8 ms·

Twitter Acquires Magic Pony

swang 10y ago
Twitter should spend some of the money getting someone to actually improve their web ui. Click a link to an individual tweet and read it. Now you click out of it to read the person's timeline. Here comes the janky timeline refresh. I mean shouldn't someone spend some time so it doesn't look like they had to pull the user's timeline? I still get errors sometimes where I see, "1 new tweet" and it's the top tweet in my timeline, except here it is again.
tlrobinson 10y ago
I know nothing about Magic Pony, but I'm starting to wonder how much of this craze is a form of "keeping up with the Joneses", except with tech giants and ML/AI startups instead of suburban families and their cars, etc.
- tsunamifury 10y ago
  Its not, its a fundamental shift in how you power your applications. Not acquiring and building this talent at a major firm would be the equivalent of sticking to steam power in the face of oil.
kami8845 10y ago
Another sad moment for the London startup scene as one of the most promising startups of recent years get acqui-gobble-hired up by $BIGCO
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- Spivak 10y ago
  For most companies in the startup scene getting bought by a larger company that has the scale and resources to apply your tech to bigger and more interesting problems is the planned exit strategy.
  - kami8845 10y ago
    While not 100% comparable this feels as weak a move as selling Facebook to Yahoo for $1B London needs strong, original startups. It's dire if you're looking for employment out here.
- zump 10y ago
  Their product was only of use to a bigger company. Just like the slew of CV startups getting bought by Snapchat.
ultramancool 10y ago
This headline is far better if you don't know what Magic Pony is.
- skrowl 10y ago
  I assumed it was something about Hasbro's My Little Pony series then actually found myself disappointed when it wasn't.
- sakri 10y ago
  Lvl6 Unicorn : $1 Trillion evaluation, cross board agreement on perpetual 0 profit.
- gfosco 10y ago
  Even a magic pony can't save Twitter.
  - yabatopia 10y ago
    That's why Twitter also plans to acquire Magic Beans. Guaranteed to grow instantly up into the sky!
    - TeMPOraL 10y ago
      Magic Enterprise Beans?
- mhurron 10y ago
  All I know is now I want a Magic Pony. Also, was kind of sad we can't post images, this story would be flooded with so many pony memes.
- leoc 10y ago
  TWITTER ACQUIRES MAGIC PONY; Joke Writes Itself Come to think of it, this is also more evidence for the case that Silicon Valley can't get any more outlandish than Silicon Valley, isn't it?
- antisthenes 10y ago
dharma1 10y ago
I looked into these guys a month ago, they have a great team of young researchers. The main application I saw was applying neural networks to video compression, improving compression by 3x or more (I guess by regenerating the lost detail?). Not sure if Twitter has much use for that but it looks like they have patented a bunch of other stuff too, and I'm sure will be a great addition to twitter's ML team. Congrats to the guys - and hope they continue creating interesting tech in old blighty after the vesting period is over.
- c0g 10y ago
  Do you have a link to the compression stuff?
  - drosteam 10y ago
    http://www.cv-foundation.org/openaccess/content_cvpr_2016/papers/Shi_Real-Time_Single_Image_CVPR_2016_paper.pdf http://www.cv-foundation.org/openaccess/content_cvpr_2016/pa...
- sjg007 10y ago
  Pied piper?
  - leoc 10y ago
    It's almost too good to be true, isn't it?
- TheArcane 10y ago
  Periscope could use it.
niftich 10y ago
Machine learning on your images and videos to "enhance our strength in live and video and opens up a whole lot of exciting creative possibilities for Twitter"! As ironically stated here [1], "The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads." Though Twitter has a good record of open-sourcing internal infrastructure projects, I think it's it's safe not to expect any substantive amount of this work to see the light of day. On the other hand, the quality of their search and recommendations when it comes to non-text content will significantly improve. They're really doubling down on Twitter being the "best place to see what's happening and why it matters, first", which is a welcome change from the confusing signalling in months prior. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11930354 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11930354
- heroprotagonist 10y ago
  > They're really doubling down on Twitter being the "best place to see what's happening and why it matters, first" It's a little ironic that they announce this in a blog post.
  - theseatoms 10y ago
    Not really. This isn't the sort of news that most people need to know "first", or alternatively "live."
    - jsprogrammer 10y ago
      Or "ever".
  - talmand 10y ago
    Wouldn't the Twitter equivalent be a tweet that points to the blog post?
- Zephyr314 10y ago
  > "The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads." There is a strong argument that as long as they continue to publish and produce open source (which they have been doing) then you could think of ads as just a source of funding and tons of data to continue to push the state of the art. It can also be a stepping stone to other ventures [1]. [1]: http://www.wsj.com/articles/where-would-we-be-without-internet-ads-1436120809 http://www.wsj.com/articles/where-would-we-be-without-intern...
tacos 10y ago
I guess they've given up on making the text part of their product make a damn bit of sense.
- simonswords82 10y ago
  I wondered this too. Twitter's app is broken - numerous complaints by power users that they should be addressing but instead they're busy buying companies?
  - MOARDONGZPLZ 10y ago
