The latest from TechCrunch
- Flashback: Two Years Ago, Twitter Killed A Feature — The One They Just Added Back
- Netflix For Pandas
- (Founder Stories) Quora's Charlie Cheever On Building A Disruptive Knowledge Platform
| Flashback: Two Years Ago, Twitter Killed A Feature — The One They Just Added Back | Top |
| This past Thursday, Twitter rolled out a new small feature that garnered quite a bit of positive buzz. Essentially, they now allow you to see what other users see when they look at Twitter. In other words, if you click on the “Following” area in my profile, you can see the main tweet stream that I see with all the (public) tweets from people I follow. Very cool. But it’s actually not new at all. In fact, Twitter had this feature in place two years ago. We mentioned this in passing in the post, but then I was directed to the blog post explaining why they removed it in June of 2009. It’s pretty interesting. From the post on June 4, 2009 on their Twitter Status blog: Recently we made a change to remove the With Friends tab from user profiles. We did this after finding out that this tab was both a relatively rarely accessed as well as computationally expensive page for us to serve. Yep. The feature was “relatively rarely accessed” by Twitter’s own standards. And it was eating up precious cycles on their taxed servers at the time. So why bring it back now? Well first of all, Twitter is clearly beyond their main scaling issues. Sure, they have downtime every now and then, but it’s nothing like the nightmare that it was two years ago. There would be hours seemingly everyday where the service was down or parts of it were taken offline to keep the main functionality up. This included features like the “With Friends” feature. This ended up being one of the many casualties. Other included tweet-to-IM, auto timeline updates, and yes, track . Because of those issues back then, the building of a robust social graph was more of a secondary concern at the time. But today it’s one of the primary concerns as Twitter has had no problem adding new users, but they need a way to keep them on the service and engaged. Features like “Who To Follow” help with this , and the resurrected “See What I See” should help as well. It’s more or less a self-tutorial to show new users what Twitter can look like when you get a feed of interesting users to follow. Considering it’s fairly buried (you have to click on a profile and then click on the “Following” link — or use the drop-down), it will still probably be “relatively rarely accessed”. But I would assume they’re figure out a way to highlight it more on the main homepage for new (or logged out) users. Perhaps that’s why they included a “Shuffle” feature as well. Plus, again, it’s a feature that will no longer cripple Twitter, so why not include it? And it makes good on a promise made two years ago. The reason for the aforementioned Twitter post was because a group of users were upset that Twitter killed off this feature without saying anything (specifically, the feed for the feature, which some were using to follow tweets). In response, Twitter wrote: It's our hope to bring back the access to these feeds at some point. But for stability reasons, we're unable to restore them at this time. We should have done a better job explaining this up front and anticipating this problem. Apologies for this; it's our highest priority to provide a reliable, stable service for everyone. Two years later, mission accomplished. Well, except the feed part. But who uses feeds anymore anyway? That’s what Twitter is for . It’s good to see Twitter in a place where they can bring back old features rather than killing ones off to stay alive. CrunchBase Information Twitter Information provided by CrunchBase | |
| Netflix For Pandas | Top |
| This guest post was written by Ethan Kurzweil. Kurzweil is a Vice President with Bessemer Venture Partners in Menlo Park, California. He works with Internet companies of all types, including Playdom, Zoosk, Crowdflower, Twilio, adap.tv, Reputation.com, Skybox Imaging, and OpenCandy. You can find him on twitter at @ethankurz . The views expressed in this post are his own, and do not represent those of Bessemer. Hardly a day goes by anymore when I don't hear about a reportedly "radical, new" business concept summarized succinctly as "X" (some well-known existing business) for "Y" (some specific market segment, use case, or other qualifier). These descriptors range from the logical – "Groupons for Moms" (okay, clear enough) – to the absurd – "Pandora for Cloud" (huh?). Often, I don't even understand the analogy, as it's so obscure, or I have never even heard of the company being compared. Sure, these monikers may satisfy our need for efficiency and brevity, but I'm convinced that in the long-run, we need to expand our collective attention spans just long enough to really describe what our businesses do. Otherwise, we run the risk of setting a model for entrepreneurship that's entirely devoid of creativity and true innovation. I see two primary problems with the current state of affairs. First, we're losing the ability to appreciate a truly novel business concept that doesn't boil down to a knockoff of something that already exists. And when I say we, I'm referring to a large number of us in the startup community – angel investors, VCs, entrepreneurs, executives; we've all adopted the convenient shorthand of translating new business ideas into three words. Having a short elevator pitch that neatly summarizes a new idea is important, but constraining such descriptors to less than a tweet is a step too far in my view. It's understandable of course given the sheer number of new companies being formed every day, that we would need a shortcut for describing new concepts quickly. But this inevitably leads to constrained thinking as to the strategy and business model to be applied to a particular product or service. If Google had thought of itself in the early days as "Yahoo for better search results," they may not have happened upon the juggernaut business model that is AdWords. More alarming is our natural tendency to evaluate a company's prospects as an offshoot of the success of the descriptor. Would anyone have taken Groupon seriously if we had referred to them in the early days as "some Chinese company that no one has heard of for the US"? My second concern is even more cause for alarm as this way of thinking is quickly becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy – at least based on the business ideas I hear about. This is not surprising since entrepreneurs take note of and emulate companies that get funding, press mentions, social media glory, and perceived traction – then turn around and get that same publicity with their copycat, reinforcing the same behavior. This sends a clear