Twitter Looks To The Future
What may or may not be a direct reaction to Twit-Out, Twitter has been making some great strides today in their communication with the Twitter community in the past 12 hours. Developer Alex Payne wrote a great article concerning the scalability and architecture of Twitter on their official dev blog, while the the service’s official @Twitter page posted a message (their first since February, which happened to be a series of “<3″ symbols sent to Tweeters) offering users to follow their page for “semi-frequent” updates.
It’s great that between their consumption of user-bought pizza and beer (next will surely be a contribution of assorted nuts, maybe even a few leather chairs or stools) that the people over at Twitter HQ are making an effort to communicate with us, but will it last? Making one day of effort is all well and good, and clearly a step-forward to customer satisfaction, but until I see consistency, something Twitter as a whole has failed in proving to just about everyone, I remain skeptical.
Also, if you haven’t heard, Twitter has raised $15 million of additional funds from backer USV and an unidentified lead investor. So no more excuses! This amount quadruples the $5 million of funding they were working with before. We all hope to see this money well spent. At least we know you don’t need to use it for groceries, with the user outpouring of free food.
It’s been made clear by both their performance and their own comments that the issue here is scaling. Twitter was built on a foundation that essentially wasn’t meant to be used how it’s being used. In a way, it seems like Twitter was never taken very seriously by the creators until users started making their way over and proving that their idea had caught on.
So I’m hoping a nice sum of this money goes into the redevelopment of the Twitter platform which has been causing so many issues for their users. Though it is safe to say that Twitter went from looking at the here and now, to worrying about the future almost overnight.
In added news, Twitter co-founder and CPO Evan Williams made a comment on his page which could be taken in a variety ways. How am I taking it? I’m going to say he isn’t a fan of Twit-Out, though of course it could be totally unrelated. Whatever it is that got their asses moving, I’m in full support of it.
4 Responses to “Twitter Looks To The Future”
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With all respect, Andrew, it’s just as easy to read Twit-Out as a jab at Twitter.
I am glad that they’re pursuing more venues of communication and being more transparent, but I really do think that the appropriate approach here is to back off, drop the subject, and see what Twitter is actually doing. Nobody - least of all you - benefits from continuing to harangue them.
Understood. Though I can’t help but be skeptical of the changes. I’m glad they are happening, I’m just skeptical whether they will actually continue. That’s something only time will tell.
I don’t blame you. From your perspective, Twitter has an awful track record and you need a reason to trust them to keep up the recent (last-48-hours) communication improvements. I’m just saying, from their perspective, they’re probably saying “dammit, Scoble and Arrington, now we have to hire a PR guy!”.
By the way, this is probably just me being dumb, but I can’t figure out how to attach an icon to my comments! Help?
The “mob” comment may concern unrelated accusations that Twitter does not enforce its stated terms of service when users are being harassed. Unfortunately, I can’t remember the name of the harassee in question.