    I think probably team of people who develop and fix bugs on the app aren't the same team that buys companies, so Twitter can probably do both.
    - simonswords82 10y ago
      Obviously it has the resources to do both. The point I'm making (badly) is that if their core product is broken perhaps buying other companies should be put on hold until they fix it.
      - MOARDONGZPLZ 10y ago
        Ah, gotcha. When you stated that the app is "broken" I assumed you meant buggy, not "broken" as in a bad core product.
    - tacos 10y ago
      Worked great for Yahoo.
fhood 10y ago
I am pretty sure this whole article is just a euphemism for a new drug that twitter execs are super into right now.
banhfun 10y ago
Where is Twitter getting this money from?
- joeblossom 10y ago
  They have a lot of cash on hand: http://finance.yahoo.com/q/ks?s=TWTR http://finance.yahoo.com/q/ks?s=TWTR It's likely money left over from the IPO & previous fund raising events.
ck2 10y ago
Tensorflow, MagicPony. I sense a trend here (machine learning).
Alexey_Nigin 10y ago
This is very sad news. The #1 reason why I moved from Facebook to Twitter was that the latter service used straightforward algoritms for deciding what to show me. When I opened Twitter, I could be almost sure that the timeline would only contain posts from people I followed, arranged in chronological order. Of course, there were some exceptions. Firstly, they always had ads. I see how many people here get angry about it, but I think ads on such site is perfectly normal. After all, they have to make money somehow, right? Secondly, there were times when I saw "While you were away" box. This was the thing I found annoying from the beginning. How did Twitter infer that I was interested in these five posts more than in those five posts? It got worse over time. In fact, now this box shows up after a few hours of my absence, as if I am expected to check Twitter 10 times a day. And it appears that they are planning to take these features to a new level. I really hope they don't do everything they talk about, but if they do, maybe I will have to seek a new social media service.
- rogerfernandezg 10y ago
  In some way, I felt the same some time ago, so I created http://preciousdigest.com http://preciousdigest.com to filter relevant tweets in my timeline.
- rconti 10y ago
  I can't laugh hard enough at this. I agree I (sorta) hate the Facebook filtering algorithm, but I find Twitter even more impenetrable. It's just impossible to figure out what's going on. Here's my timeline, just opened it up for this comment: * Account I follow, 15s ago. * PROMOTED post from 5 days ago. (here I've already run out of browser real estate on a 27" display because the tweets take so much damn room. Scroll down a page) * While you were away: post from 3 days ago * While you were away: post from 4h ago * While you were away: post from 1 day ago * While you were away: post from 3 days ago * While you were away: post from 6h ago * While you were away: retweet from 2 days ago * While you were away: post from 1 day ago * Actual twitter post from user I follow, 2h ago. * PROMOTED from 18 days ago For all intents and purposes, the Twitter feed is less chronological, less useful, and less content-dense than Facebook, and that's saying something considering that Twitter is supposedly a 140char service. I had to scroll through 3 pages of crap before I got to the actual chronological twitter you speak of. Also, they have this horrible habit of making tweets with a white background, then a tiny grey divider between tweets so it can be hard to tell at a glance when you've moved from one section of content to another -- much like when GMail went from colored message threading to all-monochrome.
mox1 10y ago
It would be super cool if Twitter let me write my own algorithm to decide what I get to see. Or even better, let me "publish" an algorithm and let other people use it.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
Negative1 10y ago
This is amazing to me, not because it's a great purchase but rather because of the absolute tone deafness that Twitter is demonstrating. People are not using Twitter because of many reasons and bad image compression is probably not one of them. Unless Twitter is planning some massive pivot what they should have spent their M&A budget on companies that will help them improve their growth situation directly (in my opinion).
- niftich 10y ago
  Twitter's massive pivot is actually well underway: - They bought Crashlytics and released Fabric.io, a souped-up Twitter SDK + Crashlytics + their bundled ad platform MoPub. The idea is you'll develop your app with this SDK and get crash reporting, usage stats, ad serving, 'Sign in via Twitter', Twitter integration, and all of this other stuff [1] for free. - They bought Digits, which is a 'log in with your phone number'-as-a-service and made it free to use. It's now integrated with Fabric. - They just bought Magic Pony which will help them better classify non-text posts so that their currently-awful suggestions are better. Fact is, 'Twitter', the service where people post tweets, is no longer their primary growth area. It's their most externally visible, sure, but they want their SDK inside every app, and mine data and serve ads, just like Google and Facebook. This might actually work, because their SDK has some very nice things you might want anyway, compared to the other two that only give you identity, integration, and ads. [1] https://get.fabric.io/kits https://get.fabric.io/kits [2] https://get.digits.com https://get.digits.com
rubyfan 10y ago
The bit about the Twitter Cortex team reads like an MBA approach to product. If I just rub together some PHDs and engineers then magic will happen.
gh-lfneu28 10y ago
Magic Pony Technology, you say? http://www.fimfiction.net/story/62074/friendship-is-optimal http://www.fimfiction.net/story/62074/friendship-is-optimal

