Twitter’s CEO Dick Costolo Is Stepping Down

http://techcrunch.com/2015/06/11/twitter-announces-ceo-dick-costolo-stepping-down-jack-dorsey-named-interim-ceo/

by brandonlipman • 11 years ago

413 251 11 years ago

austenallred14• 11 years 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).

thewhizkid2• 11 years ago

Keep in mind Jack Dorsey the interim CEO, so it's only temporary until they find a permanent CEO.

austenallred14• 11 years ago

Jack is a wild card. They'll give him a shot and see how it goes.

If it goes well they can pull an Apple and say, "The founder is finally coming back!" If not they can quietly find a replacement and say, "Now Jack is going back to Square, just like they said he always would."

It's PR insurance, basically, which Twitter desperately needs considering they go through CEOs faster than I go through freelancers.

waterlesscloud2• 11 years ago

Ellen Pao is the interim CEO of Reddit. Interim CEO is still CEO, you still have the power of the job.

mschuster912• 11 years ago

No truly big moves have been made, and the product has remained almost entirely the same

Third-party clients have been and are "accidentally" banned and subject to rate limitations, for example.

The Android app is a UX mess.

wyclif3• 11 years 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."

pyre2• 11 years 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?

istvan__• 11 years ago

Exactly! I am pretty sure that they could monetize enough on the ads, I found twitter ads pretty relevant almost all the time, i don't even removing them with adblock.

staunch2• 11 years ago

Users don't want change unless it's really good change, then it's the best thing that can happen. Here's what Twitter used to look like: https://www.flickr.com/photos/jackdorsey/188430472 https://www.flickr.com/photos/factoryjoe/190576959

I remember those days too and the product is much better now. It could be much better still.

signaler• 11 years ago

Seconded. It's like the fabric of the web now. (Possibly why their Fabric API is called 'Fabric'). I wrote about this: http://blog.higg.so/2015/06/12/on-twitter/?24

meatysnapper2• 11 years ago

Meanwhile Twitter's engineering talent drain continues, as the company will yet again change directions and nothing will get done.

For chrissake's they are still under their "Code Red", otherwise known as reorg-infinity.

And the cost-cutting will continue (as it should) for an unprofitable public company- get rid of the crossfit instructors, the chef, have less good food, etc.

throwaway6497• 11 years ago

I think we tend to overuse the word visionary quite a bit these days in the industry. Have you read the book by other Twitter founder who was ousted? He paints a different picture of Jack. Jack is no slouch but a visionary? He is not in the same league as Elon Musk. Jack is a hipster in a suit; he is smart and has carefully crafted his public persona (probably inspired by Jobs and modeled his persona after his ideas). Simple ideas can be powerful and can touch millions of lives. That doesn't make the person who initially came up with idea or some variant of it a visionary. On that metric, Evan Spiegel is a visionary too.

We should collectively be critical about how loosely we tend to use superlatives and not base the stories spun by PR machinery to qualify a person or her work. Elon Musk has invested his money, ideas, energy into - Making solar one of largest sources of clean energy - An electric car which is not a joke and probably better than a BMW M5 to drive, self-driving cars? - Satellites to cover entire land on earth with wifi - A plan to go to Mars and setup a camp there - A plan for rapid transit through tubes. Opensourced design blue-prints. - SpaceX

He is not dead and he has long way to go. We should reserve the word visionary for people like him. Let us be honest.

owens992• 11 years ago

Well said.

abalone2• 11 years ago

You don't have to be Elon Musk to be a "product visionary". It's simply someone who's good at envisioning new products. They don't all have to save the planet (and Musk is standing on the shoulders of giants with his).

We should also be careful not to base our impressions on sensational stories spun by disgruntled ex-employees who've gone on to do jack squat. Not a lot of "hipsters in a suit" have gone on to found a second multi-billion dollar company (Square). Sure, we can debate how good a business Square is but it's clearly in "visionary" product territory. It changed its industry.

soup10• 11 years ago

I own a significant amount of tesla stock and stand to benefit from Elon musk-hype. But I have to admit I'm pretty tired of it. There are other people who dream about and do things you know.

decasteve• 11 years ago

Elon also has a well crafted public persona. He's still visionary but easy to tell a lot of thought went in to how he presents himself.

