.
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