swang 10y ago

Twitter should spend some of the money getting someone to actually improve their web ui. Click a link to an individual tweet and read it. Now you click out of it to read the person's timeline. Here comes the janky timeline refresh. I mean shouldn't someone spend some time so it doesn't look like they had to pull the user's timeline? I still get errors sometimes where I see, "1 new tweet" and it's the top tweet in my timeline, except here it is again.

tlrobinson 10y ago

I know nothing about Magic Pony, but I'm starting to wonder how much of this craze is a form of "keeping up with the Joneses", except with tech giants and ML/AI startups instead of suburban families and their cars, etc.

tsunamifury 10y ago
Its not, its a fundamental shift in how you power your applications. Not acquiring and building this talent at a major firm would be the equivalent of sticking to steam power in the face of oil.

kami8845 10y ago

Another sad moment for the London startup scene as one of the most promising startups of recent years get acqui-gobble-hired up by $BIGCO

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
Spivak 10y ago
For most companies in the startup scene getting bought by a larger company that has the scale and resources to apply your tech to bigger and more interesting problems is the planned exit strategy.
- kami8845 10y ago
  While not 100% comparable this feels as weak a move as selling Facebook to Yahoo for $1B London needs strong, original startups. It's dire if you're looking for employment out here.
zump 10y ago
Their product was only of use to a bigger company. Just like the slew of CV startups getting bought by Snapchat.

ultramancool 10y ago

This headline is far better if you don't know what Magic Pony is.

