
Jack Dorsey Is Losing Control of Twitter - miraj
https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2016-twitter-dorsey-strategy/
======
Animats
Well, one would hope so.  Fortunately, Twitter doesn't have one of those
"president for life" two-class stock setups like Google and Facebook.  The
stockholders can fire Dorsey when necessary. 

The post-growth phase of a social network doesn't have to mean its collapse. 
Look at IAC, InterActive Corp (iac.com, ticker IAC).  They run a lot of sites -
Vimeo, Ask, About, Investopedia, Tinder, OKCupid, etc. -  have a market cap of
about $5 billion, and keep plugging along.  They were started by Barry Diller,
the creator of the Home Shopping Channel, something else that keeps plugging
along.  Diller is still CEO.  IAC is boring but useful. 

Twitter doesn't have to "exit"; they're already publicly held.  They just have
to trim down to a profitable and stable level, and accept that they're post-
growth. 

~~~
sytelus
Twitter has huge room for growth, at least 10X from where it is.  I just don't
think they have done enough to figure out what is preventing so many other
people to become its frequent user.  In my own experience, I find Twitter's
newsfeed algorithm pretty bad and completely lacking stickiness.  I can easily
find stories that would have kept my attention which should have ranked much
above.  The presentation of content is fairly complex (too many # and @ to
parse).  Ranking of re-tweets is especially bad.  Lot of essential tools are
still missing, for example, I can't even search my own tweets effectively.  Lot
of essential integration is left to 3rd parties (for example, no official
Chrome plugin).  If you think about it, we communicate a lot like Twitter by
using medium of text messages.  However text messages lack lot of desirable
features (non searchable, history gets purged, hard to create one-off groups
etc).  Twitter, if done right, can replace text messages and even emails at
large extent in addition to social aspects. 

I've recently started using Twitter more to stay in touch with deep learning
community and I can absolutely see why less tech-savvy non-fan user would turn
away after few attempts.  I can also see if they can turn this around and grow
10X in terms of DAW/MAU with good product planning. 

~~~
wbillingsley
It's dying because they didn't manage the tweet-storm dynamic.  Journalists
love it -- it means they don't need to leave the office and find actual news
stories to report -- but to the ordinary public it's a platform for expression
that might as well have "DANGER: LANDMINES" signs posted all around it. 

Come and hear angry people ranting at the internet! 

Rants and tweet-storms get lots of views, lots of clicks.  But they are not
necessarily what most people want to see.  Most people are not on Twitter most
of the time.  And for most people, their primary exposure to Twitter is "oh
look, there's yet another news story about a "public backlash", with a
selection of angry tweets embedded in the article". 

~~~
marssaxman
This is certainly a big turn-off for me.  Why should I care about a platform
apparently tailored for self-promoting celebrity gossip and low-content, high-
drama flamewars? 

Beyond that, I've never been able to make any sense out of their threading
system; the only way I can figure out what is happening is if someone inside
the mess writes an article explaining it and quoting the relevant comments. 
The actual feeds all seem to be incomprehensible mishmashes of quotes and
references to people who aren't present. ( I assume there's a view which makes
it all hang together if you have an account and actually log in rather than
simply browsing, but the fact that I can't really see what's inside the box
means I have no motivation to get involved.) 

Furthermore, getting too comfortable with a communications medium solely owned
and controlled by a single company seems like a recipe for long-term
disappointment. 

------
gdulli
> The company has been rolling out products faster than ever, she noted, and
> has boosted engagement through enhancements to the timeline, such as showing
> people the most relevant tweets first. 

The endeavor that drove me, a passionate user for several years, off the site
for good.  It's sad that they watered themselves down to become a second-place
Facebook. 

Maybe it's not even their fault, and it's just a side effect of being a public
company and being measured by growth instead of by the uniqueness and quality
of the product.  It's still sad. 

When the dust settles, there will be lesson in the danger of engagement-metric
based product design.  Twitter has a "while you were away" feature that shows
you their idea of the tweets they'd like you to see first. ( Even if you return
to the site 5 minutes after your last session.) ( This is different from the
non-chronological timeline, and doesn't get turned off when you disable that.) 

When you dismiss it, it asks you if you'd like to see less of that.  It's
completely ambiguous and unexplained whether they're asking whether you
disliked those specific tweets or the non-chronological aspect of the
timeline.  A lot of users have been vocal about hating the feature.  By
dismissing it are they actually burying certain friends down further on their
timeline?  Who knows?  Some people are guessing correctly what the meaning is,
but others aren't.  They're feeding a certain amount of garbage input into
their algorithms. 