A few interviews with his brother Kimbal takes Elon down a notch, in a fun brotherly way. Kimbal is the more natural and affable of the two.

puranjay• 11 years ago

"Visionary" is this generation's "Genius"

Anyone slightly out of the ordinary is saddled with that tag.

jasondc• 11 years 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.

pavlov2• 11 years ago

I think it's going to be more like Jerry Yang coming back to Yahoo -- not much of a change either way.

chuckcode• 11 years 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...

staunch2• 11 years ago

The difference is Steve Jobs spent 10 years working on NeXT, developing a clearer vision of the PC and creating what became OSX. Jack Dorsey spent 5 years doing POS systems and credit card processing deals at Square. Twitter isn't lacking for a "Twitter Pay" feature.

Dorsey's original idea for Twttr was a service that let you group SMS what club you're at to your friends list. If he had been on his own it probably would have been yet another group texting app (maybe eventually WhatsApp). It was Evan Williams (IMHO), with his Blogger experience, that developed Twitter into the "micro blogging" service we came to know. Evan Williams is working on Medium now, another idea broadcasting platform.

mortenjorck• 11 years ago

Actually, that might not be as silly as it sounds... What if Twitter tried to pivot into something like Patreon? They already have one of the world's largest social graphs of followers and creators; just add a payment layer and things could get quite interesting.

nilkn2• 11 years ago

Is Square that much of a failure? I've always had a positive impression of it, and a lot of small merchants in my city use it and seem to like it (or so I thought).

brandonlipman3• 11 years 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• 11 years 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.

brandonlipman3• 11 years 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.

capkutay• 11 years ago

Twitter stock is up 7% on the news:

http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=TWTR%2C+&ql=1

harryh2• 11 years ago

It's gotta be a weird feeling when getting fired causes your company to gain 1.7B in value.

ForHackernews• 11 years ago

I'm sure he's getting a nice golden parachute in Twitter stock.

psykovsky2• 11 years ago

Where is that value coming from? Are they even profitable? Stock value means jack shit.

free2rhyme214• 11 years 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.

eroo• 11 years 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...

kidcoach• 11 years ago

I had 2 autoplay videos and 1 popup, ibtimes has really gone to shit.

wamatt• 11 years ago

uBlock is your friend

https://github.com/chrisaljoudi/uBlock#getting-started

Mahn2• 11 years ago

Was there a time when ibtimes was good?

totony• 11 years ago

I only had some "Get adobe flash player", do I need to upgrade my computer to Windows 10?

wozniacki3• 11 years ago

Dick Costolo in a Bloomberg interview in May[1], when asked what he thinks of skeptics who say he should be fired:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=41NrVg-7bQw

[1] Twitter CEO Dick Costolo Q&A: What to Do When People Say ‘You Suck’

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-05-07/twitter-ce...

awwstn• 11 years ago

I don't know much about running a public company, but my guess is that he has an obligation (maybe a legal one?) to his shareholders to not hint to news like this before the company is officially announcing it.

kjs3• 11 years ago

You are correct. This is part of his duty.

rebelidealist2• 11 years 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...

kposehn2• 11 years 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• 11 years 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?

rebelidealist2• 11 years ago

Many small biz retailers form clothing store, restaurant, even bigger coffeeshops have told me this.

raverbashing• 11 years 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• 11 years 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• 11 years 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.

kposehn2• 11 years ago

Actually, we're only about 200 feet building-to-building. Just across 10th street with an apartment/condo building in between.

jives• 11 years 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-do...

jusben13694• 11 years 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• 11 years 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

thewhizkid2• 11 years ago

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

scott_karana• 11 years ago

It's mentioned all over TFA.

bluthru• 11 years 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.

dataker2• 11 years 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• 11 years 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?

brandonlipman3• 11 years ago

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

msie• 11 years ago

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

noir-york• 11 years 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... - if not before.

