16 ms·

Twitter’s CEO Dick Costolo Is Stepping Down

413 points by brandonlipman 11y ago

rebelidealist 11y ago
I think Dorsey is too minimalistic. It was the reason why Twitter is losing traffic to IG and Medium (ironic). Vine lost to IG video because you couldn't follow Vine accounts via the Twitter website at the beginning. Take Square for example, it had a huge head start, but no business other than small coffee shops and food trucks can use it. https://medium.com/@hungrycharles/3-things-twitter-can-do-to-make-it-the-most-popular-social-network-c62d0d7695e6 https://medium.com/@hungrycharles/3-things-twitter-can-do-to...
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
  - markcerqueira 11y ago
    Instagram.
- kposehn 11y ago
  > Take Square for example, it had a huge head start, but no business other than small coffee shops and food trucks can use it. What makes you say that?
- acchow 11y ago
  > Take Square for example, it had a huge head start, but no business other than small coffee shops and food trucks can use it. Uniqlo? Whole Foods?
  - rebelidealist 11y ago
    Many small biz retailers form clothing store, restaurant, even bigger coffeeshops have told me this.
    - nostrademons 11y ago
      I see Square all over the place now. Maker Faire uses it; we bought our Christmas tree with it; the ferry to Angel Island uses it; we bought some vodka from a tiny distillery in Seattle with it; we found a great smoked fish shack in Central California that uses it. All these places were cash-only before Square. There's certainly a lot of competition in the space, but I'm amazed at how different the small business landscape is from 3 years ago. Previously many places that weren't big chains were cash-only; now virtually nobody is, and many of them are using Square (& competitors) to take credit cards.
      - abakker 11y ago
        http://readwrite.com/2014/12/19/square-starbucks-mobile-payments-partnership-over http://readwrite.com/2014/12/19/square-starbucks-mobile-paym... Of relevance - Square is still a backend payment processor for several companies, even if it doesn't have the device on the front end. They still process payments for Starbucks, in lieu of Bank of America. It is not clear whether they make any money at it, though.
      - caseyf7 11y ago
        Great smoked fish shack? Tell me more!
        nostrademons 11y ago
        http://www.yelp.com/biz/ruddells-smokehouse-cayucos-2 http://www.yelp.com/biz/ruddells-smokehouse-cayucos-2
- raverbashing 11y ago
  > Vine lost to IG video because you couldn't follow Vine accounts via the Twitter website at the beginning Also their app was one of the worse I had the displeasure of using on a mobile phone. Really. Instagram did the concept much, much better.
toephu2 11y ago
Who is going to run Square in the interim then? Is he going to pull a Elon Musk, 3 days here, and 2 days there?
- rottencupcakes 11y ago
  Only instead of being 500 miles apart, Twitter and Square are closer to 500 feet apart. Maybe Jack located them close together for a reason.
  - kposehn 11y ago
    Actually, we're only about 200 feet building-to-building. Just across 10th street with an apartment/condo building in between.
- jives 11y ago
  He's split his time between these two companies before. "... after 8 hours at Twitter, he literally walks 2 blocks to put in another 8 hour shift at Square." http://thenextweb.com/entrepreneur/2011/11/14/jack-dorsey-does-8-hours-at-twitter-8-hours-at-square-daily/ http://thenextweb.com/entrepreneur/2011/11/14/jack-dorsey-do...
  - jusben1369 11y ago
    They were much smaller companies (pre public) in 2011 and he was never CEO at both at the same time. Executive Chairman is substantially different.
- josephpmay 11y ago
  Square just moved offices to be right next to Twitter, so it shouldn't be too hard for him to go back and forth
thewhizkid 11y ago
Did everyone forget Jack Dorsey is still the CEO of Square or...?
- scott_karana 11y ago
  It's mentioned all over TFA.
bluthru 11y ago
The current sentiment seems to be "twitter isn't fun anymore". I think Jack taking over for now can only be a good thing.
dataker 11y ago
Unless the new CEO had a ongoing positive relationship with the former CEO and company, it appears to be really hard to keep things working and have a long-term vision. From Wikipedia: >Although his 2010 takeover as CEO was supposed to be temporary, while CEO Evan Williams was on paternity leave, it eventually became a permanent position
natural219 11y ago
Is there a link to an explanation...or a set of words...somewhere...that explains what's going on with Twitter or why this happened?
- brandonlipman 11y ago
  Here is a link to the Pres Release from Twitter - https://www.scribd.com/doc/268409558/Twitter-Initiates-CEO-Transition https://www.scribd.com/doc/268409558/Twitter-Initiates-CEO-T...
msie 11y ago
Thank God! Please, please let there be some meaningful change in the api space, cheaper access to the firehose...
noir-york 11y ago
The writing was on the wall the moment Chris Sacca penned that long letter http://lowercasecapital.com/2015/06/03/what-twitter-can-be-2/ http://lowercasecapital.com/2015/06/03/what-twitter-can-be-2... - if not before. Twitter really needs a strong product person running it.
- waterlesscloud 11y ago
  It's a good time to revisit those leaked internal strategy documents from 2009. Interesting to see what played out and what didn't. http://techcrunch.com/2009/07/16/twitters-internal-strategy-laid-bare-to-be-the-pulse-of-the-planet-2/ http://techcrunch.com/2009/07/16/twitters-internal-strategy-...
hootydooty 11y ago
I guess I never thought about how Twitter hasn't exactly grown or had anything worth noting to offer every since I first found out about it. Let's see what happens now.
lancewiggs 11y ago
What he should do: 1: reopen the API up to everyone, guaranteeing access for 10 years. Let's the clients bloom. 2: reduce rhose costs. Insane. 3: That's it.
- mindstab 11y ago
  and they will make money how? their expenses sure will go up.
  - piquadrat 11y ago
    Mandatory promoted tweets for 3rd party clients maybe? I use a 3rd party android twitter client due to its superior UX compared to the official app, but I wouldn't mind getting served promoted tweets in that client at all.
    - colinbartlett 11y ago
      I am not sure it would work because I don't believe plain ol' tweets work as an advertising mechanism. Hence Twitter getting more and more creative with formats: app installs, cards, videos, and have you seen the new "send me spam" ads? http://i.imgur.com/h4H7RQw.png http://i.imgur.com/h4H7RQw.png
    - lancewiggs 11y ago
      They can do that, and they can also charge the app suppliers per customer if they don't show the ads. I'd willingly pay to have no ads, better functionality etc.
