He was A VP of Product. Not The VP of Product.

The head of product is Keith Coleman, who was preceded by Edward Ho (interim, now also (interim?) head of engineering) and preceded by Jeff Siebert (both of whom are still at the company).

So, they have one product but multiple VPs of product? Sounds like some trimming was in order.

It's just a title, and titles are free. If you want to see a lot of VPs, go visit your friendly neighborhood bank. :-)

Outside of banks, a VP title usually means "company officer", and usually comes with perks and legal changes that do cost something.

Unless you visit a tech company outside of the financial business... or really a ton of other companies.

So, Twitter VPs aren't company officers?

Edit: Twitter's bylaws suggest that a VP is a company officer.

Twitter's bylaws (and those of the other companies) are ambiguous. They do not clearly say a VP = officer. They only use them in the sense that they mention them in the same sense.

It's very company dependent.

2 data points from other industries, based on LinkedIn:

1) Ogilvy & Mather: 7,289 employees, 188 with Vice President in the title.

2) Johnson & Johnson: 63,072 employees, 1,154 with Vice President in the title.

3) Microsoft: 129,445 employees, 2,514 with Vice President in the title.

I think Vice President doesn't mean as much as it used to. :-)

I am not sure what you are trying to say. The ratios seem quite well aligned. 1) One VP for every 39 employees 2) One VP for every 54 employees 3) One VP for every 51 employees

Yes - that this isn't an elite group of "Top 10 execs" at a company. That it's reasonable for Twitter to have several VPs of Product.

Nope. I've been a VP without being an officer.

I know this may be naive, but what does the officer part entail or mean?

An officer has authority to sign contracts on behalf of the company.

That's why I said usually. I did just check the bylaws for Alphabet/Google, Twitter, Amazon, and eBay. All have similar language showing vice presidents as officers. It's also been that way at the companies I've worked for, across several industries.

That has to do with signature authority...

What neighborhood do you work in?

Titles are not free. Titles convey job responsibilities and authority.

Honarary academic checking in - everything about my title is free.

Facebook has multiple VPs of product. So does Google. This is common...

It is common when you have more than one product.

Twitter has more than one product.

Off the top of my head:

Twitter App- Web, IOS, Android, Other

Twitter API

Twitter Firehose

Twitter Advertising

Twitter Analytics

Don't forget Periscope...not sure how that fits into the company structure though, admittedly

Isn't periscope being shut down?

That's vine I guess.

I think that's Vine.

Facebook and Google aren't financially struggling. There's something to be said for "too many chefs" when your main issue is doing something, anything to make some cash. Perhaps some downsizing was truly in order.

On the other hand, losing this many execs in this short of time almost never bodes well, which means their stock price is going to tumble even further without something drastic happening soon.

> Facebook and Google aren't financially struggling.

Because advertising on Facebook and Google pays off.

Twitter, afaik, has struggled to be a relevant ad platform.

At $2B/year, I can only hope to be that irrelevant.

Now, if you want to talk about the $2.5B expense line....

$2.5B!! What are they blowing that kind of cash on?

It took them 6 weeks to change the star button into a heart, which nobody wanted because we don't "like" all the things we save for later. Twitter has been going in the wrong direction all year.

They changed "moments" to "explore" but thankfully changed it back.

Goes to show that their product leadership has no clue what they are doing

Depends on what you mean by "relevant"... It took in nearly $550 million last quarter.

The public facing platform is just one of many products twitter offers. They also offer advertising that is probably considered its own product...

I'm sure Twitter has far more than one product.

I hope using a tweetstorm to announce his departure was a subtle shot at the company's inability to ship a product the way people want to use it.

FWIW, he used our product http://writerack.com to do his Tweetstorm.

I feel great!!

It's a great tool, but I have one request: the slash line of the last tweet should ideally indicate how many total there were in the storm. For example, the friendly howto on your site should end with "6/6 Share and have fun. It's FREE!" This gives the individual tweet context when someone shares/quotes/screenshots it and it's being passed around: you know where the tweetstorm ends (instead of having to scroll down and look for a non-existent 7/ tweet).

Actually, since you're queuing up all the tweets to post them in one go, it should be feasible to add the out-of count to every tweet in the storm! That would be neat. But the last tweet should have it by convention.

