

WTF Is Up At Twitter? - MortonL
http://tech.li/2011/11/wtf-is-up-at-twitter/

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nl
_Twitter co-founders Biz Stone and Evan Williams have reportedly been less
involved in the day to day of the company since hiring Costolo to take over as
CEO_

Err.. this isn't exactly news. From March this year:

Well, it’s true and it’s official. Today, I asked Twitter about Ev’s current
role in light of Dorsey’s taking over the product lead. A company spokesperson
sent me the following statement:

 _Ev decided a couple months ago to be less involved day to day at Twitter. He
continues to have a close relationship with the company providing strategic
advice and, of course, he remains an active board member._

<http://techcrunch.com/2011/03/28/ev-less-involved-twitter/>

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jgavris
I see 503 service unavailable far too often in the logs of my twitter API
apps...

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garethsprice
Is this just a shift from "startup mode" to "mature business mode" - the
startup junkies are moving onto new ventures and being replaced with employees
who prefer to work for a more stable company?

Could it indicate that Twitter's hardest engineering problems have been solved
and they plan on keeping the service lean and simple, so there's not as much
need for a large team of people to build new features?

This would make a nice change from Facebook and Google, which seem to be
straining under the weight of feature-bloat.

Or, is it symptomatic of Twitter hitting a dead end and senior staff deciding
there's no money/business there?

This is all speculation, would appreciate any opinion or insight.
Hypothetically, if you were offered a position at Twitter right now, would you
take it?

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beagledude
don't forget Abdur Chowdhury bailed shortly ago as well, he was their Chief
Data Scientist (although better known for leaking all of the aol data)

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edomain
Nice catch

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jdnier
I thought the same thing just this Saturday afternoon when the Twitter home
page (i.e., <http://twitter.com/>) showed nothing but a plain black and white
Cherokee 405 error page for at least a couple minutes:
<http://oi41.tinypic.com/1085ypx.jpg>

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latchkey
I don't think the fail whales have gotten any less frequent. I still see them
all the time and I hardly ever use twitter.

Just because a few execs leave the company doesn't mean that would cause more
fail whales.

The real value is the engineering and ops teams who keep the system going. I'd
look to see who on those teams have left recently.

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jmonegro
If you hardly ever use twitter, you're not exactly the most qualified one to
tell whether the fail whales are less frequent.

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nikcub
Team Dick (formerly known as Team Ev) vs Team Jack

the board bought Jack back and he is trying to take over, it seems.

this happens to many companies when they get big enough and successful. look
at msft post-gates (even during gates, but his authority would overrule
deadlocks) and apple etc.

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Tichy
A ten minute Twitter outage is news now? They must be doing pretty well...

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nirvana
Eternal Vigilance is the price of scalability.

Twitter caught up with the curve for awhile, and maybe this is a short term
issue, or maybe the curve got a bit more steep, I don't know.

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SheridanCat
I thought that was going to be something and then it wasn't.

