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Twitter’s CEO Dick Costolo Is Stepping Down

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Re: Twitter’s CEO Dick Costolo Is Stepping Down

#191

Post by foobarqux »

jusben1369 wrote: post #33
austenallred wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Jack is a wild card. They'll give him a shot and see how it goes. 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.

I don't think he can do that to Square and their investors as nice as the story sounds.

He'd probably rather run Twitter if forced to choose.

Re: Twitter’s CEO Dick Costolo Is Stepping Down

#192

Post by tormeh »

logicallee wrote: post #132
dchuk wrote: post #78

How come Twitter doesn't lift the character limit on tweets? Then you could allow content writers to write a more coherent thought (IE not breaking it into a 20+ message tweet storm) and then normal length tweets could serve just as comments. 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…

the net is becoming so low content, tweets are a miracle of history. Look at blogs and comments anywhere else: so much filler. 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!

Yeah, but it's still two tweets, which kind of proves the parent's point. I think the character limit could be removed, but everything past 280 characters is only visible if you click on the tweet. (and ofc some indicator of this truncation needs to be visible). So then everybody would really want to stick to the character limit, but at the same time you could add some extra text if you're fine with people mostly not reading it.

Re: Twitter’s CEO Dick Costolo Is Stepping Down

#193

Post by vonklaus »

binxbolling wrote: post #106
larrys wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then you end up with the "postal service".

Which is wildly successful and doesn't cost us taxpayers a dime. If our "leaders" stopped actively sabotaging the USPS, it could be doing even better.

poor b8, 1/10. Please try harder.

Re: Twitter’s CEO Dick Costolo Is Stepping Down

#194

Post by kjs3 »

awwstn wrote: post #178
eroo wrote: post #15

Yesterday: "Twitter CEO Dick Costolo laughs off 'crazy' calls for his resignation"[0] [0] (warning: auto-play video on page) http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/twitter-ceo-dick-costolo-laughs-off...

I don't know much about running a public company, but my guess is that he has an obligation (maybe a legal one?) to his shareholders to not hint to news like this before the company is officially announcing it.

You are correct. This is part of his duty.

Re: Twitter’s CEO Dick Costolo Is Stepping Down

#195

Post by jkimmel »

wslh wrote: post #174
jkimmel wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are there any examples of company selling their social graph data in this manner directly? 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…

I was talking about the firehose, not the full social graph (although this is interesting to think about). They already sell this but their entry price is high. There other companies in this space using this data and selling additional services such as DataSift. > I wonder if there's a price point where they could achieve widespread API usage while still making money with standard infrastructure (no custom datacenter…

> I was talking about the firehose, not the full social graph

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.

Re: Twitter’s CEO Dick Costolo Is Stepping Down

#196

Post by rabble »

arthurcolle wrote: post #38
austenallred wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He's still be on the board as well. He probably stepped down mostly of his own accord; he didn't fight to become the CEO in the first place (even tried to turn it down multiple times). He was kind of thrown in there by the board when they fired Ev

I just bought "Hatching Twitter" yesterday, so I guess this might be a spoiler, but why did they fire Ev?

Because Ev's a great product guy but not such a great manager. Speaking of which, Jack's also better at coding / product than managing himself. (i worked at the company before both 'founders' jack and ev joined as employees.)

Re: Twitter’s CEO Dick Costolo Is Stepping Down

#197

Post by gohrt »

SeoxyS wrote: post #162
binxbolling wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which is wildly successful and doesn't cost us taxpayers a dime. If our "leaders" stopped actively sabotaging the USPS, it could be doing even better.

If it was wildly successful, how did we end up with tons of private competitors with a large market share (FedEx, UPS, DHL, OnTrac, etc). The U.S. Is one of the only countries where the state run postal service isn't sufficient. In Switzerland, for example, there is only the Swiss Post. Most countries, to my knowledge, operate with just one major postal network.

There are many niches within the general category of "post". USPS's focus (and monopoly) is on first-class and bulk 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...

Re: Twitter’s CEO Dick Costolo Is Stepping Down

#198

Post by oliyoung »

lylo wrote: post #101
dchuk wrote: post #78

How come Twitter doesn't lift the character limit on tweets? Then you could allow content writers to write a more coherent thought (IE not breaking it into a 20+ message tweet storm) and then normal length tweets could serve just as comments. 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…

I'm surprised they haven't added something along the lines of docs.twitter.com that allowed Twitter to host/own long form copy but linking to it via short URLs just as they do with photos. Best of both worlds or too fragmented/confusing?

"they" did, it's called Medium (it was founded by @biz & @ev)

Re: Twitter’s CEO Dick Costolo Is Stepping Down

#199

Post by wslh »

jkimmel wrote: post #195
wslh wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was talking about the firehose, not the full social graph (although this is interesting to think about). They already sell this but their entry price is high. There other companies in this space using this data and selling additional services such as DataSift. > I wonder if there's a price point where they could achieve widespread API usage while still making money with standard infrastructure (no custom datacenter…

> I was talking about the firehose, not the full social graph 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 d…

I don't know the numbers but I know a lot of people who want to use the firehose for a purpose.

Re: Twitter’s CEO Dick Costolo Is Stepping Down

#200

Post by adventured »

grey413 wrote: post #173
adventured wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The reason that was put into place, is that if they don't fund those pensions now, there will be no ability to do so in the future - their business is evaporating.

The business may be evaporating, but the service is going to continue. It turns out that getting documents and packages to any given citizen is really, really important for the function of governance. 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…

If they held off on paying those obligations until later, they'd be unable to pay them. It's that simple. The math would not have worked out. Reduce the size of their business by 1/3, increase the size of obligations substantially due to employees retiring and drawing against those pensions, and it becomes a very large tax payer funded pension plan.

The USPS has already become increasingly dependent on commercial spam mail to keep going.

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