message that budding entrepreneurs should pick an idea only slightly dissimilar from something that already exists, get it out there quickly (because someone else is probably working on the same copycat), and then sit back and cash their ticket to fame and fortune. Even worse is the message that entrepreneurs should be afraid to champion an idea that's so new, it simply can't be categorized, because investors and others just don't know how to pigeon-hole it yet. We could end up unwittingly deterring the future Google and Facebook founders out there from ever getting started. To be clear, it's certainly not the case that a knock-off idea can't be a good business – and often these kinds of derivatives pivot from the original idea to something different and, hopefully more innovative. But the odds of a true homerun for this model of company are exceptionally low and we need to stop glamorizing this model of entrepreneurship. Think of all of the truly revolutionary businesses and business models out there, and you've rarely heard them described in knock-off terminology. Pandora toiled for years in relative obscurity, ignoring popular sentiment that you couldn't build a successful Internet music service with advertising, only to be saved by the groundswell of support from their users lobbying to keep them alive and profitable. Zynga built applications on a platform with no demonstrable track record or model for success. And the Twitter founders conceived of an ingenious and quirky way to let people share their thoughts, one sound bite at a time. Nowhere along the way did Larry, Sergey, Zuck, Jack Dorsey, or the other founders of great Internet successes study some other business and wonder – what's some nuance of that other successful company that I can replicate? Instead, they focused on previously unsolved problems, and, by addressing these needs, built powerhouses that will forever shape the way we entertain, live, work and communicate. So the next time I hear "Airbnb for Endangered Species," I'm going to tune out and browse "Myspace for People that Use Their Real Name" and "Facebook Status Updates for people that like to express thoughts in 140 characters or less" instead. Image by kubina on Flickr | |
| (Founder Stories) Quora's Charlie Cheever On Building A Disruptive Knowledge Platform | Top |
| Been doing a show on Tech Crunch TV with us called Founder Stories. I don't know, hopefully most of you have had a chance to watch it and it's really just kind of come bout the challenges of building a company. So please give a round of applause to Charlie and Chris. You can sit down, I'm not gonna leave here. Is my mike on? Yeah. So thanks, this is a special edition of Founder Stories. If you haven't seen the show it is on Tech Crunch TV and I encourage you to watch it. This is Charlie Cheever from Quora. Thanks for being here. Thanks for having me. It is great to be here. So, you were at Amazon and Facebook before? Yeah. And you had a, you did a great job with Facebook. So you ran the connect platform and the. Hm-hm. So, like what, I guess first of all, how did that help you. How do those experiences help you with Quora and how did you decide to leave? Why did you decide to leave kind of this dream job and start a company? Yeah, I think one of the biggest thing that's happened over the last 7 or 8 years is we seen a really like humanization of the internet and the web and people who didn't used to use the internet or at least only used it passively and didn't interact and didn't put content on there, have started to do that and Facebook was really like one of the leaders in that. So you saw people's mothers uploading photos and stuff like that. So one of the goals the we have for Quora is to have all kinds of people sharing all their knowledge on the site and I think having that experience helped a little bit. Did you have the idea and then say 'I've gotta go start this company' or did you just want to start a company or how? I had the original idea of doing a Q;A type of thing but what convince me was, actually a really good idea was I did this exercise when I was evaluating it which was to, as I went through my day, just catch myself every time that I wanted to know something or was curious about something and sort of make a mental note of that, and then imagine a world where I knew everything that I wanted to know, as long as someone else in the world knew it. So, you would come up with things you wanted to know and then you wouldn't find that content on the internet and then you said okay maybe it would be great if there was a repository with that content. Right, an example is like I think I was in a cab, coming up from the airport into New York, and the driver was kind of driving like a maniac and this thought went through my head, you know; are cab drivers safer or less safe than regular drivers? I went to go put that on Quora and someone had actually already put this up like 2 months ago. The answer is cab drivers are actually safer than driving yourself, if you're curious. But there's actually so many things that just come up in your daily life and I think we've trained ourselves to dismiss them as like there's no way I can find that out quickly so I won't even worry about it. But when you sort of can have access to it, it's really changing. So, one of the biggest challenges, you have a user generated content site. One of the biggest challenges is kind of getting over the, what they call a chicken and egg problem, where you have to get both contributors and then people asking questions, answering questions, and then people, I guess, just sort of observing and loading things up. How did you approach that problem? Yeah, I think you definitely want to take responsibility for making sure that the content on your site is good because there's a real momentum and inertia with sites where you build the scaffolding and then users produce all the content. So, I think if you set it off in the right direction then that will continue and perpetuate, but if it goes in a | |
CREATE MORE ALERTS:
Auctions - Find out when new auctions are posted
Horoscopes - Receive your daily horoscope
Music - Get the newest Album Releases, Playlists and more
News - Only the news you want, delivered!
Stocks - Stay connected to the market with price quotes and more
Weather - Get today's weather conditions
| You received this email because you subscribed to Yahoo! Alerts. Use this link to unsubscribe from this alert. To change your communications preferences for other Yahoo! business lines, please visit your Marketing Preferences. To learn more about Yahoo!'s use of personal information, including the use of web beacons in HTML-based email, please read our Privacy Policy. Yahoo! is located at 701 First Avenue, Sunnyvale, CA 94089. |
No comments:
Post a Comment