The head of product is Keith Coleman, who was preceded by Edward Ho (interim, now also (interim?) head of engineering) and preceded by Jeff Siebert (both of whom are still at the company).
I think its valid to ask if Jack Dorsey is the next executive to leave.
The moment Anthony Noto went to Twitter, all wall street could talk about was that he was brought in to sell the company.
Who ever the next CTO is, they're going to have some tough decisions to make. Twitter already has to pay out an extreme amount of compensation in stock options just to get and retain talent.
I don't want this to seem inflammatory to people as twitter obviously has some serious engineering talent, but does anyone consider them to be a big name in tech anymore? They seem to be in the range of say PayPal in that they have a decent reputation but they aren't really a name that gets you any resume recognition anymore.
> By way of comparison, the company reported $2.2 billion in revenue for 2015 — meaning that it paid out 31 cents in stock-based compensation for every dollar of sales it collected.
You're going to be fighting several battles that aren't really engineering related,
- how to finally fix harassment that seems to be much more pronounced on your platform than pretty much any other mainstream social media site.
- how to get alot more advertising dollars on your site to an audience that short of reddit, seems to dislike advertising more than most social media sites.
And on top of all of this, you're probably going to have to shrink your engineering head count to make yourself look more appetizing to potential acquirers.
> They seem to be in the range of say PayPal in that they have a decent reputation but they aren't really a name that gets you any resume recognition anymore.
PayPal doesn't get you "name recognition" anymore? In fact I would expect Twitter would garner more because of their larger open source initiatives but I still hear lots of chatter about PayPal and the people who have worked there.
Maybe I'm just in a weird bubble but I still consider PayPal one of the big tech names.
Twitter's problem isn't just that they have to fix harassment, it's that they have to do it without touching social justice activism that sure looks similar to it from the outside, right down to the doxing, threats, and smears. Oh, and they'll get no sympathy for getting this wrong as the difference is apparently obvious... except that everyone defines it differently (usually based on who their friends are) and simply assumes the world shares their definition. Good luck.
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.
Was Twitter ever really about tech excellence? My perspective as an outsider who doesn't live or work in Silicon Valley, it always seemed more of a communications and media company founded on a tech backbone. Beyond their early scaling problems, which they spent a long, long time fighting, what really exciting tech has emerged from Twitter? Google, Apple, Amazon, and Facebook all have much more impressive technology to show for themselves over the last several years.
The moment Dick left was when I felt a disturbance in the twitterverse (but I also have a disdain for Dorsey).
It kind of felt weird to me that Twitter went from this platform of literally starting revolutions to managing expectations of its users in the name "fighting harassment".
I now use it simply to tweet out my latest recipes...
I think the product is solid, for a specific purpose, for a specific audience. However, they've failed to figure out the broad appeal that can lead to advertising dollars. I think their usage demographic is too narrow for a public company level of earnings. To me this is a product leadership issue. I agree that perhaps Jack Dorsey would be the next to leave. The biggest fear I, as a Twitter fan, would have is a private equity fire sale.
Anecdotally speaking, in the last 2 years, I've seen 3 ex-Twitter (as their most recent position) people apply, and none of them made it passed the second phone interview, which was the first real technical one.
I didn't do the interviews myself, but I watched them, and I was very unimpressed with the applicants.
I can say this about most (70%) Amazon people too... (and am in Seattle, so we see a lot of them).
Twitter can make money, all it has to do is reduce its operational costs first. Then launch new products to grow. Twitter isn't going to become the new ad-sense or Facebook if it isn't a platform at first place. And you don't become a platform if your product isn't relevant to a lot of people.
People use Google for search. People use Facebook to connect with friends and family. Who needs a Twitter account aside from journalists and attention-seekers? my grand mother doesn't need a twitter account. Nobody cares about her cooking a chicken or planting cucumbers in the garden BUT her closest relatives. And there is already Facebook for that.
What twitter SHOULD have done, and should probably re-consider, is leave the API open, but charge a fee to utilize it at scale. Let startups come up with creative new uses for your platform, and if they get traction - acquire them. You print money and find an easy target for growth.
Twitter's problem is their continued refusal to recognize themselves as a platform. It's probably too late at this point, but I don't think they have anything to lose.
> Who needs a Twitter account aside from journalists and attention-seekers?
Twitter is what you curate it to be. To me, Twitter is kind of the publishing platform Linked In was trying to build. Smart people posting interesting links (to their posts or others) and people discussing.