  - austenallred 11y ago
    They make $2 Billion/year already
    - mrweasel 11y ago
      No they don't. They had $1.4 billion in revenue, so they must have to have profits lower than that. In fact they lost half a billion dollars last year. https://www.google.com/finance?q=NYSE%3ATWTR&fstype=ii&ei=qzRgU8CuL4mSqwHgRg https://www.google.com/finance?q=NYSE%3ATWTR&fstype=ii&ei=qz... <- Income before tax: -578.350.000 USD.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
- brandonlipman 11y ago
  Jim Cramer is saying he feels the stock was not well managed and investors/analyst struggled to find the metrics that should be focussed on.
austenallred 11y ago
Having a founder and product visionary (Jack) in the driver's seat at Twitter is absolutely the right move. Sure, Jack has his quirks, and seems a little bit crazy and minimalistic, but that's exactly what makes him the right person for the job. Twitter is executing on its vision now just fine, but that's just the problem: There hasn't been any vision left in the company. No truly big moves have been made, and the product has remained almost entirely the same (with the exception of fonts and colors constantly moving around the screen and a lot more ads).
- wyclif 11y ago
  The problem with this, as an early Twitter user (summer 2006), is that I don't really want Twitter to significantly change. The minimalism is a feature. It was SMS on the web. I always wanted Twitter to be more like a public utility, but that's impossible now because it's been "monetized."
  - pyre 11y ago
    > I always wanted Twitter to be more like a public utility Twitter is a business, how were you expecting this to work? For the USG to aqui-hire them?
    - Kalium 11y ago
      Sometimes, I think it would be for the best if the USG had a way to acqui-hire companies that are best suited to be public services.
      - hellbanner 11y ago
        Or if government funded open-source software research.
        afarrell 11y ago
        DARPA does
jasondc 11y ago
This could be like Steve Jobs coming back to Apple, or it could be like Marc Pincus coming back to Zynga. Hopefully the former.
- pavlov 11y ago
  I think it's going to be more like Jerry Yang coming back to Yahoo -- not much of a change either way.
  - chuckcode 11y ago
    Jerry Yang's investment in Alibaba turned out to be worth over $42 billion dollars which accounts for most of the value of Yahoo today...
    - hueving 11y ago
      Good for yahoo, but he should just run a hedge fund if that's all he's good for.
      - boomzilla 11y ago
        Engineers :) If Jerry Yang did not have the credentials of Yahoo founder/CEO at the time, do you think Jack Ma would've let him in? Alibaba was growing very fast at that point, and one big reason they let Yahoo in is its brand.
        volaski 11y ago
        What's up with that condescending "Engineers :)" remark, which has nothing to do with whether Jerry Yang returning to Yahoo made a difference in how Yahoo recovered from its demise.
    - pavlov 11y ago
      That actually happened before Yang returned as CEO: "In 2005, under Yang’s direction but before he took over as CEO in 2007, Yahoo! purchased a 40% stake in Alibaba for $1 billion plus the assets of Yahoo! China, valued at $700 million." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerry_Yang_(entrepreneur)#Alibaba https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerry_Yang_(entrepreneur)#Alib...
brandonlipman 11y ago
I know Ev Williams is working on Medium (which I love) but it would be awesome if he would return to Twitter. Back to the original founding team.
- colbyh 11y ago
  Ev as CEO would be a better call than Jack, IMO. Ev's passion is still in a related space where as I don't think Jack's heart is as connected to the Twitter product as it is to Square these days. Really though, I'd take a random bum off the street as CEO before Anthony Noto. So there's that.
  - brandonlipman 11y ago
    Completely agree. I love his philosophy on product. What he has done at Medium shows how he can build a product. It's incredible.
    - walterbell 11y ago
      Twitter can acquire Medium, completing the Steve Jobs narrative. Medium recently made major strategic changes, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9702651 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9702651
capkutay 11y ago
Twitter stock is up 7% on the news: http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=TWTR%2C+&ql=1 http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=TWTR%2C+&ql=1
- harryh 11y ago
  It's gotta be a weird feeling when getting fired causes your company to gain 1.7B in value.
  - ForHackernews 11y ago
    I'm sure he's getting a nice golden parachute in Twitter stock.
    - austenallred 11y ago
      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
      - arthurcolle 11y ago
        I just bought "Hatching Twitter" yesterday, so I guess this might be a spoiler, but why did they fire Ev?
        austenallred 11y ago
        It's not totally clear. The book kind of portrayed it as a coup staged by Jack, but at the end of the day the board fired him. Ev was surprised, and a few people said they'd quit if Ev was ousted (including, initially, Dick). Dick was definitely thrown into the role - it wasn't something he fought for.
        nostrademons 11y ago
free2rhyme214 11y ago
After listening to "Hatching Twitter" I don't think the founding team could work together again however, I think one of the founders should run the company.
shockzzz 11y ago
I guess he couldn't invert a binary tree. Idiot.
eroo 11y ago
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-crazy-calls-his-resignation-1505325 http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/twitter-ceo-dick-costolo-laughs-off...
- kidcoach 11y ago
  I had 2 autoplay videos and 1 popup, ibtimes has really gone to shit.
  - Mahn 11y ago
    Was there a time when ibtimes was good?
  - wamatt 11y ago
    uBlock is your friend https://github.com/chrisaljoudi/uBlock#getting-started https://github.com/chrisaljoudi/uBlock#getting-started
    - nacs 11y ago
      I have ublock installed and the popup still happened.
      - coldpie 11y ago
        As usual, NoScript puts shitty webpages in their place.
    - pgrote 11y ago
      uBlock Origin is a better friend. :) https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ublock-origin/cjpalhdlnbpafiamejdnhcphjbkeiagm https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ublock-origin/cjpa...
      - pen2l 11y ago
myth_buster 11y ago
