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I feel like every three weeks I see an article like this on Hacker News and a gazillion good ideas about how to improve Twitter's service. At the same time, th

I feel like every three weeks I see an article like this on Hacker News and a gazillion good ideas about how to improve Twitter's service. At the same time, there have been no core changes to Twitter in the last several years. Is Twitter the only company in the Valley where every engineer isn't checking Hacker News every few hours!?

harlanlewis 11y ago
This exactly captures why Twitter is so disappointing. From my normal user perspective (not advertising, not a celebrity...) they've never been an internally innovative company - @mentions and retweets are community inventions, the best clients for niche, power, and general use have always been 3rd party, and after stumbling onto a private messaging hit they shot DMs behind the woodshed just before the world went wild for whatsapp and snapchat. The community continues to come up with interesting ideas, never to be implemented. There's no doubt Twitter has stellar engineers. It's strategy that needs to be externalized. A shame they've spoiled so many developer relationships.
- niccaluim 11y ago
  For the past five years Twitter engineering has been focused on two things: rebuilding the infrastructure and building an ad platform. They nailed both of these. But unfortunately that left little time for product engineering. Add in the revolving door of heads of product and it's no surprise there hasn't been much substantive change to the product.
PhantomGremlin 11y ago
Is Twitter the only company in the Valley where every engineer isn't checking Hacker News every few hours!? They're all too busy passing joints and/or bongs around to really care about HN or about their product. :-) Peter Thiel: Twitter Executives 'Probably' Smoke Too Much Pot, And That's Why It's A 'Horribly Mismanaged Company' http://www.businessinsider.com/twitter-executives-smoke-too-much-pot-2014-9 http://www.businessinsider.com/twitter-executives-smoke-too-...
- aikah 11y ago
  Pot Driven Development is fine , what is not is them shutting you down when you write a successful product based on their api. That's the stupidest policy ever.
reasonishy 11y ago
> At the same time, there have been no core changes to Twitter in the last several years. I thought they just figured out a revolutionary code change that allows them to support messages over 140 characters! That's real progress...

harlanlewis 11y ago

This exactly captures why Twitter is so disappointing. From my normal user perspective (not advertising, not a celebrity...) they've never been an internally innovative company - @mentions and retweets are community inventions, the best clients for niche, power, and general use have always been 3rd party, and after stumbling onto a private messaging hit they shot DMs behind the woodshed just before the world went wild for whatsapp and snapchat. The community continues to come up with interesting ideas, never to be implemented. There's no doubt Twitter has stellar engineers. It's strategy that needs to be externalized. A shame they've spoiled so many developer relationships.

niccaluim 11y ago
For the past five years Twitter engineering has been focused on two things: rebuilding the infrastructure and building an ad platform. They nailed both of these. But unfortunately that left little time for product engineering. Add in the revolving door of heads of product and it's no surprise there hasn't been much substantive change to the product.

PhantomGremlin 11y ago

Is Twitter the only company in the Valley where every engineer isn't checking Hacker News every few hours!? They're all too busy passing joints and/or bongs around to really care about HN or about their product. :-) Peter Thiel: Twitter Executives 'Probably' Smoke Too Much Pot, And That's Why It's A 'Horribly Mismanaged Company' http://www.businessinsider.com/twitter-executives-smoke-too-much-pot-2014-9 http://www.businessinsider.com/twitter-executives-smoke-too-...

aikah 11y ago
Pot Driven Development is fine , what is not is them shutting you down when you write a successful product based on their api. That's the stupidest policy ever.

reasonishy 11y ago

> At the same time, there have been no core changes to Twitter in the last several years. I thought they just figured out a revolutionary code change that allows them to support messages over 140 characters! That's real progress...