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.
So the original author transferred ownership (incl. github page) to a the uBlock community, in reality to one of them. It turned out he handed it over to s kid who in turn made some weird source code changes and asked prominently for money/donations.
This scheme seems to popular with adblockers, afaik the original AdBlock and the AdBlockPlus had a similar "relationship". And later a German company took over AdBlockPlus in a similar manner and is doing big business in a gray area (whitelisting domains costs ad networks a lot of money and is absurd for an adblocker!?)
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).
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.
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.
> It's simply someone who's good at envisioning new products
We risk running out of superlatives if we take that attitude. Can we reserve 'visionary' for those 'once in a generation' types and not degrade it to mean 'competent product manager'.
Objecting to someone calling Jack Dorsey a visionary because you believe its hyperbole and then calling him a "competent product manager" seems just as, if not more disingenuous.
Other than what I've read here I don't really know who Jack Dorsey is.
My point was based on the grandparent's own words: "You don't have to be Elon Musk to be a 'product visionary'. It's simply someone who's good at envisioning new products" which sounds to me like an abasement of the English language.
This reminds me of another battle I have apparently lost. Companies that have a "vision".
No you probably don't. You might have a plan, a goal or an ethos but with the exception of a small handful of companies- if you claim your's has a 'vision' then you're deluded or incurably pretentious.
I could just about live with 'mission' as at least that doesn't sound like you're claiming divine providence.
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.
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."
Don't get me wrong; I agree with your "good change" observation, and I wasn't saying the Twitter interface should have been frozen in time at 2006 (and I definitely wasn't saying there is no room for improvement, even now). I'm simply of the opinion that Twitter is rapidly losing sight of what their purpose is.
Twitter doesn't have a purpose, it serves a purpose.
We can all disagree about what function Twitter performs for individuals, or in the marketplace, or what have you. But it isn't like there's ever a destination for a company or medium or whatever it is that Twitter is.
It was only wildly successful until our leaders "sabotaged" it by forcing it to obey standard actuarial practices. (Unlike the rest of the govt, the USPS is now required to fully fund it's pension plans.)
Also, it's pretty hard not to be "wildly successful" when you get a legally enforced monopoly. Comcast is also "wildly successful", but we certainly don't want to expand that model.
Yes and no. It's a monopoly that can't charge what it takes to stay afloat. Raising prices or changing delivery schedules requires an act of Congress! No member of Congress wants to have to answer for that, so the price of sending a letter hundreds - if not thousands - of miles, to be hand-delivered remains under one-half of one dollar $USD. THAT IS INSANE.
It's been argued, deftly, that even with a decline in volume for mass mailers, raising the price from $0.49 to $1 would not only put the USPTO all the way in the black but enable them to meet obligations for years to come.
That's exactly what every profitable company does: pay their workers less than they otherwise could. The only alternative is to distribute all profit among employees. (And some people who believe that profiting from other people's work is immoral advocate just that.)
My understanding was that almost all of that is due to the insane benefits and pension requirements placed on the USPS in 2006. Happy to be corrected if I'm offbase.
The reason that was put into place, is that if they don't fund those pensions now, there will be no ability to do so in the future - their business is evaporating.
The business may be evaporating, but the service is going to continue. It turns out that getting documents and packages to any given citizen is really, really important for the function of governance.
In many ways, stripping the post office of their monopoly had the opposite of the intended effect, because it removed the pretenses that let people pretend that it was somehow magically different and special compared to other essential government services just because it sold stuff.
If they held off on paying those obligations until later, they'd be unable to pay them. It's that simple. The math would not have worked out. Reduce the size of their business by 1/3, increase the size of obligations substantially due to employees retiring and drawing against those pensions, and it becomes a very large tax payer funded pension plan.
The USPS has already become increasingly dependent on commercial spam mail to keep going.
The US doesn't require private corporations to offer a pension at all. If they do voluntarily, it's almost always a 401k. The USPS' pension funding forced on it by a "starve the beast" Congress is much different.
The US gov't sure as hell requires private corporations with pensions to make sure they are fully funded. The pension might be optional, but running an underfunded one is not.
"AFTER years of poor investment returns, the pension funds of the United States’ largest companies are further behind than they have ever been.