Glassdoor: 88% CEO approval rating from 220 ratings. It's interesting that there is such a disconnect between employees and stakeholders. On a related note Chris Sacca wrote this blog [0] titled "What twitter can be" last week. [0]: http://lowercasecapital.com/2015/06/03/what-twitter-can-be-2/ http://lowercasecapital.com/2015/06/03/what-twitter-can-be-2...
- omgitstom 11y ago
  The only way to allow that connection is to have employees as a collective majority shareholder
  - hellbanner 11y ago
    Like here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9696476 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9696476
    - toomuchtodo 11y ago
      I hope this model continues to evolve in other companies. I'd rather see employees do well versus shareholders (who may or may not be employees), VCs, and investment bankers managing an IPO.
  - zanny 11y ago
    You can always found Coops: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooperative https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooperative Problem of course is that traditional investing is how you get startup funds.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
  - myth_buster 11y ago
    You can be good to your employees and bad for stockholders. One way to do this is to hand out bonuses instead of dividends. Agreed. But don't the employees have higher stakes running on the long term success of the company compared to investors who are known to be in for short term profit and hence can't the former be a better indicator? Eg: Mass employee exodus results in company going bust while the team can still bootstrap when investors run away with money.
jgalt212 11y ago
Jack running Square and Twitter will be bad for both Square and Twitter, but probably more bad for Twitter as the stakes are higher. Nothing against Jack, but human beings cannot multi-task. Now maybe Jack and Elon don't think they are human, but the results will bear this out.
mpg33 11y ago
Removing and preventing fake accounts should be they're no. 1 priority.
- themeek 11y ago
  Why do you believe this should be their highest priority?
  - mpg33 11y ago
    Ruins the experience. Fake followers. Fake tweets. Just don't understand how it hasn't been fixed yet.
    - oldmanjay 11y ago
      Out of curiosity, how would you fix it?
      - themeek 11y ago
        Currently DIA uses internet signals collection, social media analysis and human intelligence to identify foreign messaging and popular messages that are harmful to national security. They will submit requests to have these taken down (as the State Department did to Youtube to take down Al-Alwaki's videos) - though currently Twitter is not very cooperative. I do not know how Twitter would handle a problem like this itself.
    - themeek 11y ago
      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.
themeek 11y ago
Twitter has been a frustration for US propaganda efforts for a long time (e.g. https://www.muckrock.com/foi/united-states-of-america-10/center-for-strategic-counterterrorism-communications-operations-state-1348/#file-10265 https://www.muckrock.com/foi/united-states-of-america-10/cen...). Whoever usurps Dick Costolo, if they pursue 'removing and preventing fake accounts', they are also likely to partner more closely with the Department of State and DoD to support strategic communication and counter-strategic communications efforts - taking down accounts the US claims represent efforts by Russia, other actors, or contain ideas and narratives that harm United States national security.
dchuk 11y ago
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 standard blog posts on their own domains. It could completely open up the platform to new opportunities, plus allow for richer expression in content which means they can mine the ever living shit out of it even more accurately to improve their advertising profits.
- slaven 11y ago
  Not to mention that adding an image chops 20+ chars of my limit. Want a URL in there and maybe a hashtag? You're down to less than 100 characters. These arbitrary platform limits should not burden the end user.
- jccooper 11y ago
  Minimalism is a strong feature of Twitter. The effect of lifting the character limit is unpredictable, and I'm not certain it would be positive. It could be, but my personal reaction would probably be to use it less if the fire hose increased in magnitude.
- dexterdog 11y ago
  The interface can just show a more link after a certain number of characters. Then again, I never really got twitter from the publishing side as it's only a read-only thing for me.
- untog 11y ago
  That would change the nature of Twitter a lot, though. writers could write their content on Twitter and have it appear as standard blog posts on their own domains That makes the posts sound very, very large. That's not what I want from Twitter - I want short, sharp posts that make one single point. 140 characters does feel like a meaningless limit, but IMO they'd still want to emphasise short content somehow.
- 11y ago
maerek 11y ago
From an update to the article: [Update: On the conference call, Costolo said he initiated internal conversations about leaving at the end of last year, and that following discussions in Feburary and his decision to step down, Twitter decided to begin the CEO search. Costolo said he chose to leave now because he thought staying on through the CEO search would cause scrutiny to intensify. During the Q&A, Twitter execs said that since Costolo voluntarily stepped down, there will be no severance package.] The line about 'no severance package' seems highly unusual and would lead me to assume that this was a forceful 'push' to step down.
- argonaut 11y ago
  You've got it the other way around. A forceful push is very likely to lead to a huge severance package (because that's the cost of getting someone to go quietly and stay for the transition). So the fact that he doesn't get a severance package leads me to believe it was voluntary.
  - mathattack 11y ago
    It's a high class way for him to leave, that may set up other options for him in the future (VC, Professorship, etc) that wouldn't be there if it was an ugly breakup. Given that the stock traded at all time lows, no severance was justified. https://www.google.com/finance?cid=32086821185414 https://www.google.com/finance?cid=32086821185414
    - argonaut 11y ago
      Given that he was the CEO of a public company, there's a pretty good chance he had a rich severance clause in his contract in the event he was fired.
    - sirkneeland 11y ago
      That didn't stop Leo Apothekar for collecting $30 million in severance after tanking HP. Nor did it stop Stephen Elop from collecting $25 million after running Nokia's devices business into the ground/arms of Microsoft (although I think technically that was structured as a "bonus") Reminds me of some quote I heard somewhere: "CEO: where success is rewarded handsomely and failure only slightly less so"
