

Twitter Acquires Smallthought Systems (DabbleDB, Trendly) - sandofsky
http://blog.twitter.com/2010/06/more-than-dabbling.html

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apike
Another cool success story out of Vancouver. Scaling up a business here would
have been even cooler, but if you're going to be acquired, Twitter is a heck
of a place to go. Congratulations guys!

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antonym
I fail to grasp why this is being hailed as a success story. DabbleDB the
product is likely going away. These guys are getting jobs at Twitter, which is
arguably better for them than going out of business, but hardly is criteria
for a very successful exit. Its cool, don't get me wrong, but thats different
than a success story.

Does anyone have any indication of the purchase price? Did investors make
anything, or even their money back? It is hard to declare this a success, or
much of anything at all, without some information regarding terms of the deal,
and future of the product. Even if they lost money but the product was going
to continue in Twitter's hands I would argue this may be enough to declare
success because of Twitter's likely longevity. But without this and compelling
evidence that Twitter had any reason to pay more than salaries to the team, I
can't find a reason to declare this a success -- other than kudos to the team
for getting jobs at a cool company as their funding ran out (I am assuming
this is a primary reason for the change, as is common; please correct me if
mistaken).

Anyone have more info to share regarding this? I have always been a big fan of
DabbleDB and the team clearly has talent.

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koevet
Wonder if Dabble will follow the destiny of Etherpad and get opensourced

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henning
Hooray, a success story for Smalltalk and Seaside!

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rcoder
I don't know that I would call this a success for Smalltalk or Seaside as much
as it is a win for a very smart startup who simply happened to use Smalltalk
for some of their products. Furthermore, I doubt they'll be doing much Squeak
hacking inside Twitter, so in some ways you could look upon it as a loss for
the community.

Regardless, I have a lot of respect for the Smallthought guys. Their presence
at Twitter HQ does only good things for my opinion of their business and
technical direction.

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paulgb
Considering Avi's contributions to Seaside, I think _simply happened_ is an
understatement. I'm sure using Seaside was a very deliberate choice on their
part.

> Regardless, I have a lot of respect for the Smallthought guys. Their
> presence at Twitter HQ further does only good things for my opinion of their
> business and technical direction.

My thoughts exactly.

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rcoder
My perspective on Seaside may be a little different, because I still remember
Avi trying out many of the same ideas in Ruby, and moving to Smalltalk (at
least initially) because its continuations didn't leak memory like MRI's did.
I also know from personal discussions that the Smallthought guys are very
pragmatic about their tools: when Squeak/Seaside were the right tool, they
used it, but when Ruby, Java, Javascript, or another language/framework made
more sense, they weren't dogmatic about using it.

I'm not trying to downplay the importance of Smalltalk to DabbleDB, but it was
just one piece of the puzzle. The same "use the right tool for the problem"
attitude seems to be increasingly pervading Twitter these days, which I think
has helped as much as anything else in their improved stability and scale over
the last year or so.

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paulgb
Thanks for the insight. I didn't realize that ruby's (former?) continuation
memory-leaks were the the reason for Seaside being in Smalltalk rather than
Ruby.

In this case I wonder whether Smalltalk really is the right tool for the job.
Smalltalk isn't a bad language but there aren't a lot of libraries available.
I've played around with Seaside a bit and ended up having to rewrite some of
the HTTP libraries to do what I needed. Unfortunately I can't think of another
language outside of the LISP family that supports continuations well.

~~~
jluxenberg
_Unfortunately I can't think of another language outside of the LISP family
that supports continuations well._

Javascript has closures, which you can use to implement continuations. See
<http://marijn.haverbeke.nl/cps/>

~~~
paulgb
First-class functions can be used for continuation-passing style, but to do
what Seaside does elegantly you really need first-class continuations.

There's an interesting article on how Seaside uses continuations here:
[http://blog.fitzell.ca/2009/01/seaside-partial-
continuations...](http://blog.fitzell.ca/2009/01/seaside-partial-
continuations.html)

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jfager
They bought Values of N a while back, so this makes at least two companies
with top-tier product design chops brought into the fold. I'm a fan of the
twitter web UI, and I think they've done a good job with their feature set so
far, but I wonder when or if we're going to start seeing stuff that's more
than just tweaking the basic model coming out of these talent acquisitions.

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tonystubblebine
I think we have seen things. Twitter's semblance of stability comes directly
from the Summize acquisition. And I think Rael from Values of N was behind
lists.

Dabble DB though seems like it was acquired for backend analytics (according
to the blog post).

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jfager
At the risk of setting off a pointless semantics wrangling session, iwantsandy
and dabbledb were/are both great products that never got the attention they
deserved. I think it's hard to make the case that lists (while nice) are in
the same ballpark - they fall under the 'tweak' category to me.

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abstractwater
The announcement on Dabble DB's website:

<http://blog.dabbledb.com/2010/06/140character-dabbling.html>

<http://dabbledb.com/>

Signups now turned off.

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mark_l_watson
Wow, Twitter just picked up an awesome tech team, and the services are nice
also. I don't use DabbleDB very much (only a free account, years ago), but it
was very well done. Avi's work and writing on Seaside is also great stuff.

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mark_l_watson
Also, I just noticed that the blog post was by Kevin Weil (who I follow on
Twitter :-) who is also an analytics heavyweight.

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lecha
Anybody care to venture a guess why Twitter would buy them? It is surely not
for their business. Is it really only HR acquisition? If not, how could
Twitter use their tech?

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indy
They're joining the analytics team at Twitter

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lecha
That makes sense. <http://trendly.com/> is their other product.

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mileszs
The parent article makes clear that they will be on the analytics team because
of Trendly, sir. I promise it's a quick and easy read.

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ananthrk
<http://www.avibryant.com/2010/06/life-changing.html>