I like the idea of the concluding tweet number wrapping things up. It's been noted.

Since characters are scarce in a tweet, we tried to reduce the number of non-critical text.

I think we can make the numbering type (x/y) an option.

Thanks!

You own storm-view looks broken https://writerack.com/crazyfoo/811331557608652800

"Twitter is stronger because w#oneteamneteam" != "Twitter is stronger because we are #oneteam"

Or is that my browser?

Hmm.. That seems to be a bug. Will be sorted.

I like the term storm-view. I'm stealing it. :D

Nice work!

Why are you getting downvoted? People seriously need to lighten up ;)

Yes, of course it's totally fine for people to post their excitement about something like that. It may be a tangent, but it's a specific, interesting tangent, not the generic kind of off-topic discussion which is predictable. Also, there's a huge difference between a community member sharing excitement with fellow users vs. someone showing up just to promote something.

But note that OoTheNigerian's comment eventually became upvoted (hugely upvoted in fact). That community correction often happens when comments are unfairly downvoted—but it takes a little while.

Thanks for the clarification on policy. At the least, I now know that self-deleting a comment that is in the wrong does not stop downvotes/flags.

Hmm, that doesn't sound quite fair. I wonder what we could do better there.

I didn't see the comments that you erased, but based on many things you've posted in the past, I'm sure they were in good faith and driven by concern for the quality of HN, which is something we appreciate even in the rare case of a misfire.

It's not irrelevant.

The person spoke about him using a feature he thought Twitter should have. Tweetstorms.

From far away Nigeria (you may know it as Africa;)) we built something that filled the need and the head of product at twitter using it is the biggest endorsement one can get.

Of course, I could have chosen to be more elaborate in my comment and be like minimaxir but sometimes few words are better.

I am excited and i let it out.

You aren't the author.

I didn't read it as sarcastic and if people were talking about tweetstorms and I found out my tool was used to build it, I'm sure it is not irrelevant to point it out.

You would get my point if you tried building something and had it used.

It seems you have carried on with your monitoring behaviour from Techcrunch comment days.

You can downvote and go in peace but please quit your lecture.

Thanks.

Jeez if a person can't get excited about their own tech project on Hacker News, where can they??

Personally, I found the comment interesting. I have always sort of wondered how prolific Twitter users actually handle the tedium of this, so it's interesting to see a link to one way they do so.

I know I might sound like a vim user, but tweetstorms are honestly one of my favourite parts of twitter. Maybe there could be a better UI for authoring and displaying them, but there's something I really enjoy about reading a story 140 characters at a time.

I've been saying this for a little while now: Twitter should really try to capitalize on Tweetstorms. What they don't seem to realize is that Tweetstorms enable Twitter to be a kind of inverse annotation platform. Most annotation platforms enable large chunks of text to be dissected by readers, but a Tweetstorm is the opposite: the author specifies the exact segmentation of the text as they release it, and each segment can be individually commented on or shared. It forces authors to present their ideas as a sequence of small interlocking arguments. The medium enforces rhetorical granularity, for better or worse.

I can't be the only person who sees this potential. Come on, Twitter, build this out... I'll even let you hire me to work on it. :)

(Shameless plug) I've been working on an open-source tool to visualize twitter conversations and I've come to appreciate tweetstorms a bit more.

Here's this tweetstorm visualized with the tool: https://s3.amazonaws.com/aws-website-staticfiles-25g9k/tvp.h...

Wow that's cool! Making it obvious which branch is part of the actual storm rather than someone replying would be nice. Once zoomed in my avatar recognition doesn't work as well.

Or maybe the tweet storm is always the left most branch and I just didn't realise that? :)

In any case super cool stuff!

That's really cool. I've always found it difficult to follow discussions on Twitter. Maybe the UI is better for logged-in users but I've never bothered.

Twitter users find new ways to use the service, such as tweet storms or customer support, but the company fails to recognize these opportunities to "pave the cow paths" and improve there usability of their service.

What is there to build out? I guess it could be made more obvious for those that don't get it, but it's already being used in exactly the way you describe by Twitter's power users.