walterbell 11y ago
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-restructuring-2015-6 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.."
dataker 11y ago
Is it possible for Twitter to acquire Square?
enochroot 11y ago
Mike Arrington claims he was fired: "So @dickc was fired. My guess is @sacca knew about it before writing his recent open letters." https://twitter.com/arrington/status/609103779791683584 https://twitter.com/arrington/status/609103779791683584
- aaronbrethorst 11y ago
  "What Twitter Can Be" http://lowercasecapital.com/2015/06/03/what-twitter-can-be-2/ http://lowercasecapital.com/2015/06/03/what-twitter-can-be-2...
wslh 11y ago
Make the firehose available for anyone at an affordable price and the earnings will jump. Talk is cheap but in a way this is what Google did with AdWords. In the past you should have a budget of thousands dollars to advertise on popular sites like Yahoo. Google found a way to keep the required budget at a minimum. I think Twitter haven't done that because it is always more comfortable to talk to a few customers who can pay a lot of money instead of having an horde using your service, but it is currently unacceptable to think this way if you are Twitter.
- jkimmel 11y ago
  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 achieve widespread API usage while still making money with standard infrastructure (no custom datacenters, &c.)
  - wslh 11y ago
    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 datacenters, &c.) What issue do you see here? can you expand?
    - jkimmel 11y ago
      > 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.
udev 11y ago
Twitter is a complicated case. On one hand it has incredible political clout as free speech tool, is used by most celebrities, etc. Yet, its very design makes monetization difficult, and in my opinion, unlikely to ever be of great success.
mschuster91 11y ago
Another problem that Twitter has, aside from the financial issues, is the "eternal september" phenomen. Seriously, the influx of kids who spam around anyone they see with "OMG CUT 4 BIEBER" or other pubertic crap sucks. It's even worse than the followback and other kinds of spambots.
- unoti 11y ago
  That's the number one problem with social media-- sometimes you are subjected to what people have to say.
mpdehaan2 11y ago
whoa, interesting. On one hand, I have ceased to see twitter evolve much at all over the last N years, much like I used to say of Flickr. I eventually left Flickr because I wasn't seeing improvements for photo sharing and browsing that I really wanted as a photographer. It's a legitimate problem that he needs to solve. I don't think twitter needs to be much different than what it is, because i'm addicted to it, but it not evolving and just investing in scale I think does need to be addressed. Ways to find more interesting people and content, and to allow people to have more room to link to other pages/sites/things about themselves might be a start. (Without getting to be too myspacey?). I definitely like that it's a lot more open than Facebook and can read things without always friending everything, but I also want more controls about what type of content I see and get. Lists are ok-ish, but so many things are so marketey from companies versus just being news feeds, I kind of end up not following companies. Marketers on twitter are I think it's curse, and it's starting to become that kind of platform.
- ytdht 11y ago
  If you think that Twitter is pretty much perfect for you, why would you want it to change at all? Change is not always good...
- dave1619 11y ago
  I tend to agree that Twitter hasn't evolved/progressed much over the past few to several years. I think they've got a lot of potential though. IMO they should have entered the personal messaging space and been one of the top players. They could have eventually link personal messaging with discussion around topics and Twitter as well.
notNow 11y ago
Seriously, what was Sacca thinking when he pressed the publish button on that Twitter piece? I'm half way through and it's just insane. He spilled the beans for every product that Twitter could build in the coming couple of years for everyone to see. Couldn't he just have sent those recommendations or feature requests to the top management and spared them the public humiliation or giving the competition free ideas and inteliigence?!! This is just ridiculous.
- welanes 11y ago
  Ideas are ten a penny, plus there's nothing in the post that's innovative or surprising for anyone who uses Twitter even a little.
ElectricFeel 11y ago
I gotta say.. I have been railing against the Twitter tide for a couple of years now and have been against it for a long time but I am a convert.. Speaking from a dev perspective here is really is a stroke of genius software-wise... I know this is a weird thing to say but it's SEXY code, even.. I get excited thinking about how awesome it is! Call me a nerd if you will.
digital-rubber 11y ago
Dick cost-o-lo(t)? Or did cost too much got too little? :)
getdavidhiggins 11y ago
I wrote a post in response to Costolo stepping down. Since the trendy thing is to post punditry about Twitter, I couldn't help but chime in. "On Twitter" - http://blog.higg.im/2015/06/12/on-twitter/ http://blog.higg.im/2015/06/12/on-twitter/ ---------- Also, you can make up your own mind about this: http://www.vox.com/2015/6/11/8761731/twitter-trouble-facebook-twtr http://www.vox.com/2015/6/11/8761731/twitter-trouble-faceboo... http://lowercasecapital.com/2015/06/03/what-twitter-can-be-2/ http://lowercasecapital.com/2015/06/03/what-twitter-can-be-2... https://medium.com/@michaeledwards/re-imaging-twitter-ea4e1139fe12 https://medium.com/@michaeledwards/re-imaging-twitter-ea4e11... http://www.novaspivack.com/uncategorized/why-twitters-engagement-has-fallen http://www.novaspivack.com/uncategorized/why-twitters-engage... https://alexgaynor.net/2014/oct/30/i-hope-twitter-goes-away/ https://alexgaynor.net/2014/oct/30/i-hope-twitter-goes-away/ http://blog.higg.im/twitters-self-immolation/ http://blog.higg.im/twitters-self-immolation/ http://john.do/twitter-quit/ http://john.do/twitter-quit/ http://techcrunch.com/2015/02/22/twitters-dilemma/ http://techcrunch.com/2015/02/22/twitters-dilemma/ http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/04/a-eulogy-for-twitter/361339/ http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/04/a-eulo... http://www.mathewingram.com/work/2015/04/30/twitters-multi-billion-dollar-mistake-happened-five-years-ago/ http://www.mathewingram.com/work/2015/04/30/twitters-multi-b...