~~~
go_go_
That feature drove me, a technologist and casual social media user, to use
twitter regularly for the first time. 

I simply don't have the time or the interest to keep up with a long stream of
tweets.  It allows me to catch some highlights, and then move on to the never
ending live stream. 

~~~
gdulli
I don't doubt that there are people who are willing to let Twitter decide for
them what content is worthwhile, just that it's sad that that's what the
platform is now.  A bland community for casual users promoting the same viral
content you can get anywhere, rather than a unique community for power users. 
Those people are only going to see what Twitter decides what is (or what
should be) popular which creates a watered-down experience at best, a
disturbing and manipulative one at worst. 

~~~
go_go_
> a unique community for power users. 

This hasn't been twitter's objective for a long time now.  The idea that
twitter caters or cares about power users (in my opinion) was put to rest when
they decided to severely limit apis and third party tooling years ago. 

As a company, they want to be as big as possible which means power users are
not their target audience. 

~~~
wutbrodo
This argument works in general, and as much as it annoyed me as a user, I
accepted for Google and Facebook changes in the past. 

The problem with Applying it to Twitter is that they have never been as big or
universal as people assume they are.  The median number of tweets from an
account is one, active in-stream users lagged freaking Google+ for years, etc. 
Their shoddy, unintuitive product is practically designed to be power-user
heavy, and the network has been so since the beginning.  Having a user base
thick with big influencers like journalists, celebs, and politicians is a
blessing, but Twitter couldn't understand that and blindly followed Facebook's
playbook, despite being a hugely different company. 

------
nostrademons
Wow.  They really are Yahoo.  Founders take a back-seat in the midst of hyper-
growth.  Outside management team sourced from other industries (CFO of the NFL,
for a tech company?).  Product pivot into believing they're a media company. 
Eclipsed by newer technologies.  Founder CEO returns amidst flat stock
performance and boardroom turmoil.  Exploring a sale to other big companies,
who can't afford it because the market cap is too inflated.  Talk of needing a
turnaround CEO. 

Maybe they should hire Marissa Mayer.  I hear she'll be looking for a job in
the near future, and she's got plenty of relevant experience. 

~~~
gerby
Marissa Mayer is one of those women who believes their shit is rock solid,
when in fact it's very runny which can be compared to the runniness of Yahoos
market cap since she became CEO.  She is also an elitist who believes you need
to have a college degree in order to get things done that she needs done.  Now,
Yahoo is virtually worthless.  Good job Marissa. 

~~~
nostrademons
I actually don't get much of the Marissa-hate around here.  I've worked with
her - she was the executive sponsor of a couple projects I worked on when I
first got to Google.  She has her flaws, but in general she's both smart and
very hardworking.  CEO of Yahoo is a tough job for anyone - as evidenced by the
5 (!)  CEOs in the 5 years before her - but the real mistakes made in Yahoo's
history were made in the late 90s and early 2000s. 

It's pretty likely Twitter will follow the same path, but the real mistakes
made in Twitter's lifetime were made between 2010-2016. 

------
samfisher83
Maybe this is what Twitter is.  It Generates a couple billion in revenue. 
Instead of trying to grow how about shrinking the costs.  If a company can
consistently generate a billion dollar in cash flow that is pretty good.  They
don't need to have 4000 employees.  Maybe they need to go down to 2000,1000 or
500.  Maybe you won't be able to get the best talent, but I am sure you can
find some people to run it. 

~~~
strictnein
That's why someone like Google just seems like a good fit for Twitter. 
Existing ad sales mechanism and super strong infrastructure seems like it
would offer up a lot of opportunities to trim down. 

~~~
sangnoir
> That's why someone like Google just seems like a good fit for Twitter

Someone else in a different thread mentioned that Twitter isn't exactly in
great books with various world governments who are friendly, or at least
neutral with Google currently.  Is Twitter's revenue worth the additional risk
of regulatory scrutiny/antagonism to Google? 

------
Zikes
Twitter keeps ignoring what its users want, and pushing ridiculous features
nobody asked for. 

Keep the timeline chronological!  Instead of injecting 12 hour old tweets into
my timeline randomly, give me a tab of popular tweets by people I follow. 

Give me more options to discover interesting discussions.  Let me subscribe to
or follow hashtags. 

Give me more options for filtering out the noise.  Let me provide hashtags or
keywords I don't care about. 

Back before Twitter made the decision to transition from a service to a
platform, there were Twitter apps and clients that provided all kinds of great
ways to interact with Twitter.  But Twitter shut them down, and never bothered
to integrate the things that made them great into the official Twitter
platform or apps. 

Twitter's greatest potential is as a firehose of live data.  Give users the
tools to use and personalize that data and Twitter will become an
indispensable part of people's daily lives. 