However since Twitter is what you make Twitter to be, garbage in garbage out. I quit Twitter for about 2 years but then unfollowed every account and started fresh. Now I use it all the time, way more than Facebook, etc.
At the moment, and since just after I quit Facebook, Twitter has worked for me regarding how I communicate and consume over such "live feed" social media.
* The social--what users actually use it for.
* The ad platform.
* The realtime gestalt/search platform.
The latter is what is inadequately funded and considered.
Twitter has a latency advantage on the pulse of thought across the user base. The user base is already high-value for this relative to the morass of Facebook users. This is the key differentiator. This is what you base the platform and the value of search upon. You don't bury it by restricting the API, or trying to shift it into the realm of the social platform with "Moments"--you build dependency upon it, and monetize that unique value by those who need to keep the pulse. This creates value for the other two parts. It is also woefully underfunded.
Someone mentioned an AWS-like model. That is thinking along the right track. Make the gestalt a utility that people will pay for.
Yes, you still have all the spam/hate issues on the social platform, and those need to be solved. But those only become a corporate imperative if Twitter is resigned to merely being a social network rather than a platform.
Maybe it's actually 4 parts--I forgot about the live event deals (e.g., NFL games). There's a raw, traditional media part, but I'd align that with the advertising part.
I'm sure it's simply arm chair quarter backing but I feel like Twitter could be turned around and I think almost anyone could do it as long as they can force them to take action and quickly.
Honestly I feel like I shouldn't even post this because it's half on topic and half off topic. But I was thinking about some ideas I think Twitter should do and, well, screw it I'm curious to see what the HN community thinks of any of my ideas.
Twitter should:
- Lay off approx 60-70% of the staff. Seriously Twitter is way, way, way over staffed. I mean I don't want to see this happen but Twitter is so employee heavy I don't understand how they can sustain themselves without losing a large amount of employees.
- Longer forms of communication. Yeah yeah I know "Twitter is short it makes people be concise" yadda yadda yadda; look a lot of the top Twitter users constantly do tweet storms. Many post photos of long form content. Sure maybe you keep the same limits but allow a way to stitch together multiple tweets should you want to do something long form. Right now the dialog gets ruined because comments get spliced during the user posting their thoughts.
This has to be addressed somehow. They're losing out on too much conversation and context when people post things like photos of text.
- Need some focus around various types of media. Video is especially important. Look at Instagram, they copied Snap's stories and BOOM, big success. Twitter is positioned to be a messaging pipe for the internet. Let's get more types of media flowing through it! Make Live even faster to start (dedicated button). Make image taking native, too. Single button, type text, posted. Done.
- Better ways of handling discussions. Something threaded, not counting usernames in limits (to a degree; can't have someone spamming hundreds at once). In a similar vein create groups so conversations / discussions can rapidly happen inside of groups.
- More tools for filtering, maybe creating separate views for different types of people you follow (like it would be great to see what my friends are saying versus what news sources are saying etc without going through the cumbersome list UX).
- Verification so if someone wants to use their real name they can have it verified and can even filter by verified so they can filter out the noise if they want. Facebook is pretty damn successful at real names but you can also create alternate personalities via Pages. I think Twitter should mimic this functionality to a degree.
It might be too late for devs to trust them again, but they had an ideal situation maybe like 5-6 years ago where every developer out there was thinking about and experimenting with the Twitter API and you'd see a cool new project released basically every day. That all stopped when the suits wanted to grab control of Twitter and started discouraging and forcing out lots of companies that were trying to invest on that and build actually innovative software.
As a company, what's better than having others doing your work for you and promoting your service at the same time? Getting rid of that situation to me was the beginning of the end for them. There was such a rapid enthusiasm for Twitter that died off for a lot of influencers with that.
Thinking about it, Twitter barely evolved since its inception. At least changes are barely noticeable on the website in terms of features or UX. And I agreee with you, it's impossible to follow a discussion on Twitter. It is almost impossible to know who is answering to whom when tweets pile up.
Apart from layoffs, how do you see your other ideas adding business value and/or revenue to the company rather than just making the product better for end users?
Are you thinking about how Twitter could be a better product or a better business?
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...
I hope the best for Twitter, as it's probably been the most beneficial of the social media network services (unless you count GMail) for me. I wish I could devote more of my programming class curriculum to teaching the Twitter API, as it has so many rich use-cases and students really enjoy it, but I expect that if Twitter survives for the long-haul, its API probably won't. At least, I expect it to be constrained in the same way Facebook has constrained its previously liberal (in the sense of data scope, not political) data endpoints.
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 limitation."