413 points by brandonlipman 11y ago

I think Dorsey is too minimalistic. It was the reason why Twitter is losing traffic to IG and Medium (ironic). Vine lost to IG video because you couldn't follow Vine accounts via the Twitter website at the beginning. Take Square for example, it had a huge head start, but no business other than small coffee shops and food trucks can use it. https://medium.com/@hungrycharles/3-things-twitter-can-do-to-make-it-the-most-popular-social-network-c62d0d7695e6 https://medium.com/@hungrycharles/3-things-twitter-can-do-to...

deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
- markcerqueira 11y ago
  Instagram.
kposehn 11y ago
> Take Square for example, it had a huge head start, but no business other than small coffee shops and food trucks can use it. What makes you say that?
acchow 11y ago
> Take Square for example, it had a huge head start, but no business other than small coffee shops and food trucks can use it. Uniqlo? Whole Foods?
- rebelidealist 11y ago
  Many small biz retailers form clothing store, restaurant, even bigger coffeeshops have told me this.
  - nostrademons 11y ago
    I see Square all over the place now. Maker Faire uses it; we bought our Christmas tree with it; the ferry to Angel Island uses it; we bought some vodka from a tiny distillery in Seattle with it; we found a great smoked fish shack in Central California that uses it. All these places were cash-only before Square. There's certainly a lot of competition in the space, but I'm amazed at how different the small business landscape is from 3 years ago. Previously many places that weren't big chains were cash-only; now virtually nobody is, and many of them are using Square (& competitors) to take credit cards.
    - abakker 11y ago
      http://readwrite.com/2014/12/19/square-starbucks-mobile-payments-partnership-over http://readwrite.com/2014/12/19/square-starbucks-mobile-paym... Of relevance - Square is still a backend payment processor for several companies, even if it doesn't have the device on the front end. They still process payments for Starbucks, in lieu of Bank of America. It is not clear whether they make any money at it, though.
    - caseyf7 11y ago
      Great smoked fish shack? Tell me more!
      - nostrademons 11y ago
        http://www.yelp.com/biz/ruddells-smokehouse-cayucos-2 http://www.yelp.com/biz/ruddells-smokehouse-cayucos-2
raverbashing 11y ago
> Vine lost to IG video because you couldn't follow Vine accounts via the Twitter website at the beginning Also their app was one of the worse I had the displeasure of using on a mobile phone. Really. Instagram did the concept much, much better.

toephu2 11y ago

Who is going to run Square in the interim then? Is he going to pull a Elon Musk, 3 days here, and 2 days there?

rottencupcakes 11y ago
Only instead of being 500 miles apart, Twitter and Square are closer to 500 feet apart. Maybe Jack located them close together for a reason.
- kposehn 11y ago
  Actually, we're only about 200 feet building-to-building. Just across 10th street with an apartment/condo building in between.
jives 11y ago
He's split his time between these two companies before. "... after 8 hours at Twitter, he literally walks 2 blocks to put in another 8 hour shift at Square." http://thenextweb.com/entrepreneur/2011/11/14/jack-dorsey-does-8-hours-at-twitter-8-hours-at-square-daily/ http://thenextweb.com/entrepreneur/2011/11/14/jack-dorsey-do...
- jusben1369 11y ago
  They were much smaller companies (pre public) in 2011 and he was never CEO at both at the same time. Executive Chairman is substantially different.
josephpmay 11y ago
Square just moved offices to be right next to Twitter, so it shouldn't be too hard for him to go back and forth

thewhizkid 11y ago

Did everyone forget Jack Dorsey is still the CEO of Square or...?

scott_karana 11y ago
It's mentioned all over TFA.

bluthru 11y ago

The current sentiment seems to be "twitter isn't fun anymore". I think Jack taking over for now can only be a good thing.

dataker 11y ago

Unless the new CEO had a ongoing positive relationship with the former CEO and company, it appears to be really hard to keep things working and have a long-term vision. From Wikipedia: >Although his 2010 takeover as CEO was supposed to be temporary, while CEO Evan Williams was on paternity leave, it eventually became a permanent position

natural219 11y ago

Is there a link to an explanation...or a set of words...somewhere...that explains what's going on with Twitter or why this happened?

brandonlipman 11y ago
Here is a link to the Pres Release from Twitter - https://www.scribd.com/doc/268409558/Twitter-Initiates-CEO-Transition https://www.scribd.com/doc/268409558/Twitter-Initiates-CEO-T...

msie 11y ago

Thank God! Please, please let there be some meaningful change in the api space, cheaper access to the firehose...

noir-york 11y ago

The writing was on the wall the moment Chris Sacca penned that long letter http://lowercasecapital.com/2015/06/03/what-twitter-can-be-2/ http://lowercasecapital.com/2015/06/03/what-twitter-can-be-2... - if not before. Twitter really needs a strong product person running it.

waterlesscloud 11y ago
It's a good time to revisit those leaked internal strategy documents from 2009. Interesting to see what played out and what didn't. http://techcrunch.com/2009/07/16/twitters-internal-strategy-laid-bare-to-be-the-pulse-of-the-planet-2/ http://techcrunch.com/2009/07/16/twitters-internal-strategy-...

hootydooty 11y ago

I guess I never thought about how Twitter hasn't exactly grown or had anything worth noting to offer every since I first found out about it. Let's see what happens now.

lancewiggs 11y ago

What he should do: 1: reopen the API up to everyone, guaranteeing access for 10 years. Let's the clients bloom. 2: reduce rhose costs. Insane. 3: That's it.