You're right that it's already usable, but it could be even better. For example:

1) Making it easier to compose Tweetstorms (third-party services like WriteRack exist, but it would be nice to have official support).

2) Enhancing the display of Tweetstorms to make them easier to follow. Right now, the UI for viewing Tweet replies is the same regardless of who's replying to who. Twitter could make it so that a person's replies to themselves (the building blocks of a Tweetstorm) have a unique look-and-feel compared to replies from followers. This would emphasize the Tweetstorm as a distinct type of posting, rather than something jury-rigged out of self-replies.

3) Not Tweetstorm specific, but make it easier to have and follow branched conversations. Sites like Reddit have this down already, while Facebook and Twitter seem reluctant to let anything go beyond one level down. Let people branch! It would actually make things easier to follow, and it would also allow for something (sort of) novel: branched Tweetstorms! Linear text is so 20th century! :)

What makes tweetstorms better than just letting people write long tweets? Tweetstorms infuriate me because they totally dominate my feed and ensure that the same tweet keeps being shoved back to the top of the timeline. Much better to let people write long tweets and just hide the part >140 characters behind an expand button. So I can safely ignore the whole thing.

The pacing of tweetstorms is what makes them unique. It's something fairly unique - if I wanted "longer tweets" I would go to Medium.

The timeline thing is a real(ish) problem that can be solved with UI, in a similar way how they show conversations inline (automatically collapse them)

Integrate it with W3C annotation standard, extending the standard to incorporate tweet storm strengths.

Whilst everyone is plugging their own stuff, we’ve been working on a little thing called Stormchaser for aggregating Tweetstorms in your timeline and lists: https://www.stormchaser.io

Because twitter is an insufficient blogging platform and normal blogs don't attract enough views people use tools to turn blogposts into tweets and tweets into blogposts.

This is a bit ridiculous. Not trying to demean your product, but it shouldn't be necessary to have it.

I'm a designer and I agree. The one quick improvement Twitter could make to the tweetstorm is to automatically (or giving the option to) remove the users handle when replaying to themselves when initiating the storm.

You can already reply to yourself and Your handle doesn't appear, does it? At least, it doesn't if I use the web interface.

Otherwise, this pic will give you a good idea of the changes Twitter is making to the tweet structure...

http://www.insider.gr/sites/default/files/57e01f4edd08956b5e...

Even if it does appear, you can simply remove it and Twitter will preserve the reply/threading regardless.

Same. My thought for this, and I wanted to build a media industry specific alternative to Twitter using it, was to allow a tweet/story to have depth/paging.

So, imagine your timeline is a regular, vertical stream. But any tweet could have paging on the horizontal axis, and you'd hit next or swipe to continue reading. Anyone browsing could read the opening tweet and ignore the rest if they wanted. Subsequent tweets within the first could have a video, image gallery, etc. Analytics would show the writer how many people delved how far into the content.

So, for a sports story, some people might scroll past, or read the first couple of sentences, but a strong fan would read every detail down through the analysis and stats.

Not sure why they haven't tried this. They could supplant some news that currently exists as links outside of the app.

> I wanted to build a media industry specific alternative to Twitter using it

Considering really the only people on Twitter is just Media people...

Which is why I'm surprised that the media lap it up rather than collectively building something they have more control over. Of course, it would take an industry organisation to arrange that and in my experience those bodies aren't really capable of doing something at that scale.

Are you familiar with Ted Nelson's hyperorthogonal data structures [0]?

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZigZag_(software)

Judging by the amount of noise I've heard recently on this topic you may be the only person who like that.

It's cute. It's part of the medium. Books must have pages. Tweetstorms must have 140char tweets.

>Tweetstorms must have 140char tweets.

seems to be matching the pacing of a graphic novel.

You know what, that's exactly it. The comparison of the pacing perfectly captures what makes it feel so unique.

I personally really hate these. There is always one or two good posts that hook me in but then the bias/politics/etc gets revealed when you read the rest. My friends retweet them but in the end I just think the author (and my duped friend) are idiots. Maybe it is just who I follow...

Why? I like the content of some tweetstorms, but the UI for them is just so bad I feel they'd be better off as a blog post if they're written contiguously.