Twitter is a business model that will be studied for years IMHO. No clear path to revenue, viral adoption, and very little product development away from its core competencies. I use Twitter often, but it has always seemed like a platform most useful if you have something to promote. One big flaw has been trying to find value to ordinary users who want to do something beyond typing into an echo chamber. If Twitter goes away it would be interested to figure out what would take its place.
> it has always seemed like a platform most useful if you have something to promote
Twitter is most used for 2 things:
- to promote your own brand (which includes companies like CNN & Google, as well as authors, writers and celebrities)
- to gossip about what you ate for lunch, or how everything is falling apart and the world has never been so bad, or whine about Mondays
The users that do #1 tend to do very little of #2, and vice versa. Listening to #2 will add very little value to your life except extra anxiety and distraction, but #2 is needed because they're the people to whom brands are promoting themselves.
The problem is people keep coming back to Facebook to keep up with friends, and people keep coming back to Twitter to watch and participate in drama. The former will inevitably be more engaged with the advertising than the latter, and Twitter can't change that.
A lot of Twitter's management in product/engineering seems to be from a very particular demographic. Graduated Stanford in early 2000s and quickly rose up the ladder in Google -- Alex Roetter, Josh McFarland, Keith Coleman.
Aside from being what I assume to be exceptionally talented individuals, what do you guys think separates these people from their peers to make it to the VP level so quickly?
As someone just getting started in my career, what steps can I take to put myself in a position to grow so quickly?
Twitter's Senior Management rating on Glassdoor is a 3.0/5 (where the goal is 4.0/5 or higher), one of the lowest among Bay Area companies. It's down there with eBay (3.0), HP (2.7), PayPal (3.1), etc. That is, they clearly need to replace their entire management structure.
For reference: Facebook (4.3), Google (3.9), Uber (3.9), Snapchat (3.8), AirBnB (3.7), Quora (3.7), Dropbox (3.6), Abobe (3.6), Apple (3.5), Pinterest (3.5), and Microsoft (3.4).
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 the engineering organization. But given he had been removed from it (and passed over) in the past, it's not surprising he would leave, voluntarily or involuntarily.
I think it's sad that Twitter is facing so many departures. It's unclear what is really happening but I do hope this service doesn't collapse. It's mind boggling to me that something so useful is struggling to stick around.
I acknowledge that CEO is not an easy job, but in light of all the departures and drama, I honestly wonder if @jack really is the right person for the job?
Seems that the problems with product, PR, and investor relations got worse when he came back. How much rope will the board give him before he hangs himself?
Twitter's failure is a failure to embrace an open web. The next CTO at Twitter should take a deep hard look at decentralization, protocols such as OStatus, and how to provide an open platform (like email) not a walled garden.
Say one manages a government agency or any other large organization -- Why the heck would they put all eggs into a provider's basket rather than set up their own GNU social infrastructure? Does anyone not realize the power of controlling their own namespace?
It is disappointing because I personally still believe Twitter has a lot of potential, and it seems like they can't catch a break.
I don't work at Twitter, so it is hard for me to tell how much this exec drain has had an effect on delivery and execution, but I'd imagine a good amount.
The NFL Thursday Twitter has been super disappointing. I wish there was a way to get the video screen mostly full, and have a live feed of MY timeline on the feed. I definitely am tweeting a ton during sporting events, and feel like I never see targeted ads or well thought out products surrounding that.
[+] [-] aresant|9 years ago|reply
https://twitter.com/crazyfoo/status/811331557608652800
AKA outside of Dorsey, who is a split / shared CEO, who is in charge of Twitter?
[+] [-] argonaut|9 years ago|reply
The head of product is Keith Coleman, who was preceded by Edward Ho (interim, now also (interim?) head of engineering) and preceded by Jeff Siebert (both of whom are still at the company).
[+] [-] johns|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] x0x0|9 years ago|reply
I can't understand how he was vp product on a social network.
[+] [-] mikeryan|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|9 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] chollida1|9 years ago|reply
The moment Anthony Noto went to Twitter, all wall street could talk about was that he was brought in to sell the company.
Who ever the next CTO is, they're going to have some tough decisions to make. Twitter already has to pay out an extreme amount of compensation in stock options just to get and retain talent.
I don't want this to seem inflammatory to people as twitter obviously has some serious engineering talent, but does anyone consider them to be a big name in tech anymore? They seem to be in the range of say PayPal in that they have a decent reputation but they aren't really a name that gets you any resume recognition anymore.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/27/business/dealbook/twitters...