The companies in the Standard & Poor’s 500 collectively reported that at the end of their most recent fiscal years, their pension plans had obligations of $1.68 trillion and assets of just $1.32 trillion. The difference of $355 billion was the largest ever, S.& P. said in a report.
Of the 500 companies, 338 have defined-benefit pension plans, and only 18 are fully funded. Seven companies reported that their plans were underfunded by more than $10 billion, with the largest negative figure, $21.6 billion, reported by General Electric."
Private corporations are not held to the same standard as the USPS for pension funding.
As the article you linked says, they're underfunded because the investments didn't perform as well as expected.
If there's something else to it, by all means feel free to state precisely the difference between how these pension funds from the random article you googled operate, and the USPS's requirements. There might be, but the article you linked doesn't imply that.
Show me a private corporation that is legally required to fully pre-fund pensions 75 years in advance for every employee, including all potential future employees, and I'll eat my hat.
The USPS started operating at a loss because Republican lawmakers passed the Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act, signed into law by George W Bush, requiring the USPS to prefund retirement benefits.
If it was wildly successful, how did we end up with tons of private competitors with a large market share (FedEx, UPS, DHL, OnTrac, etc). The U.S. Is one of the only countries where the state run postal service isn't sufficient. In Switzerland, for example, there is only the Swiss Post. Most countries, to my knowledge, operate with just one major postal network.
> If it was wildly successful, how did we end up with tons of private competitors with a large market share (FedEx, UPS, DHL, OnTrac, etc).
Because the US Postal Service is viewed as a utility, and required to service every address in the continental US (as well as most of its territories). Fedex, UPS, and other private carriers are under no such obligation, and so can extract profits from the most profitable routes or services, leaving USPS with more less profitable services to provide (first class, bulk mail).
If you don't think the USPS provides a phenomenal service for the price they charge, you're insane. I can send an ounce of paper across a continent for $0.50-$1.09.
I read your comment as 'Given USPS can send a package over 4000km in the same country, let's compare that with international charges in Switzerland'¹. Is that correct? Because that would be a liiiittle bit misleading in my world and I'd like to compare Swiss international charges with a USPS delivery from New York to Reykjavik please.
① Apologies if that isn't the case. But 4000km just felt too close to the east coast to west coast distance.
That awkward moment when you realize DHL is a German company.
There's also a number of alternate services for the post in a number of other countries. FedEx is not a duplicate of the post - it's for sending small but high value things extremely fast. And between FedEx One Rate and FedEx Smart Post, it's pretty clear that they view USPS as a competitor to be respected.
> Which is wildly successful and doesn't cost us taxpayers a dime.
You have to be kidding! The USPS is a disaster and barely works. I'm about to cancel my prime membership because Amazon started using the USPS although Amazon have finally got the message at least for my account and rarely use them now. Look up Prime and USPS if you want to see pages and pages just how bad service is with the USPS.
I used to think people like you had to be lying, because my service with the USPS in the Minneapolis area growing up was absolutely stellar. The value on the dollar was by far the best, and the friendly counter agents would help you figure out how to ship something the way you want.
Then I moved to Chicago and understood why the USPS gets such a bad rap. Lines a mile long, counter agents that can be called uncaring at best, tons of misdelivered/undelivered mail, etc. It was like two entirely different services.
I'm since back in Minneapolis and the USPS here is just as reliable as UPS or Fedex. 9 out of 10 packages arrive on time, which is about average for all of them.
Huh. I live in the cities and have always been happy with USPS and am always baffled by other peoples' complaints about it. Interesting to know it's because our local service is outstanding.
SmartPost and SurePost? Yeah, if I see that I call Amazon and tell them to cancel the order because basically I will not get the package. They simply refuse to bring packages to my door, even though according to the regulations they have to. I've tried talking to the local post master, but he avoids me ('he's in a meeting', 'I'll have him call you', 'Yeah, don't wait because he'll be awhile'). What's funny is that Amazon now has a special Sunday delivery service through the USPS and somehow they get delivered, but any other day of the week they do not.
It's so bad, confusing and illogical sometimes I just laugh at the situation. But, it's only a situation that can happen in a government agency.