skrowl 10y ago
I assumed it was something about Hasbro's My Little Pony series then actually found myself disappointed when it wasn't.
sakri 10y ago
Lvl6 Unicorn : $1 Trillion evaluation, cross board agreement on perpetual 0 profit.
gfosco 10y ago
Even a magic pony can't save Twitter.
- yabatopia 10y ago
  That's why Twitter also plans to acquire Magic Beans. Guaranteed to grow instantly up into the sky!
  - TeMPOraL 10y ago
    Magic Enterprise Beans?
mhurron 10y ago
All I know is now I want a Magic Pony. Also, was kind of sad we can't post images, this story would be flooded with so many pony memes.
leoc 10y ago
TWITTER ACQUIRES MAGIC PONY; Joke Writes Itself Come to think of it, this is also more evidence for the case that Silicon Valley can't get any more outlandish than Silicon Valley, isn't it?
antisthenes 10y ago

dharma1 10y ago

I looked into these guys a month ago, they have a great team of young researchers. The main application I saw was applying neural networks to video compression, improving compression by 3x or more (I guess by regenerating the lost detail?). Not sure if Twitter has much use for that but it looks like they have patented a bunch of other stuff too, and I'm sure will be a great addition to twitter's ML team. Congrats to the guys - and hope they continue creating interesting tech in old blighty after the vesting period is over.

c0g 10y ago
Do you have a link to the compression stuff?
- drosteam 10y ago
  http://www.cv-foundation.org/openaccess/content_cvpr_2016/papers/Shi_Real-Time_Single_Image_CVPR_2016_paper.pdf http://www.cv-foundation.org/openaccess/content_cvpr_2016/pa...
sjg007 10y ago
Pied piper?
- leoc 10y ago
  It's almost too good to be true, isn't it?
TheArcane 10y ago
Periscope could use it.

niftich 10y ago

Machine learning on your images and videos to "enhance our strength in live and video and opens up a whole lot of exciting creative possibilities for Twitter"! As ironically stated here [1], "The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads." Though Twitter has a good record of open-sourcing internal infrastructure projects, I think it's it's safe not to expect any substantive amount of this work to see the light of day. On the other hand, the quality of their search and recommendations when it comes to non-text content will significantly improve. They're really doubling down on Twitter being the "best place to see what's happening and why it matters, first", which is a welcome change from the confusing signalling in months prior. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11930354 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11930354

heroprotagonist 10y ago
> They're really doubling down on Twitter being the "best place to see what's happening and why it matters, first" It's a little ironic that they announce this in a blog post.
- theseatoms 10y ago
  Not really. This isn't the sort of news that most people need to know "first", or alternatively "live."
  - jsprogrammer 10y ago
    Or "ever".
- talmand 10y ago
  Wouldn't the Twitter equivalent be a tweet that points to the blog post?
Zephyr314 10y ago
> "The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads." There is a strong argument that as long as they continue to publish and produce open source (which they have been doing) then you could think of ads as just a source of funding and tons of data to continue to push the state of the art. It can also be a stepping stone to other ventures [1]. [1]: http://www.wsj.com/articles/where-would-we-be-without-internet-ads-1436120809 http://www.wsj.com/articles/where-would-we-be-without-intern...

tacos 10y ago

I guess they've given up on making the text part of their product make a damn bit of sense.

simonswords82 10y ago
I wondered this too. Twitter's app is broken - numerous complaints by power users that they should be addressing but instead they're busy buying companies?
- MOARDONGZPLZ 10y ago
  I think probably team of people who develop and fix bugs on the app aren't the same team that buys companies, so Twitter can probably do both.
  - simonswords82 10y ago
    Obviously it has the resources to do both. The point I'm making (badly) is that if their core product is broken perhaps buying other companies should be put on hold until they fix it.
    - MOARDONGZPLZ 10y ago
      Ah, gotcha. When you stated that the app is "broken" I assumed you meant buggy, not "broken" as in a bad core product.
  - tacos 10y ago
    Worked great for Yahoo.

fhood 10y ago

I am pretty sure this whole article is just a euphemism for a new drug that twitter execs are super into right now.

banhfun 10y ago

Where is Twitter getting this money from?

joeblossom 10y ago
They have a lot of cash on hand: http://finance.yahoo.com/q/ks?s=TWTR http://finance.yahoo.com/q/ks?s=TWTR It's likely money left over from the IPO & previous fund raising events.

ck2 10y ago

Tensorflow, MagicPony. I sense a trend here (machine learning).