> By way of comparison, the company reported $2.2 billion in revenue for 2015 — meaning that it paid out 31 cents in stock-based compensation for every dollar of sales it collected.
You're going to be fighting several battles that aren't really engineering related,
- how to finally fix harassment that seems to be much more pronounced on your platform than pretty much any other mainstream social media site.
- how to get alot more advertising dollars on your site to an audience that short of reddit, seems to dislike advertising more than most social media sites.
And on top of all of this, you're probably going to have to shrink your engineering head count to make yourself look more appetizing to potential acquirers.
Yikes......
[+] [-] BinaryIdiot|9 years ago|reply
PayPal doesn't get you "name recognition" anymore? In fact I would expect Twitter would garner more because of their larger open source initiatives but I still hear lots of chatter about PayPal and the people who have worked there.
Maybe I'm just in a weird bubble but I still consider PayPal one of the big tech names.
[+] [-] makomk|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] grandalf|9 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] slg|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TheOneTrueKyle|9 years ago|reply
It kind of felt weird to me that Twitter went from this platform of literally starting revolutions to managing expectations of its users in the name "fighting harassment".
I now use it simply to tweet out my latest recipes...
[+] [-] user5994461|9 years ago|reply
Lay off then no need to pay it.
There are 4000 employees, which is about one order of magnitude too much.
[+] [-] pritianka|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|9 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] gotthemwmds|9 years ago|reply
I didn't do the interviews myself, but I watched them, and I was very unimpressed with the applicants.
I can say this about most (70%) Amazon people too... (and am in Seattle, so we see a lot of them).
[+] [-] throwaw12ay|9 years ago|reply
People use Google for search. People use Facebook to connect with friends and family. Who needs a Twitter account aside from journalists and attention-seekers? my grand mother doesn't need a twitter account. Nobody cares about her cooking a chicken or planting cucumbers in the garden BUT her closest relatives. And there is already Facebook for that.
[+] [-] tw04|9 years ago|reply
Twitter's problem is their continued refusal to recognize themselves as a platform. It's probably too late at this point, but I don't think they have anything to lose.
[+] [-] brentm|9 years ago|reply
Twitter is what you curate it to be. To me, Twitter is kind of the publishing platform Linked In was trying to build. Smart people posting interesting links (to their posts or others) and people discussing.
However since Twitter is what you make Twitter to be, garbage in garbage out. I quit Twitter for about 2 years but then unfollowed every account and started fresh. Now I use it all the time, way more than Facebook, etc.
[+] [-] drdeadringer|9 years ago|reply
At the moment, and since just after I quit Facebook, Twitter has worked for me regarding how I communicate and consume over such "live feed" social media.
[+] [-] _audakel|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] firebones|9 years ago|reply
Trifurcate Twitter into three distinct parts:
* The social--what users actually use it for. * The ad platform. * The realtime gestalt/search platform.
The latter is what is inadequately funded and considered.
Twitter has a latency advantage on the pulse of thought across the user base. The user base is already high-value for this relative to the morass of Facebook users. This is the key differentiator. This is what you base the platform and the value of search upon. You don't bury it by restricting the API, or trying to shift it into the realm of the social platform with "Moments"--you build dependency upon it, and monetize that unique value by those who need to keep the pulse. This creates value for the other two parts. It is also woefully underfunded.
Someone mentioned an AWS-like model. That is thinking along the right track. Make the gestalt a utility that people will pay for.
Yes, you still have all the spam/hate issues on the social platform, and those need to be solved. But those only become a corporate imperative if Twitter is resigned to merely being a social network rather than a platform.
Maybe it's actually 4 parts--I forgot about the live event deals (e.g., NFL games). There's a raw, traditional media part, but I'd align that with the advertising part.
[+] [-] BinaryIdiot|9 years ago|reply
Honestly I feel like I shouldn't even post this because it's half on topic and half off topic. But I was thinking about some ideas I think Twitter should do and, well, screw it I'm curious to see what the HN community thinks of any of my ideas.
Twitter should:
- Lay off approx 60-70% of the staff. Seriously Twitter is way, way, way over staffed. I mean I don't want to see this happen but Twitter is so employee heavy I don't understand how they can sustain themselves without losing a large amount of employees.
- Longer forms of communication. Yeah yeah I know "Twitter is short it makes people be concise" yadda yadda yadda; look a lot of the top Twitter users constantly do tweet storms. Many post photos of long form content. Sure maybe you keep the same limits but allow a way to stitch together multiple tweets should you want to do something long form. Right now the dialog gets ruined because comments get spliced during the user posting their thoughts.