Which only survives by selling our addresses and delivering 100s of billions of pieces of spam to our mailbox. The legitimate mail for which i ostensibly exists is drying up quickly.
It's a business now. You can't go back and reinvent it now, which is clear from my comment above. But that wasn't always so. In 2006 it wasn't so. I remember those early days when only nerds were using Twitter. Now, you can't sustain a business that way, I know that. But Twitter was always supposed to be minimalist and web-enabled SMS. It's a shame, IMO, that because of "monetization" they have to make all these moves to make it more complicated and harder to surface useful information and conversations. Promoted tweets that are intrusive. Cards. Etc. I think there was a time when Twitter could have been "rolled in" to the public Internet in a way that would be more open and free of this grasping for a profit strategy. That time has passed, and it's sad.
> I think there was a time when Twitter could have been "rolled in" to the public Internet in a way that would be more open and free of this grasping for a profit strategy.
Hey, I remember such a time. I remember when Twitter was the "in" thing, and "everyone" (read: only techies in the Bay area) was using it. I remember how lots of conventions that are baked into the system today (@ notation for user references, "RT:" for retweeting, etc) were organically generated community standards.
All of that said, Twitter as a system had major hurdles to overcome to become a utility in the way that you want. But assuming that they published a standard, and created some sort of federated system (e.g. XMPP) how would this be anything but a money-sink? Would Twitter still be in use today? Would Facebook have copied most of what the public wants out of Twitter, and that would be it? How expensive would it be for a major provided of "Twitter Protocol Service" to maintain an SMS gateway? Would anyone actually pay for this service? What about inter-node security? Would we see something akin to the joke that is TLS between SMTP servers?
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.
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.
Spend any real significant time with split duties. Most of his investors would say "We didn't put $x in this with the understanding that you were going to be a 50% CEO/leader"
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.
[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.
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.
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.
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"
I agree completely. That's why I consider a high class way for him to exit. I was going to make a comment about Apothekar's behavior pre-empting him from having a future business career but actually it doesn't seem to harm him.
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.
>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.
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"
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.
My hunch is that Jack won't/can't stick around for three reasons :
a) He has another company to save which is in itself a
full time job, given how hot the payments space is.
b) If Twitter should ultimately (and rather ingloriously)
be sold to say a Alibaba or Facebook or (longshots)
Microsoft or Google, Jack wouldn't want to be the guy who
'trimmed the fat' and right-sized it for a sale. It wouldn't
be good for his personal brand.
c) Twitter hasn't yet found an identity - even with
300 MM users (even Costolo hasn't contested this as
recently as May, in an interview [1]). Jack can only
breathe life into it, if he makes one hell of a pivot away
from the way Twitter is perceived by the masses - way
too confusing to use for most [2] and lacking an identity
(People still ask of Twitter what they don't of Facebook -
what Twitter will be when it has finally grown up)[3]
Bonus reason : Twitter has gone through 5 product heads
in the five years while Costolo was at the helm. A part
of me wants to believe that it is not all the fault of
Costolo and that Twitter needs a fundamental rethink.
I doubt Dorsey is willing to do it. I just don't think
he can, unless he gives up his gig at Square.
[1] [3] Twitter CEO Dick Costolo Q&A: What to Do When People Say ‘You Suck’
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.
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.
Employees often have less business acumen then an old lady selling on the open market.
I find it amusing that people who can code think they can do anything and everything. Despite what you like to to believe, those MBAs do have value. Lots of it.
I agree with your first and second sentence 100%. Especially the 2nd sentence.
But in my experience (not what I believe) very very few MBAs have value. The few I have seen have been the ones who have done executive MBAs (mainly people with a lot of experience going to get some theory knowledge) and they apply very little and very specific knowledge from their MBA.
My favorite experience with 'fresh' MBA students (still in university, no real work experience) was when I sat on a panel of local expat business people (in the Czech republic) doing a Q and A for MBA students from the US somewhere. They came off a day of exploring Prague, and had sat through some chamber of commerce and Ministry of Trade and Industry presentations so our panel was up to talk about our real world experiences building businesses out here. We all gave a short speech about what we've done and lessons learned out here-specifically what is great about business out here but also what pitfalls to look out for- then opened up for questions from the students.