mindstab 11y ago
and they will make money how? their expenses sure will go up.
- piquadrat 11y ago
  Mandatory promoted tweets for 3rd party clients maybe? I use a 3rd party android twitter client due to its superior UX compared to the official app, but I wouldn't mind getting served promoted tweets in that client at all.
  - colinbartlett 11y ago
    I am not sure it would work because I don't believe plain ol' tweets work as an advertising mechanism. Hence Twitter getting more and more creative with formats: app installs, cards, videos, and have you seen the new "send me spam" ads? http://i.imgur.com/h4H7RQw.png http://i.imgur.com/h4H7RQw.png
  - lancewiggs 11y ago
    They can do that, and they can also charge the app suppliers per customer if they don't show the ads. I'd willingly pay to have no ads, better functionality etc.
- austenallred 11y ago
  They make $2 Billion/year already
  - mrweasel 11y ago
    No they don't. They had $1.4 billion in revenue, so they must have to have profits lower than that. In fact they lost half a billion dollars last year. https://www.google.com/finance?q=NYSE%3ATWTR&fstype=ii&ei=qzRgU8CuL4mSqwHgRg https://www.google.com/finance?q=NYSE%3ATWTR&fstype=ii&ei=qz... <- Income before tax: -578.350.000 USD.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

brandonlipman 11y ago
Jim Cramer is saying he feels the stock was not well managed and investors/analyst struggled to find the metrics that should be focussed on.

austenallred 11y ago

Having a founder and product visionary (Jack) in the driver's seat at Twitter is absolutely the right move. Sure, Jack has his quirks, and seems a little bit crazy and minimalistic, but that's exactly what makes him the right person for the job. Twitter is executing on its vision now just fine, but that's just the problem: There hasn't been any vision left in the company. No truly big moves have been made, and the product has remained almost entirely the same (with the exception of fonts and colors constantly moving around the screen and a lot more ads).

wyclif 11y ago
The problem with this, as an early Twitter user (summer 2006), is that I don't really want Twitter to significantly change. The minimalism is a feature. It was SMS on the web. I always wanted Twitter to be more like a public utility, but that's impossible now because it's been "monetized."
- pyre 11y ago
  > I always wanted Twitter to be more like a public utility Twitter is a business, how were you expecting this to work? For the USG to aqui-hire them?
  - Kalium 11y ago
    Sometimes, I think it would be for the best if the USG had a way to acqui-hire companies that are best suited to be public services.
    - hellbanner 11y ago
      Or if government funded open-source software research.
      - afarrell 11y ago
        DARPA does

jasondc 11y ago

This could be like Steve Jobs coming back to Apple, or it could be like Marc Pincus coming back to Zynga. Hopefully the former.

pavlov 11y ago
I think it's going to be more like Jerry Yang coming back to Yahoo -- not much of a change either way.
- chuckcode 11y ago
  Jerry Yang's investment in Alibaba turned out to be worth over $42 billion dollars which accounts for most of the value of Yahoo today...
  - hueving 11y ago
    Good for yahoo, but he should just run a hedge fund if that's all he's good for.
    - boomzilla 11y ago
      Engineers :) If Jerry Yang did not have the credentials of Yahoo founder/CEO at the time, do you think Jack Ma would've let him in? Alibaba was growing very fast at that point, and one big reason they let Yahoo in is its brand.
      - volaski 11y ago
        What's up with that condescending "Engineers :)" remark, which has nothing to do with whether Jerry Yang returning to Yahoo made a difference in how Yahoo recovered from its demise.
  - pavlov 11y ago
    That actually happened before Yang returned as CEO: "In 2005, under Yang’s direction but before he took over as CEO in 2007, Yahoo! purchased a 40% stake in Alibaba for $1 billion plus the assets of Yahoo! China, valued at $700 million." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerry_Yang_(entrepreneur)#Alibaba https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerry_Yang_(entrepreneur)#Alib...

brandonlipman 11y ago

I know Ev Williams is working on Medium (which I love) but it would be awesome if he would return to Twitter. Back to the original founding team.

colbyh 11y ago
Ev as CEO would be a better call than Jack, IMO. Ev's passion is still in a related space where as I don't think Jack's heart is as connected to the Twitter product as it is to Square these days. Really though, I'd take a random bum off the street as CEO before Anthony Noto. So there's that.
- brandonlipman 11y ago
  Completely agree. I love his philosophy on product. What he has done at Medium shows how he can build a product. It's incredible.
  - walterbell 11y ago
    Twitter can acquire Medium, completing the Steve Jobs narrative. Medium recently made major strategic changes, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9702651 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9702651

capkutay 11y ago

Twitter stock is up 7% on the news: http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=TWTR%2C+&ql=1 http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=TWTR%2C+&ql=1

harryh 11y ago
It's gotta be a weird feeling when getting fired causes your company to gain 1.7B in value.
- ForHackernews 11y ago
  I'm sure he's getting a nice golden parachute in Twitter stock.
  - austenallred 11y ago
    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
    - arthurcolle 11y ago
      I just bought "Hatching Twitter" yesterday, so I guess this might be a spoiler, but why did they fire Ev?
      - austenallred 11y ago
        It's not totally clear. The book kind of portrayed it as a coup staged by Jack, but at the end of the day the board fired him. Ev was surprised, and a few people said they'd quit if Ev was ousted (including, initially, Dick). Dick was definitely thrown into the role - it wasn't something he fought for.
        nostrademons 11y ago

free2rhyme214 11y ago

After listening to "Hatching Twitter" I don't think the founding team could work together again however, I think one of the founders should run the company.

shockzzz 11y ago

I guess he couldn't invert a binary tree. Idiot.

eroo 11y ago

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-crazy-calls-his-resignation-1505325 http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/twitter-ceo-dick-costolo-laughs-off...