~~~
cgag
I found a tweet from 2015 via google and wanted to see the surrounding
discussion.  I couldn't find a way, so I tried just holding page down on the
feed, trying to infinitely scroll my way to it.  After around 5 minutes it
stopped loading tweets. 

Oh well. 

edit: I meant this to be a reply to the "failure to handle the basics" post. 

~~~
Zikes
There's no way to refresh a tweet in the Android app to load new replies,
either.  Even if I leave that tweet and come back to it, it often only pulls up
locally cached replies. 

And the replies are often neither chronological nor threaded in any meaningful
way.  I know the 140 character limit strongly discourages meaningful
discussion, but I'm starting to think they believe that every single tweet
should stand alone.  That replies, likes, and retweets are nothing more than a
metric to judge the quality or interestingness of an individual tweet. 

------
david927
In my opinion this isn't about Dorsey but about Twitter. 

In 1984, Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus unveiled a unicorn.  Later
investigation revealed it to be a goat with its horns fused together. 

~~~
thieving_magpie
[https://s-media-cache-
ak0.pinimg.com/564x/10/2f/e1/102fe1905...](https://s-media-cache-
ak0.pinimg.com/564x/10/2f/e1/102fe1905b27fbc962a9a6f9e867c89f.jpg)

That's hilarious. 

~~~
agumonkey
Do not click [http://www.villagevoice.com/news/heres-the-hideous-goat-
crea...](http://www.villagevoice.com/news/heres-the-hideous-goat-creature-
ringling-bros-claimed-was-a-unicorn-in-1985-6667020)

------
superlad
This is _the reason_ Jack Dorsey's return was doomed to failure.  He was half-
time and didn't take control like a general commanding troops must. 

He was the Executive Officer but he was not a Chief Executive Officer. 

For someone in this position, the natural human incentive is to build
consensus and avoid ruffling feathers.  An employee revolt could have gotten
him fired.  He had to worry what people thought. 

Steve Job's return to Apple was dominating.  He absolutely worked more than
anyone else and ran circles around anyone trying to get in his way.  And he
fired people and replaced the board with friends.  Things people would have
faulted him for had he not had time to see his plans through. 

But..even if he had gone full-time and led a successful coup, he probably
would have still failed.  Twitter was truly an accident and so no one really
knows what it is. 

------
27182818284
There is only a finite amount of energy a person has and a finite amount of
hours awake, you know?  I can't imagine trying to re-steer Twitter while also
being an effective CEO at a place like Square. 

~~~
patwalls
Elon Musk. 

/s

~~~
rdl
Elon has some _awesome_ lieutenants; Shotwell at SpaceX being the best
example, who is essentially Tim Cook or Sheryl Sandberg level.  That clearly
has never existed at Twitter (does/did exist at Square when Keith Rabois was
there; not sure about Square now but probably.) 

~~~
FussyZeus
Right but Elon _put them there_.  Part of being a leader is recognizing when
you have too much shit to do and finding people you trust, are qualified and
delegating tasks to them. 

~~~
rdl
Absolutely.  If we were to start cataloguing the ways Jack Dorsey is not Elon
Musk we'd be here for a long time. 

------
erdevs
Turnarounds are super hard.  A year isn't long enough and Dorsey would have
been wise to both set expectations clearly that this is a 3+ year trek as well
as lock in some protective provisions around that timeline. 

Given the actual state of affairs though, the Board has a clear fiduciary duty
to consider all options. 

Since Dorsey didn't give himself enough time to actually effect a true
fundamental product/vision turnaround, he would've been far wiser to simply
focus on driving revenue as a first step.  Then circle back to product later. 

It seems the strategy here was either unclear or unrealistic. 

------
baccheion
On another note, I don't know why the Bay Area is so obsessed with cheesy.  I
mean, they do the most cliche, cheesy, predictable things in this regard, then
try to poorly hype it as "profound and visionary thinking."  They keep trying
to recreate the magic that happened with Steve Jobs in 1997, for example.  And
they keep failing. 

They probably aren't even really trying to recreate the magic, just trying to
associate themselves with it and use that to take credit for what happened in
that case.  This is the kind of twisted backward stupid logic that was
prevalent in the area while I was there (2008 - 2011).  It was just more BS
every time. 

I mean, if you are trying to recreate the magic or emulate what's been done in
the past, then do that, rather than do the dumbest things, then try to poorly
and illogically spin it (in the most tired, played out, and "has never been
successful" way) to look like something else. 

Add to that the overrepresented judger (MBTI) population, and you have a
recipe for the shht of everything past constantly repeating in the worst way,
as arrogant egotistical self-centered know-nothing idiots use it to try to
credit themselves with being something other than the dumbest shht. 

