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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

#71

Post by danso »

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.

Frankly, I wouldn't mind if we saw an end to Trump's tweets. Not because of their content, but because of their impulsiveness, which is a behavior that Twitter's design encourages. Which is cool when it comes to celebrities and such in which it's fun to see what they think about sans filter.

But the president of the United States speaks with the executive authority for an entire nation. It's questionable enough when a company's stock falls because Trump lashes out at them, and means it [0]. But what about the times he makes a typo, or just doesn't have all the info he needs at that moment when his emotions arise? Even asking that he types something to be sent through a Wordpress-powered system would give him the same megaphone, but adding a little more friction so that things that deserved to be trashed/called-out in his voice actually deserve so.

For those who say this amounts to making Trump less "real" of a man...sure. But he's no longer just a man, he's the chief executive of the world's greatest power. He gave up the privilege of "just sayin what I think" for the privilege of being able to unilaterally launch a nuclear war. Keep in mind that there are no checks and balances against this power -- it is utterly unilateral: http://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2016/11/18/the-president-and-...

Giving up frictionless communication in 140-character-sized comments seems like a reasonable thing to pass on, given the many extra responsibilities he has, and the extra weight each of his words have.

[0] http://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/trump-threaten...

Re: Twitter’s Chief Technology Officer to Leave Company

#72

Post by qq66 »

argonaut wrote: post #22
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.

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…

Yes, but speaking as someone who has used Google's great advertising tools as well as mailed a money order to a niche forum owner to run an ad, the advertisers will put up with anything if you can deliver converting users.

Re: Twitter’s Chief Technology Officer to Leave Company

#73

Post by sulam »

minimaxir wrote: post #44
slg wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Can't reply to the child comment -- but worth pointing out that open sourcing your growth magic would be considered pretty dumb by most/all of SV. In fact open sourcing your scaling magic is considered dumb by most of SV. Finally, Twitter clearly doesn't have growth magic (or they'd be growing faster) -- but is that an engineer's fault? At the end of the day, any user facing engineering is beholden to the product team. Engineers at Twitter can run experiments, but they can't get those experiments shipped unless a PM is behind it. I'm not saying the PM team at Twitter are blocking awesome ideas -- just that there's a real shortage of awesome ideas that have been proven to work in the Twitter context. It's tough.

[full disclosure, I wrote one of the projects mentioned above.]

Re: Twitter’s Chief Technology Officer to Leave Company

#74

Post by brilliantcode »

when will we see the same for Facebook? If Twitter falls then it's a shift in investor's attitude towards "should make lots of money at unknown time down the road".

Money today is more valuable than money tomorrow. Tech seems to have been a curious exception as it was in the 2000 bubble.

Re: Twitter’s Chief Technology Officer to Leave Company

#75

Post by markcerqueira »

djfm wrote: post #66
usaphp wrote: post #52

While it's a topic about twitter I'd like to ask a question that always puzzles me. Twitter has 3900+ employees and good portion of those are developers, I just don't understand how can such a basic product that almost never pushes any updates or radical changes/improvements require so many employees. What the hell are they doing except for burning investors cash? Just curious...

It's probably harder than we think because of the scale of it.

Yeah, but that only really applies to specific engineering teams like backend services and ops right? Web (frontend), iOS, Android, etc. don't really care about scale.

Re: Twitter’s Chief Technology Officer to Leave Company

#76

Post by walterbell »

lhnz wrote: post #47
md224 wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Integrate it with W3C annotation standard, extending the standard to incorporate tweet storm strengths.

Re: Twitter’s Chief Technology Officer to Leave Company

#77

Post by minimaxir »

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…

You can query users on Facebook by their userID though, which is enough to uniquely identify users atleast. However, you can't easily scrape public user data even with Graph API.

That is probably for the best as people have messaged me about that functionality, with not-very-ethical intentions.

Re: Twitter’s Chief Technology Officer to Leave Company

#78

Post by sulam »

djfm wrote: post #66
usaphp wrote: post #52

While it's a topic about twitter I'd like to ask a question that always puzzles me. Twitter has 3900+ employees and good portion of those are developers, I just don't understand how can such a basic product that almost never pushes any updates or radical changes/improvements require so many employees. What the hell are they doing except for burning investors cash? Just curious...

It's probably harder than we think because of the scale of it.

Also a surprising fraction goes to data science and advertising infrastructure. Stuff that would go away if they weren't worried about making money. :)

Re: Twitter’s Chief Technology Officer to Leave Company

#79

Post by maxerickson »

narrator wrote: post #19
grandalf wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> a big name in tech anymore Donald Trump is making headlines using Twitter every day. I think that once users/victims become immune to Facebook's dark patterns, Twitter will look pretty good. The only thing it can do to screw that up is continue censoring content and allowing botnets.

What's just bizarre is that they were seriously considering censoring Donald Trump's account at one point and even announced it. From a purely business standpoint, that was a dumb idea even to propose. It makes you wonder about the rationality of management and if they view the company as some sort of hipster San Francisco hobby paid for by VCs and not as a profit making enterprise.

Are you talking about something stronger than they said here?

http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2016/11/...

Re: Twitter’s Chief Technology Officer to Leave Company

#80

Post by argonaut »

streblo wrote: post #65
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…

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.
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