Twitter really needs a strong product person running it.

waterlesscloud2• 11 years 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-...

hootydooty• 11 years 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.

lancewiggs2• 11 years 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• 11 years ago

and they will make money how? their expenses sure will go up.

piquadrat• 11 years 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.

austenallred14• 11 years ago

They make $2 Billion/year already

mikeokner• 11 years ago

Yeah their API updates a few years back were a huge pain in the ass. For a good 6 months every twitter widget I saw was broken. I replaced widgets on a few sites, and the official replacement always looked & felt shoe-horned because there was so much less control.

untog4• 11 years ago

Although it's a passion point in tech circles, allowing alternative clients is near the bottom of the list of issues Twitter needs to address. Plus it would make any platform changes and their ad system very challenging to successfully implement.

lotso• 11 years ago

How do they make money?

myth_buster• 11 years 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...

omgitstom• 11 years ago

The only way to allow that connection is to have employees as a collective majority shareholder

hellbanner3• 11 years ago

Like here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9696476

zanny• 11 years ago

You can always found Coops: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooperative

Problem of course is that traditional investing is how you get startup funds.

jgalt212• 11 years 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.

mpg332• 11 years ago

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

themeek4• 11 years ago

Why do you believe this should be their highest priority?

mpg332• 11 years ago

Ruins the experience. Fake followers. Fake tweets. Just don't understand how it hasn't been fixed yet.

chatmasta• 11 years ago

Why? More accounts = higher numbers = happy stakeholders. Is it in twitters best interest to delete "fake" accounts? Also, how do you disambiguate a friendly bot from an unfriendly one?

jeffmould• 11 years ago

I know off topic, but I sort of agree, just not the #1 priority. The #1 priority should be to fix their implementation of 2FA. It is completely baffling why a company that faces many user account hacks has such a limited implementation. I know many users that manage multiple accounts and to limit them to implementing 2FA to only one account per phone number makes no sense to me.

As for the fake accounts I think they flourish on Twitter not just because it is social media, but also because of the follower limits. There is a whole underground business of fake accounts to get real users over the 2000 follower mark initially and even higher as the account grows as followers to following becomes out of whatever proportion Twitter sets. I think if they eliminated or adjusted the 2000 follower limit (there are other ways to detect spam accounts besides limiting the account to 2000 followers until they cross a threshold) it would help some with deterring this issue.

Sorry rant over :)

Crito• 11 years ago

What do you mean by fake account? People not using their real name on twitter? Or spam bot accounts and stuff?

I fear they might be tempted to attack the later by attacking the former.

themeek4• 11 years 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/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.

dchuk2• 11 years 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• 11 years 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• 11 years 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• 11 years 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.

untog4• 11 years 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.

usaphp• 11 years ago

I strongly disagree, the only reason I am using Twitter and follow people I like is to quickly read their thoughts on current events if I wanted to read more of them I would have read their blogs instead

kamilszybalski• 11 years ago

I think this had something to do with the length of SMS messages and not splitting them. There are a plethora of 3rd party services that allow you to tweet 140+ characters.

austenallred14• 11 years ago

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

ams6110• 11 years ago

Incessantly tweeting whatever thought is current in one's stream of consciousness is like mental diarrhea, and is usually about as appealing.

edgarvaldes• 11 years ago

You just write a nice "blog post" in this comment :)

dchuk2• 11 years ago

I get what you're saying, but lifting the character limit doesn't in any way mean you need to write longer tweets. You could still just write off the cuff thoughts when you have them, as the platform currently allows for.

dougdonohoe• 11 years ago

I never understood 'tweet storms', especially since the feed is in reverse chronological order, possibly interspersed with tweets from other sources. No easy way to read it in order.

flurp• 11 years ago

"wiggle room": Username limit was 20 characters (or something like that). 20 for username, 140 for message.

aaronbrethorst2• 11 years ago

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

lylo• 11 years ago

I'm surprised they haven't added something along the lines of docs.twitter.com that allowed Twitter to host/own long form copy but linking to it via short URLs just as they do with photos. Best of both worlds or too fragmented/confusing?

oliyoung• 11 years ago

"they" did, it's called Medium (it was founded by @biz & @ev)

return0• 11 years ago

it would be impossible to follow such a text-storm for any human.

Bud• 11 years ago

To me, the strongest argument for this is that people are dodging the 140-char limit by, incredibly, posting IMAGES of the text they want to type but are not allowed to, thus using two orders of magnitude more data. Which just makes a mockery of the entire limit concept to begin with.