~~~
bravo22
For the same reason Hollywood promotes "Glamour", "Celebrities" and fawns over
them on the red carpet.  Gotta feed the machine with the bright-eyed and the
impressionable. 

------
laic_sir
TWTR has such much potential, there is not single day goes by that I won't
hear Twitter's name been mentioned in some news or on TV.  With Donald Trump as
your Chief Marketing Officer for free, working day and night diligently, how
could you not grow your user number? 

The only reason you are not growing user number is you have an inferior user
experience comparing with Facebook/Snapchat.  That is something really easy to
fix by just copying what other guys are doing better, but Dorsey did nothing. 
He lost interest long ago.  TWTR does not need to sell, just need someone who
is passionate, maybe a good engineer who knows the product. 

------
ihsw
I would love to have more privacy-focused features and more distance from the
whole "everything's public" mantra -- following a user without anyone else
knowing, following a user for only a specific hashtag, private-only hashtags. 

The whole "everything's public or everything's private" shtick just doesn't
work for me. 

~~~
harryh
You can create a private list and add people to that instead of following them
publicly.  The UX isn't the best, but it works. 

~~~
danielweber
A bad UX for privacy-critical features is worse than nothing.  I don't want to
be privately talking with someone and worry that it might be public to the
world because I checked something wrong. 

~~~
harryh
Oh ya, I hear you.  All kinds of problems!  Was just trying to be helpful for
ihsw if they wanted to muddle through. 

------
epalm
Serious question, I'm genuinely not trolling here.  How can Twitter (or any
other social site) be expected to maintain a high rate of new users, forever? 
After the first few hundred million users, wouldn't one expect new
registrations to slow down a bit? 

~~~
pharrlax
There just aren't enough eggs shouting into the void at random celebrities. 

------
sigmar
Why are all the photos shaded blue?  I thought I had highlighted it by
accident. 

~~~
throwaway40483
This is a reference to the Twitter blue bird logo.  But yeah, it also caught me
by surprise at first. 

------
puppetmaster3
Here is the legacy of Jack and Twitter, ex 1: Dilbert creator:

[http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-10-03/dilbert-creator-
sco...](http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-10-03/dilbert-creator-scott-adams-
shadowbanned-twitter-after-trump-support)

How much traffic is that? 

Ex: 2 Milo.  Etc.  So... what business is he in? 

------
h4nkoslo
It's fair to say you've lost control, when the Saudi royal family owns more of
the company than you do. 

------
baccheion
Twitter needs to do the following:

\- Replace their mediocre management team (3.2 rating on Glassdoor, versus a
threshold of 4.0 or a "damn, management's good" of 4.2) with people that
actually know what they're doing

\- Replace their mediocre management team (3.2 rating on Glassdoor, versus a
threshold of 4.0 or a "damn, management's good" of 4.2) with people that
actually know what they're doing

\- Replace their mediocre management team (3.2 rating on Glassdoor, versus a
threshold of 4.0 or a "damn, management's good" of 4.2) with people that
actually know what they're doing

\- Replace their mediocre management team (3.2 rating on Glassdoor, versus a
threshold of 4.0 or a "damn, management's good" of 4.2) with people that
actually know what they're doing

\- Replace their mediocre management team (3.2 rating on Glassdoor, versus a
threshold of 4.0 or a "damn, management's good" of 4.2) with people that
actually know what they're doing

\- Reduce the number of employees to 1,555

\- Hire an additional 259-585 quality people (engineers and designers, mainly)
to fix user experience and engineering issues

\- Start paying attention to the user base and deliver what's actually needed

\- Innovate and push things forward, rather than settling into stagnation and
decline

There's really not much to it.  Twitter is only having problems because they
keep messing up, stagnating, or doing the dumbest things. 

~~~
tarancato
What the hell is with those numbers?  Is it a joke I don't get? 

~~~
baccheion
What numbers? 