kidcoach 11y ago
I had 2 autoplay videos and 1 popup, ibtimes has really gone to shit.
- Mahn 11y ago
  Was there a time when ibtimes was good?
- wamatt 11y ago
  uBlock is your friend https://github.com/chrisaljoudi/uBlock#getting-started https://github.com/chrisaljoudi/uBlock#getting-started
  - nacs 11y ago
    I have ublock installed and the popup still happened.
    - coldpie 11y ago
      As usual, NoScript puts shitty webpages in their place.
  - pgrote 11y ago
    uBlock Origin is a better friend. :) https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ublock-origin/cjpalhdlnbpafiamejdnhcphjbkeiagm https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ublock-origin/cjpa...
    - pen2l 11y ago

myth_buster 11y ago

Glassdoor: 88% CEO approval rating from 220 ratings. It's interesting that there is such a disconnect between employees and stakeholders. On a related note Chris Sacca wrote this blog [0] titled "What twitter can be" last week. [0]: http://lowercasecapital.com/2015/06/03/what-twitter-can-be-2/ http://lowercasecapital.com/2015/06/03/what-twitter-can-be-2...

omgitstom 11y ago
The only way to allow that connection is to have employees as a collective majority shareholder
- hellbanner 11y ago
  Like here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9696476 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9696476
  - toomuchtodo 11y ago
    I hope this model continues to evolve in other companies. I'd rather see employees do well versus shareholders (who may or may not be employees), VCs, and investment bankers managing an IPO.
- zanny 11y ago
  You can always found Coops: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooperative https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooperative Problem of course is that traditional investing is how you get startup funds.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
- myth_buster 11y ago
  You can be good to your employees and bad for stockholders. One way to do this is to hand out bonuses instead of dividends. Agreed. But don't the employees have higher stakes running on the long term success of the company compared to investors who are known to be in for short term profit and hence can't the former be a better indicator? Eg: Mass employee exodus results in company going bust while the team can still bootstrap when investors run away with money.

jgalt212 11y ago

Jack running Square and Twitter will be bad for both Square and Twitter, but probably more bad for Twitter as the stakes are higher. Nothing against Jack, but human beings cannot multi-task. Now maybe Jack and Elon don't think they are human, but the results will bear this out.

mpg33 11y ago

Removing and preventing fake accounts should be they're no. 1 priority.

themeek 11y ago
Why do you believe this should be their highest priority?
- mpg33 11y ago
  Ruins the experience. Fake followers. Fake tweets. Just don't understand how it hasn't been fixed yet.
  - oldmanjay 11y ago
    Out of curiosity, how would you fix it?
    - themeek 11y ago
      Currently DIA uses internet signals collection, social media analysis and human intelligence to identify foreign messaging and popular messages that are harmful to national security. They will submit requests to have these taken down (as the State Department did to Youtube to take down Al-Alwaki's videos) - though currently Twitter is not very cooperative. I do not know how Twitter would handle a problem like this itself.
  - themeek 11y ago
    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.

themeek 11y ago

Twitter has been a frustration for US propaganda efforts for a long time (e.g. https://www.muckrock.com/foi/united-states-of-america-10/center-for-strategic-counterterrorism-communications-operations-state-1348/#file-10265 https://www.muckrock.com/foi/united-states-of-america-10/cen...). Whoever usurps Dick Costolo, if they pursue 'removing and preventing fake accounts', they are also likely to partner more closely with the Department of State and DoD to support strategic communication and counter-strategic communications efforts - taking down accounts the US claims represent efforts by Russia, other actors, or contain ideas and narratives that harm United States national security.

dchuk 11y ago

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 standard blog posts on their own domains. It could completely open up the platform to new opportunities, plus allow for richer expression in content which means they can mine the ever living shit out of it even more accurately to improve their advertising profits.

slaven 11y ago
Not to mention that adding an image chops 20+ chars of my limit. Want a URL in there and maybe a hashtag? You're down to less than 100 characters. These arbitrary platform limits should not burden the end user.
jccooper 11y ago
Minimalism is a strong feature of Twitter. The effect of lifting the character limit is unpredictable, and I'm not certain it would be positive. It could be, but my personal reaction would probably be to use it less if the fire hose increased in magnitude.
dexterdog 11y ago
The interface can just show a more link after a certain number of characters. Then again, I never really got twitter from the publishing side as it's only a read-only thing for me.
untog 11y ago
That would change the nature of Twitter a lot, though. writers could write their content on Twitter and have it appear as standard blog posts on their own domains That makes the posts sound very, very large. That's not what I want from Twitter - I want short, sharp posts that make one single point. 140 characters does feel like a meaningless limit, but IMO they'd still want to emphasise short content somehow.
11y ago

maerek 11y ago

From an update to the article: [Update: On the conference call, Costolo said he initiated internal conversations about leaving at the end of last year, and that following discussions in Feburary and his decision to step down, Twitter decided to begin the CEO search. Costolo said he chose to leave now because he thought staying on through the CEO search would cause scrutiny to intensify. During the Q&A, Twitter execs said that since Costolo voluntarily stepped down, there will be no severance package.] The line about 'no severance package' seems highly unusual and would lead me to assume that this was a forceful 'push' to step down.

argonaut 11y ago
You've got it the other way around. A forceful push is very likely to lead to a huge severance package (because that's the cost of getting someone to go quietly and stay for the transition). So the fact that he doesn't get a severance package leads me to believe it was voluntary.
- mathattack 11y ago
  It's a high class way for him to leave, that may set up other options for him in the future (VC, Professorship, etc) that wouldn't be there if it was an ugly breakup. Given that the stock traded at all time lows, no severance was justified. https://www.google.com/finance?cid=32086821185414 https://www.google.com/finance?cid=32086821185414
  - argonaut 11y ago
    Given that he was the CEO of a public company, there's a pretty good chance he had a rich severance clause in his contract in the event he was fired.
  - sirkneeland 11y ago
    That didn't stop Leo Apothekar for collecting $30 million in severance after tanking HP. Nor did it stop Stephen Elop from collecting $25 million after running Nokia's devices business into the ground/arms of Microsoft (although I think technically that was structured as a "bonus") Reminds me of some quote I heard somewhere: "CEO: where success is rewarded handsomely and failure only slightly less so"

walterbell 11y ago

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-restructuring-2015-6 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.."