Just up the limit to what you need for a decent English paragraph and be done with it. Right now, you can't even write a complex sentence.

logicallee• 11 years ago

the net is becoming so low content, tweets are a miracle of history. Look at blogs and comments anywhere else: so much filler.

I can't name another medium built around this much respect for the time and attention of readers, down to the character. It's great.

Note: the above started as 2 long paragraphs; as an exercise I edited it down to 2 tweets - I think it's better!

tormeh• 11 years ago

Yeah, but it's still two tweets, which kind of proves the parent's point. I think the character limit could be removed, but everything past 280 characters is only visible if you click on the tweet. (and ofc some indicator of this truncation needs to be visible). So then everybody would really want to stick to the character limit, but at the same time you could add some extra text if you're fine with people mostly not reading it.

maerek• 11 years 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.

wozniacki3• 11 years ago

On a related note, Jack is said to forgo compensation for his interim role at Twitter.[1]

That should put to end any doubts about whether Jack's role is indeed truly interim and not a comeback.

[1] Jack Dorsey to forgo salary to lead Twitter

http://www.marketwatch.com/story/jack-dorsey-to-forgo-salary...

jgrahamc• 11 years ago

That should put to end any doubts about whether Jack's role is indeed truly interim and not a comeback.

Why? The article you link to says: "Dorsey requested no compensation for his role until the company's compensation committee agrees on a package when it conducts its annual assessment and the setting of executive compensation later in the year"

gkoberger• 11 years ago

Nope, this is win-win for them.

They said interim for a reason. If it doesn't work, they can say "this was the plan all along". If it does work, they can say "this was the plan all along".

Either way, he will be paid very well – they just haven't nailed down the exact details yet, as the contract specifically states.

mathattack3• 11 years ago

I'm not sure what you're implying? That he doesn't want to stick around? Jobs didn't take a salary after his return.

argonaut2• 11 years 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.

mathattack3• 11 years 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

matt4077• 11 years ago

Wouldn't a 'forceful push' be the exact reason for a severance package? It's usually compensation for someone leaving before their contract is up.

softdev12• 11 years ago

I highly recommend reading Hatching Twitter (http://www.amazon.com/Hatching-Twitter-Story-Friendship-Betr...) which talks about the behind the scenes CEO transitions between first Jack Dorsey, then Ev Williams, then Dick Costolo. Both Jack and Ev were said to be forced out by the board against their will (per the book) - event though the press spin was that they left voluntarily.

I'm hoping that Nick Bilton writes a follow-up with this new Costolo to Dorsey transition. I wouldn't be surprised if Jack ends up removing the interim title and stays full time.

austenallred14• 11 years ago

The line about 'no severance package' seems highly unusual and would lead me to assume that this was a forceful 'push' to step down.

It's rather normal for people to not get severance packages when they quit.

Costolo is remaining on the board, and got a ton of stock when he became CEO. Considering that he grew the company's valuation from $3 Billion to $23 Billion (7.6x for those doing the math), I can assure you he doesn't really need a severance package anyway.

anon808• 11 years ago

and he's also getting a nice return on his angel investment in tellapart . . . which twitter acquired a month ago for $.5 Billion.

walterbell3• 11 years 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-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.."

dataker2• 11 years ago

Is it possible for Twitter to acquire Square?

enochroot• 11 years 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

aaronbrethorst2• 11 years ago

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

wslh3• 11 years 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.

jkimmel2• 11 years 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.)

wslh3• 11 years 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?

udev• 11 years 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.

mschuster912• 11 years 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• 11 years ago

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

mpdehaan2• 11 years 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• 11 years 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• 11 years 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• 11 years 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• 11 years 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.

getdavidhiggins• 11 years 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/

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Also, you can make up your own mind about this:

http://www.vox.com/2015/6/11/8761731/twitter-trouble-faceboo...

http://lowercasecapital.com/2015/06/03/what-twitter-can-be-2...

https://medium.com/@michaeledwards/re-imaging-twitter-ea4e11...

http://www.novaspivack.com/uncategorized/why-twitters-engage...