~~~
tarancato
1,555 employees, for example, why that and not 1,500

~~~
baccheion
It's based on some arbitrary thing I did some time ago to determine how large
a company should be (6-8 reports per manager and N layers of management; 1
layer = 1 + 6 + 6 * 6 = 43, 2 layers = 1 + 6 + 6 * 6 + 6 * 6 * 6 = 259, 3
layers = 1 + 6 + 6 * 6 + 6 * 6 * 6 + 6 * 6 * 6 * 6 = 1555, 4 layers = 9331,
etc). 

As Twitter seems to be twice as large as it needs to be (3898 vs. 1949) and as
it's obvious more people will need to be hired after any cuts, I arbitrarily
chose 1555 and 259/585 (same number of layers, but 8 reports, rather than 6)
as the numbers since they add up to about 2000. 

~~~
praneshp
Was the arbitrary thing you did somewhat scientific (ie,from reading papers,
etc about ideal company size)? 

Asking just out of curiosity, I don't think your comment is going to be too
popular.  I care about this a little bit because of recent cuts I saw at Yahoo. 

~~~
baccheion
Twitter being twice as large as it needs to be isn't arbitrary.  That's easily
seen from all information available.  It may not be necessary to have a round
of layoffs, but it's at least clear that they've hired too many people.  Rather
than going the route of layoffs, they could stop hiring more people, clear out
the idiot management team that's driving them into the ground, then wait until
they've caught up before hiring again. 

The number of employees being set to 1555 is what's arbitrary.  The actual
employee counts (1, 7, 43, 259, 1555, 9331, etc) aren't as arbitrary, as
that's what results when one assumes 6-8 reports per manager, then calculates
backward to determine the overall company size per added layer of management. 
That is, if you want 2 layers of management, and you want each manager to have
8 reports, then you'll have an overall size of (1 CEO + 8 executives + 8 * 8
managers + 8 * 8 * 8 individual contributors) 585. 

The idea of having no more than 6-8 reports per manager is somewhat based on
science (number of things one can hold in short-term memory lining up with the
number of people one can effectively manage at a time), but meh. 

Also, the less management layers that exist, the better.  And as each manager
is really only able to handle 6-8 people, once you increase employee counts
past a certain amount, another layer of management becomes necessary.  This
could become more relaxed with better software and increased efficiency (a
manager could have 21 reports, for example, if they don't have to
heavily/directly manage them all), but I kept going with the 6-8 number, as it
gave me a good sense of things. 

Another (arbitrary?)  reason those numbers seemed good to me was from assessing
insertion sort vs. quicksort.  That is, if you compare the two, then they are
equal when there are 9 items, but insertion sort is a better choice when
there's less than 9 items.  It was somewhat random, but as I noticed insertion
sort is how the mind naturally sorts (when it learns to be more efficient), it
cast another vote for using 6-8.  When there's more than 8 or 9 things in mind,
one's natural tendency is to then try to break things up into chunks (like
quicksort), then run the equivalent of insertion sort on each chunk, then
merge everything back together. 

~~~
praneshp
Thanks for replying!  Good analogy! 

------
mucker
Twitter where free speech isn't.  There will be replacements and Twitter knows
it. 

~~~
Mao_Zedang
It would be interesting to see how much twitters war against feelings and
words is effecting their bottom line. 

~~~
mucker
Indeed it would.  It seems that after every purge they've fallen a bit farther. 
It seems very odd, on a platform dedicated to short witted public screeds,
that they would get offended by...short witted screeds.  Oh well. 

------
norea-armozel
The biggest problem I think is that they constantly add features that don't
improve the core functionality.  For example, Moments really don't help with
hashtag filtering, conversation searching, and the like.  All they need to do
is make it easier to filter conversations, basically.  It's not that hard to
see why that would get more people on board since they could make sense of
their time line.  But it seems Dorsey and company would rather just pile on
stuff that's not related to that.  I don't get their motivation for this.  Can
someone can explain it? 

------
mtgx
This along with the recent bidding could explain why Twitter is "suddenly" not
censoring anti-Hillary/pro-Trump trending topics anymore.  They didn't want
anymore negative press about it when the negotiations started. 

~~~
venomsnake
With the internet split halfway in the current culture war you cannot make
money from only half of the audience. 

~~~
Mao_Zedang
That isnt stopping them from trying. 

------
yeukhon
Maybe he needs to stop managing both Square and Twitter at the same time. 

------
nashashmi
Twitter and Snapchat need to merge.  But their stock prices are hyperinflated. 