Alexey_Nigin 10y ago

This is very sad news. The #1 reason why I moved from Facebook to Twitter was that the latter service used straightforward algoritms for deciding what to show me. When I opened Twitter, I could be almost sure that the timeline would only contain posts from people I followed, arranged in chronological order. Of course, there were some exceptions. Firstly, they always had ads. I see how many people here get angry about it, but I think ads on such site is perfectly normal. After all, they have to make money somehow, right? Secondly, there were times when I saw "While you were away" box. This was the thing I found annoying from the beginning. How did Twitter infer that I was interested in these five posts more than in those five posts? It got worse over time. In fact, now this box shows up after a few hours of my absence, as if I am expected to check Twitter 10 times a day. And it appears that they are planning to take these features to a new level. I really hope they don't do everything they talk about, but if they do, maybe I will have to seek a new social media service.

rogerfernandezg 10y ago
In some way, I felt the same some time ago, so I created http://preciousdigest.com http://preciousdigest.com to filter relevant tweets in my timeline.
rconti 10y ago
I can't laugh hard enough at this. I agree I (sorta) hate the Facebook filtering algorithm, but I find Twitter even more impenetrable. It's just impossible to figure out what's going on. Here's my timeline, just opened it up for this comment: * Account I follow, 15s ago. * PROMOTED post from 5 days ago. (here I've already run out of browser real estate on a 27" display because the tweets take so much damn room. Scroll down a page) * While you were away: post from 3 days ago * While you were away: post from 4h ago * While you were away: post from 1 day ago * While you were away: post from 3 days ago * While you were away: post from 6h ago * While you were away: retweet from 2 days ago * While you were away: post from 1 day ago * Actual twitter post from user I follow, 2h ago. * PROMOTED from 18 days ago For all intents and purposes, the Twitter feed is less chronological, less useful, and less content-dense than Facebook, and that's saying something considering that Twitter is supposedly a 140char service. I had to scroll through 3 pages of crap before I got to the actual chronological twitter you speak of. Also, they have this horrible habit of making tweets with a white background, then a tiny grey divider between tweets so it can be hard to tell at a glance when you've moved from one section of content to another -- much like when GMail went from colored message threading to all-monochrome.

mox1 10y ago

It would be super cool if Twitter let me write my own algorithm to decide what I get to see. Or even better, let me "publish" an algorithm and let other people use it.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

Negative1 10y ago

This is amazing to me, not because it's a great purchase but rather because of the absolute tone deafness that Twitter is demonstrating. People are not using Twitter because of many reasons and bad image compression is probably not one of them. Unless Twitter is planning some massive pivot what they should have spent their M&A budget on companies that will help them improve their growth situation directly (in my opinion).

niftich 10y ago
Twitter's massive pivot is actually well underway: - They bought Crashlytics and released Fabric.io, a souped-up Twitter SDK + Crashlytics + their bundled ad platform MoPub. The idea is you'll develop your app with this SDK and get crash reporting, usage stats, ad serving, 'Sign in via Twitter', Twitter integration, and all of this other stuff [1] for free. - They bought Digits, which is a 'log in with your phone number'-as-a-service and made it free to use. It's now integrated with Fabric. - They just bought Magic Pony which will help them better classify non-text posts so that their currently-awful suggestions are better. Fact is, 'Twitter', the service where people post tweets, is no longer their primary growth area. It's their most externally visible, sure, but they want their SDK inside every app, and mine data and serve ads, just like Google and Facebook. This might actually work, because their SDK has some very nice things you might want anyway, compared to the other two that only give you identity, integration, and ads. [1] https://get.fabric.io/kits https://get.fabric.io/kits [2] https://get.digits.com https://get.digits.com

rubyfan 10y ago

The bit about the Twitter Cortex team reads like an MBA approach to product. If I just rub together some PHDs and engineers then magic will happen.

gh-lfneu28 10y ago

Magic Pony Technology, you say? http://www.fimfiction.net/story/62074/friendship-is-optimal http://www.fimfiction.net/story/62074/friendship-is-optimal