This has to be addressed somehow. They're losing out on too much conversation and context when people post things like photos of text.
- Need some focus around various types of media. Video is especially important. Look at Instagram, they copied Snap's stories and BOOM, big success. Twitter is positioned to be a messaging pipe for the internet. Let's get more types of media flowing through it! Make Live even faster to start (dedicated button). Make image taking native, too. Single button, type text, posted. Done.
- Better ways of handling discussions. Something threaded, not counting usernames in limits (to a degree; can't have someone spamming hundreds at once). In a similar vein create groups so conversations / discussions can rapidly happen inside of groups.
- More tools for filtering, maybe creating separate views for different types of people you follow (like it would be great to see what my friends are saying versus what news sources are saying etc without going through the cumbersome list UX).
- Verification so if someone wants to use their real name they can have it verified and can even filter by verified so they can filter out the noise if they want. Facebook is pretty damn successful at real names but you can also create alternate personalities via Pages. I think Twitter should mimic this functionality to a degree.
[+] [-] throwaway420|9 years ago|reply
As a company, what's better than having others doing your work for you and promoting your service at the same time? Getting rid of that situation to me was the beginning of the end for them. There was such a rapid enthusiasm for Twitter that died off for a lot of influencers with that.
[+] [-] throwaw12ay|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Benjammer|9 years ago|reply
Are you thinking about how Twitter could be a better product or a better business?
[+] [-] usaphp|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] djfm|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] whywhywhywhy|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|9 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] benmarks|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] danso|9 years ago|reply
edit: grammar
[+] [-] minimaxir|9 years ago|reply
Twitter, meanwhile, still has that stupid 3200 most-recent tweet limit on historical data, which is apparently a "technical limitation."
[+] [-] josh_carterPDX|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] concinds|9 years ago|reply
Twitter is most used for 2 things:
- to promote your own brand (which includes companies like CNN & Google, as well as authors, writers and celebrities)
- to gossip about what you ate for lunch, or how everything is falling apart and the world has never been so bad, or whine about Mondays
The users that do #1 tend to do very little of #2, and vice versa. Listening to #2 will add very little value to your life except extra anxiety and distraction, but #2 is needed because they're the people to whom brands are promoting themselves.
The problem is people keep coming back to Facebook to keep up with friends, and people keep coming back to Twitter to watch and participate in drama. The former will inevitably be more engaged with the advertising than the latter, and Twitter can't change that.
[+] [-] criddell|9 years ago|reply
I don't know about that. They have $2.2 billion in revenue last year. Get the employee count down to 300 people and you have a great business.
[+] [-] fjdlwlv|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] throwyawa62134|9 years ago|reply
Aside from being what I assume to be exceptionally talented individuals, what do you guys think separates these people from their peers to make it to the VP level so quickly?
As someone just getting started in my career, what steps can I take to put myself in a position to grow so quickly?
[+] [-] baccheion|9 years ago|reply
For reference: Facebook (4.3), Google (3.9), Uber (3.9), Snapchat (3.8), AirBnB (3.7), Quora (3.7), Dropbox (3.6), Abobe (3.6), Apple (3.5), Pinterest (3.5), and Microsoft (3.4).
[+] [-] cekvenich3|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] argonaut|9 years ago|reply
After Roetter left, Messinger was put back in charge of the engineering organization. But given he had been removed from it (and passed over) in the past, it's not surprising he would leave, voluntarily or involuntarily.
[+] [-] pritianka|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sheraz|9 years ago|reply
Seems that the problems with product, PR, and investor relations got worse when he came back. How much rope will the board give him before he hangs himself?
[+] [-] mathattack|9 years ago|reply
http://www.recode.net/2016/12/6/13814264/twitter-anthony-not...
[+] [-] riffic|9 years ago|reply
Say one manages a government agency or any other large organization -- Why the heck would they put all eggs into a provider's basket rather than set up their own GNU social infrastructure? Does anyone not realize the power of controlling their own namespace?
[+] [-] sulam|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rb808|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sna1l|9 years ago|reply
I don't work at Twitter, so it is hard for me to tell how much this exec drain has had an effect on delivery and execution, but I'd imagine a good amount.
The NFL Thursday Twitter has been super disappointing. I wish there was a way to get the video screen mostly full, and have a live feed of MY timeline on the feed. I definitely am tweeting a ton during sporting events, and feel like I never see targeted ads or well thought out products surrounding that.
[+] [-] sidcool|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sherifmansour|9 years ago|reply