Twitter’s CEO Dick Costolo Is Stepping Down

I'd always figured (based on offhand comments by Ev and his investors at the time) that it was because Ev had difficulty taking a hard-line on people for performance issues. The quote I'm thinking of was something like "Evan always wanted his friends to share in his success", and it was in the context of hiring friends or promoting internal employees into larger roles rather than looking outside the company. My read on that is that he placed a very high premium on loyalty, rewarding people who had helped out Twitter when it was very young, while the board wanted to capitalize on its hotness to bring in big external talent that was available then.

This would also be consistent with the employees feeling a significant amount of loyalty toward Ev, and several wanting to quit when he was ousted.

The origins of the 140 character limit are interesting; it was originally put in place because Twitter was SMS-based, and SMS limits the number of characters to 160. 140 allowed some wiggle room.

But retaining the character limit changes the platform entirely. "Lifting the twitter limit" does not a publishing platform make; it changes everything that Twitter is.

I think Jack explained the psychological reasons very well [1]: Imagine you're standing in front of a blank wall, and instructed to paint the entire thing. You hold yourself in a very specific way. You spend a lot of time and effort thinking about how you should do it. You compose your actions in such a way to fill the entire wall.

Now compare that to being given a post-it note. Not only is it less intimidating and more disposable, but it doesn't take as much mental effort to get to a point where your work becomes valuable.

That's why I tweet incessantly, but I rarely blog. To blog I feel like I have to have some continuation of several thoughts that are strung together in a logical way, and all flow to some larger conclusion. Tweeting is a single thought or impression that is off the cuff. It almost flows naturally out of me.

I even find that when I want to write a blog post, it flows the best when I just start out tweeting. Before I know it it becomes a tweet storm, but breaking the work up into very small, bite-sized chunks makes the entire process manageable.

That being said, it makes sense for there to be some way to easily consume a tweet storm other than someone tweeting 1/ 2/ 3/ 4/. But I don't think that solution is saying, "Alright, go nuts, tweets can be as long as you want them to." My hunch is Twitter would lose an order of magnitude more value than it would gain by doing so.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EPLK8lmsjq4

Could the recent Medium re-org by Twitter co-founder Ev Williams be related? If Medium was acquired by Twitter and Williams became CEO, it would combine the product vision and data from Medium with the Twitter users who were originally drawn to Williams' vision.

http://uk.businessinsider.com/medium-budget-cuts-and-restruc...

"Medium now wants to become more of a social network rather than a publishing platform. But this comes at a great cost to its full-time and freelance staff ...

“Medium is not a publishing tool,” CEO Ev Williams wrote in the announcement. "It's a network. A network of ideas that build off each other. And people. And GIFs."

Many are still trying to decipher what this means ... Nearly all of Medium's sites are undergoing major upheavals.."

Use of the word "just" with regard to a technical issue is—in my experience—a good indication that the issue is incredibly thorny and complicated, and there's probably a really good reason why things are the way they are.

My guess would be that it is because fake accounts are not merely fraud, but are often front organizations, either by lobbyists and political PACs or by corporation PR groups, or by nations states abroad and at home for their own covert 'PR'.

These fake accounts are quite difficult to detect.

The accounts that are easy to detect are avoided anyway, since users get to manage their own subscriptions. Some are even cherished for their novelty - horseebooks, etc.

Detecting these covert accounts means being a middle man for whichever party lays a claim about source - and this makes Twitter a middleman for other parties' curation.