(Exception I suppose is the live tweetstorm, where someone is just getting on their soapbox)

What's wrong with reinventing TCP/IP over twitter? Sometimes they even appear out of order.

This is the company that leaked they were doing an algorithmic timeline, it was really unpopular and they said they weren't doing it, then it turned out to be a lie when they started rolling it out 2-3 weeks later.

Josh came in from the TellApart acquisition, an adtech/retargeting/data company, where he was ceo.

I can't understand how he was vp product on a social network.

Actually, that makes total sense. There are multiple VPs at engineering firms. People always complain about how big Twitter is, how they can't believe how many employees Twitter has, but people don't realize Twitter has two "users": actual "users," and advertisers. Twitter has to dedicate a huge number of engineers, product managers, marketers, account managers, etc. to dealing with advertisers, setting up the ad auctions, analytics, dashboards, etc.

Yes, but speaking as someone who has used Google's great advertising tools as well as mailed a money order to a niche forum owner to run an ad, the advertisers will put up with anything if you can deliver converting users.

Yes. But when 1% optimization means millions in revenue, you're going to throw a lot of engineers at the problem.

good point

I'd still suggest that, even though twitter obviously needs advertisers, someone with a deep understanding of users and how they use twitter would lead to more user growth / more engaged users. Which is probably the thing twitter needs most.

Maybe. But at the same time, Twitter has a lot of influential and/or affluent users, which a lot of companies would like to reach.

Maybe they shouldn't try to grow absolute user numbers and instead focus on being a publishing platform for influencers (keep in mind that lots of people who aren't Twitter users see popular tweets on other platforms). Then they could focus on providing great advertising and targeting for companies that want to reach influencers.

At the end of the day Twitter's customers are advertisers. It seems like they are trying to sell these customers a way to reach a mass market audience. Maybe they should play to their unique advantage and focus on selling influencers' and/or business decision-makers' attention.

Twitter offers those products already - it offers promoted trends, custom emojis, and custom moments to a small pool of 'Premium' advertisers at $100-250k a pop.

It's a good way to control the quality of output, but it isn't a good way to make mega millions, as these big companies and influencers only have so much advertising budget to go round.

Consider also for someone like Trump or a Kardashian, the ability to reach 17.6M followers (and however many more through retweets + national news) for free with no filtering is a huge draw. It's hard to get them to pay for what they have already. Start to introduce features (as Facebook did) that make it more difficult for people to see tweets, and both the end consumers and the influencers themselves will revolt.

Focus less on absolute user numbers and the quality of the product declines (you have less data to train your targeting algorithms on), and the site as a whole becomes less of a draw for influencers too.

Not saying T shouldn't offer 'Premium' content to media companies, but going all in on large advertisers seems like a route to the poorhouse.

They already have more than enough users. Twitter needs more/better advertizers if they want to break even. Users can be got through sponsorships and celeb endorsements, paying advertizers require competative platforms.

He was not the VP of product, he was a VP of product, specifically VP of product for Twitter's advertising arm.

Because it's not a social network? It's an advertising brokerage.

nope, thats their monetization strategy not their identity. a subtle difference.

Ok but the point is that it's not crazy to have a VP of product for the parts of the product that deliver the monetization strategy.

yes i would agree on that

Yeah? And Facebook isn't a social network either, it's an advertising brokerage? And Google isn't a search engine, it's an advertising brokerage? The Financial Times isn't a newspaper, it's an advertising brokerage? Spotify isn't music streaming, it's an advertising brokerage?

Didn't Facebook recently get called a "free content ad network"?

I think that term describes most of those companies well, as it incorporates their business model. They just vary in what kind of content or service they offer with their ads.

I dont think it's unfair to call a business what it is -- just like we do with farms or investment firms, though they greatly differ in how they go about that business model.

And they all have engineering teams dedicated to their ad technologies? With VP level leadership or higher?

Why are we making everything a question?

I'm keeping in theme with the parent comment? I'm glad you agree it's retarded?

And users aren't important, just their eye balls.

Financial Times and Spotify make money on subscriptions.

Actually Spotify lost $194m last year on subscriptions.

Maybe, because building an adtech company is not something he wants to be remembered for?

Anthony Noto COO http://www.recode.net/2016/12/6/13814264/twitter-anthony-not...