The businesses are very similar.  The products are similar.  The trends are
similar.  Even the demographics are similar.  It is a shame that Twitter can't
be more, when it totally needs to be more.  And snapchat can do so much better
too. 

But the problem might be they are tripping over the problems in front of them,
not pursuing solutions to problems that lie ahead. 

------
hrxn
The sooner Twitter dies the better...

------
perseusprime11
“Jack is a good entrepreneur,” Slingerlend said. “ But Twitter needs a
turnaround CEO, and that’s a completely different job.” 

I am not sure if I agree with the above conclusion that Twitter needs a
turnaround CEO.  I think Twitter needs to fully execute the live streaming
strategy and see where they go from there and Jack needs to become a full time
CEO and handoff Square to somebody else.  Bring Mark Zuckerburg on to the board
so they start learning how to execute on social.  These are some small changes
they can make to win back investors and win back some credibility. 

------
rrggrr
The USGOV spends roughly $90 billion a year hoping to influence or read the
policy intentions of other states and non-state actors.  Having shattered the
wall between public and private institutions with its $11 billion dollar
bailout of General Motors, why not partner with Blackstone Group and take
Twitter private?  The company's value in advancing US interests is immense and
that value will die a swift death in Disney's hands. 

~~~
jdavis703
Doesn't Disney also export American values, similar to say CNN's contribution
to the "soft power" mantra? 

------
ryanmarsh
I hope you're all happy when the product gets fingerbanged to death by legions
of mediocre corporate managers at whichever soulless quarterly-earnings
addicted too-lobbied-to-fail corporate institution acquires them, just so the
financiers can get their fucking Twitter check. 

If Twitter didn't change a fucking thing for the rest of my life I'd still use
it and love it.  Forever. 

~~~
brandnewlow
It loses money and stopped growing a long time ago.  The product you love is
unsustainable unfortunately. 

~~~
wyclif
It's only unsustainable because they refuse to cut back and do what the top
comment on this page talks about: run Twitter like a post-growth company. 
There's nothing wrong with the product that cannot be fixed.  The problem is
that investors are demanding unrealistic growth and dividends. 

------
0003
Noto is just dominating hacker news lately. 

------
yuhong
As a side note, I have been thinking of Yishan-style CEOs for a while now,
with board of directors tweeting often too.  Twitter itself would probably be a
good candidate for such a public company. 

~~~
dilemma
>I have been thinking of Yishan-style CEOs for a while now, with board of
directors tweeting often too. 

What does this mean? 

~~~
yuhong
I am thinking of Yishan Wong, formerly of Reddit. 

------
perseusprime11
It does speak volumes of Twitter that even Google and Facebook want to keep
distance.  Is it because there is nothing to see here?  no product that works
meaningfully? 

------
ry4n413
ouch

------
FT_intern
Slightly off topic, does anyone know if the portrayal of Jack Dorsey in
Hatching Twitter is accurate? 

~~~
wiremine
I'm something like twitter user 1019, and joined on day 2 or 3 after it was
launch.  Before twitter was Odeo, a podcasting company.  Their blog post
announcing twitter back in the day went something like this:

1\. Odeo isn't doing well.  2\. We broke into small teams to brainstorm ideas. 
3\. Jack, one of our devs, had this idea for SMS messaging.  4\. Oh, and it
also had a web interface.  5\. It was quick to build, so here you go (link to
twitter).  6\. Tell us what you think. 

It was, IMHO, incredibly boring at that point, and I didn't use it again for
years. 

That's my personal recollection of how it was announced.  I think history was
rewritten a few times maybe? 

Edit: Oops, it was NOT doing well.  Big difference, sorry. 

~~~
_kyran
Slightly off topic again, but what was Odeo like? 

I see it referenced everywhere, but what exactly where they trying to do, and
what worked/didn't work? 

~~~
jonknee
> I see it referenced everywhere, but what exactly where they trying to do,
> and what worked/didn't work? 

It was discovery for podcasts and was destroyed when iTunes included podcasts. 

~~~
uxp100
They also had Odeo messages, which was a replacement for the Seattle free
Voice Mail numbers that Podcasts often used for audio feedback.  For those who
had a mic, but didn't want to fiddle with recording software and encoding and
emailing an mp3. 

It was an awful flash app that rarely worked.  Mostly a good way to freeze your
browser. 

------
kenko
But at least he's still got some sweet Rick Owens jackets. 

------
jordache
i don't use twitter because i have no idea what my user/pass is.  They should
just allow authentication via FB