dataker 11y ago

Is it possible for Twitter to acquire Square?

enochroot 11y ago

Mike Arrington claims he was fired: "So @dickc was fired. My guess is @sacca knew about it before writing his recent open letters." https://twitter.com/arrington/status/609103779791683584 https://twitter.com/arrington/status/609103779791683584

aaronbrethorst 11y ago
"What Twitter Can Be" http://lowercasecapital.com/2015/06/03/what-twitter-can-be-2/ http://lowercasecapital.com/2015/06/03/what-twitter-can-be-2...

wslh 11y ago

Make the firehose available for anyone at an affordable price and the earnings will jump. Talk is cheap but in a way this is what Google did with AdWords. In the past you should have a budget of thousands dollars to advertise on popular sites like Yahoo. Google found a way to keep the required budget at a minimum. I think Twitter haven't done that because it is always more comfortable to talk to a few customers who can pay a lot of money instead of having an horde using your service, but it is currently unacceptable to think this way if you are Twitter.

jkimmel 11y ago
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 achieve widespread API usage while still making money with standard infrastructure (no custom datacenters, &c.)
- wslh 11y ago
  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 datacenters, &c.) What issue do you see here? can you expand?
  - jkimmel 11y ago
    > 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.

udev 11y ago

Twitter is a complicated case. On one hand it has incredible political clout as free speech tool, is used by most celebrities, etc. Yet, its very design makes monetization difficult, and in my opinion, unlikely to ever be of great success.

mschuster91 11y ago

Another problem that Twitter has, aside from the financial issues, is the "eternal september" phenomen. Seriously, the influx of kids who spam around anyone they see with "OMG CUT 4 BIEBER" or other pubertic crap sucks. It's even worse than the followback and other kinds of spambots.

unoti 11y ago
That's the number one problem with social media-- sometimes you are subjected to what people have to say.

mpdehaan2 11y ago

whoa, interesting. On one hand, I have ceased to see twitter evolve much at all over the last N years, much like I used to say of Flickr. I eventually left Flickr because I wasn't seeing improvements for photo sharing and browsing that I really wanted as a photographer. It's a legitimate problem that he needs to solve. I don't think twitter needs to be much different than what it is, because i'm addicted to it, but it not evolving and just investing in scale I think does need to be addressed. Ways to find more interesting people and content, and to allow people to have more room to link to other pages/sites/things about themselves might be a start. (Without getting to be too myspacey?). I definitely like that it's a lot more open than Facebook and can read things without always friending everything, but I also want more controls about what type of content I see and get. Lists are ok-ish, but so many things are so marketey from companies versus just being news feeds, I kind of end up not following companies. Marketers on twitter are I think it's curse, and it's starting to become that kind of platform.

ytdht 11y ago
If you think that Twitter is pretty much perfect for you, why would you want it to change at all? Change is not always good...
dave1619 11y ago
I tend to agree that Twitter hasn't evolved/progressed much over the past few to several years. I think they've got a lot of potential though. IMO they should have entered the personal messaging space and been one of the top players. They could have eventually link personal messaging with discussion around topics and Twitter as well.

notNow 11y ago

Seriously, what was Sacca thinking when he pressed the publish button on that Twitter piece? I'm half way through and it's just insane. He spilled the beans for every product that Twitter could build in the coming couple of years for everyone to see. Couldn't he just have sent those recommendations or feature requests to the top management and spared them the public humiliation or giving the competition free ideas and inteliigence?!! This is just ridiculous.

welanes 11y ago
Ideas are ten a penny, plus there's nothing in the post that's innovative or surprising for anyone who uses Twitter even a little.

ElectricFeel 11y ago

I gotta say.. I have been railing against the Twitter tide for a couple of years now and have been against it for a long time but I am a convert.. Speaking from a dev perspective here is really is a stroke of genius software-wise... I know this is a weird thing to say but it's SEXY code, even.. I get excited thinking about how awesome it is! Call me a nerd if you will.

digital-rubber 11y ago

Dick cost-o-lo(t)? Or did cost too much got too little? :)

getdavidhiggins 11y ago

I wrote a post in response to Costolo stepping down. Since the trendy thing is to post punditry about Twitter, I couldn't help but chime in. "On Twitter" - http://blog.higg.im/2015/06/12/on-twitter/ http://blog.higg.im/2015/06/12/on-twitter/ ---------- Also, you can make up your own mind about this: http://www.vox.com/2015/6/11/8761731/twitter-trouble-facebook-twtr http://www.vox.com/2015/6/11/8761731/twitter-trouble-faceboo... http://lowercasecapital.com/2015/06/03/what-twitter-can-be-2/ http://lowercasecapital.com/2015/06/03/what-twitter-can-be-2... https://medium.com/@michaeledwards/re-imaging-twitter-ea4e1139fe12 https://medium.com/@michaeledwards/re-imaging-twitter-ea4e11... http://www.novaspivack.com/uncategorized/why-twitters-engagement-has-fallen http://www.novaspivack.com/uncategorized/why-twitters-engage... https://alexgaynor.net/2014/oct/30/i-hope-twitter-goes-away/ https://alexgaynor.net/2014/oct/30/i-hope-twitter-goes-away/ http://blog.higg.im/twitters-self-immolation/ http://blog.higg.im/twitters-self-immolation/ http://john.do/twitter-quit/ http://john.do/twitter-quit/ http://techcrunch.com/2015/02/22/twitters-dilemma/ http://techcrunch.com/2015/02/22/twitters-dilemma/ http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/04/a-eulogy-for-twitter/361339/ http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/04/a-eulo... http://www.mathewingram.com/work/2015/04/30/twitters-multi-billion-dollar-mistake-happened-five-years-ago/ http://www.mathewingram.com/work/2015/04/30/twitters-multi-b...