The first question came from a student who I think was trying to emulate a hard-nosed, no nonsense businessman, who quite aggressively asked "Hold on, hold on hold on! So, can you just tell me whether I should bring my business here or not? The first presentations are telling me that everything is wonderful out here, now you lot tell me it's not so easy. So which is it then?!?"
I (admittedly a little bit annoyed, as I was doing the panel for free, I just wanted to help some future business people out) said to her: "Your job as a business owner is to gather data, evaluate it and make what you think is a sound decision based on it. You saw basically 2 sets of presentations today, one from people who are selling the Czech Republic, and one from foreigners who have actually built businesses here. So, you need to evaluate both sides of the coin, and come up with your own decision. If you can't do that you may well end up buying a lot of bridges and investing blindly in things that can't fail."
That gathered a few laughs, and even the woman who asked came up to me afterwards and asked me a few more questions (but still in a bullish type of way). But the local Chamber of commerce and the ministry never invited me again to be a panel member.
That was a round about way of trying to say that newly minted MBAs, their heads full of case studies, tends to see the business world in shades of black and white. That theories always work, that the business would be successful if you only did this. But the real world tends to be a little more murky, and until those MBAs gain a little more experience and are granted a little wisdom, they offer very little more value than an interesting tweet.
I generally agree with what you have said, except on the number of MBA programs which offer value. I don't think they are so rare, but people shouldn't expect that a random state college can offer the world, either. Just be careful when you chose, be proactive, research the programs, the professors, the associates, the alumni and make that (very important) decision in your life. Often times you need to be guided, so seek guidance if your family is unable to offer help in such decisions.
Education is hard and needs to be worked hard to get your money's worth out of it.
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.
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.
It's not literally every thought; ideally it's only the best/most interesting ones.
I rather enjoy seeing what's on the mind of the smartest people in the world (and even moreso what they're reading), and that's what I try to structure my Twitter feed for.
I try to tweet things that are at least somewhat insightful, but maybe I really suck at it. The great thing about Twitter is that if people don't think I'm interesting they can unfollow me. I really love that. Being on Twitter is like being in a room with whomever you would like to at any given time.
Well its usually unappealing, doesn't mean always. Look at it this way - would you tell the world to stop writing so many books unless they knew the book they were writing was a bonafide masterpiece?
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.
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.
Of course, but I think the psychological benefits to the imposed scarcity are enormous.
I think there are ways to allow tweetstorms without lifting the limit, and I love the concept of things like oneshot that allow you to reference something without making it part of your tweet, but still imposing the limit. My guess would be Twitter builds in some features like that.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
I'd always figured (based on offhand comments by Ev and his investors at the time) that it was because Ev had difficulty taking a hard-line on people for performance issues. The quote I'm thinking of was something like "Evan always wanted his friends to share in his success", and it was in the context of hiring friends or promoting internal employees into larger roles rather than looking outside the company. My read on that is that he placed a very high premium on loyalty, rewarding people who had helped out Twitter when it was very young, while the board wanted to capitalize on its hotness to bring in big external talent that was available then.
This would also be consistent with the employees feeling a significant amount of loyalty toward Ev, and several wanting to quit when he was ousted.
I don't know enough about business, but I feel rewarding people is never a bad idea, as long as the talent fits. That being said someone outside can be a fresh eye, but again, doesn't mean they won't become issue. I actually find Google's Eric Schmidt being a really successful outsider (but he joined so early), or Yahoo's CEO being the next prime example in this external talent debate. I mean why work for a company if you won't be prompted to take on the next important role? How many years do you want to stuck at being a director, rather than a VP, or a SVP?
Because Ev's a great product guy but not such a great manager. Speaking of which, Jack's also better at coding / product than managing himself. (i worked at the company before both 'founders' jack and ev joined as employees.)
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
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).
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.
"Twitter users create the favorite and just like they own their tweets they should own the result of their action. If you favorite something we argue that you should be able to decide what you want to do with the data you create. If you want to use it to give Flattr donations to other Twitter users you should be the one to make that decision."
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."
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.)
> 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.
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.
"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.."
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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?!!
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.
[0] (warning: auto-play video on page) http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/twitter-ceo-dick-costolo-laughs-off...