
Twitter Acquires Magic Pony - rogerfernandezg
https://blog.twitter.com/2016/increasing-our-investment-in-machine-learning
======
niftich
Machine learning on your images and videos to "enhance our strength in live
and video and opens up a whole lot of exciting creative possibilities for
Twitter"!

As ironically stated here [1], "The best minds of my generation are thinking
about how to make people click ads."

Though Twitter has a good record of open-sourcing internal infrastructure
projects, I think it's it's safe not to expect any substantive amount of this
work to see the light of day.

On the other hand, the quality of their search and recommendations when it
comes to non-text content will significantly improve. They're really doubling
down on Twitter being the "best place to see what's happening and why it
matters, first", which is a welcome change from the confusing signalling in
months prior.

[1]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11930354](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11930354)

~~~
sdegutis
> As ironically stated here, "The best minds of my generation are thinking
> about how to make people click ads."

Thanks. Perfectly succinct summary of what I hate so much about today's
business world.

Dear all advertisers: how about you stop trying to figure out how to make
people want your product/service more, and focus on making it discoverable and
clearly understood when the time comes where they finally realize they _do_
want such a product/service and go seeking it out from someone? And if they
never do end up wanting it, MAYBE THAT'S FINE and maybe it's time you stop
selling it?

~~~
grok2
As I was reading your comment, I was thinking - "Why not? Why shouldn't
advertisers figure out how to advertise in ways that comes somewhat close to
what you are suggesting, but make you want to buy before you know you want
something?" ;-)...

Sometimes I think we are in a difficult dichotomy -- we like Twitter and we
consume it voraciously and love that it is free, but we don't want them to use
advertising as a source of revenue even though that might be the source that
keeps it alive for us to consume. And, for free!

~~~
sdegutis
For sure, we're a greedy, selfish, and short-sighted species. But that doesn't
make the advertisers _right_ for doing what people are implicitly asking them
to.

~~~
true_religion
People say 'the advertisers', but don't most people in the world work for a
company that uses ads?

It seems that there's a mentality of compartmentalization, where people
believe there to be 'evil ad companies' that somehow do nothing but make ads
and don't actually sell products, nor employ people in the creative industry.

~~~
sdegutis
Just a crazy idea, but what if instead of TV/radio commercials and billboards
and internet popup ads, products advertised themselves in the places they are
sold (e.g. the sign next to a restaurant, or the side of a shampoo bottle on a
shelf in the store), to explain very briefly why they're better than the
competition? Most of the time, people will come across it organically, and
that's healthy and good. But if discoverability is needed too, they can
advertise in appropriate places, like restaurant listings, etc.

~~~
icebraining
One of the buzzwords a few years back was the "intention economy"; the idea is
that you wouldn't have ads, instead you'd have a kind of automated RFP process
in which consumers would say what they want and sellers would reply with
offers that matched the request.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intention_economy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intention_economy)

~~~
niftich
Like a reverse auction or call for tenders?

------
dharma1
I looked into these guys a month ago, they have a great team of young
researchers.

The main application I saw was applying neural networks to video compression,
improving compression by 3x or more (I guess by regenerating the lost
detail?). Not sure if Twitter has much use for that but it looks like they
have patented a bunch of other stuff too, and I'm sure will be a great
addition to twitter's ML team.

Congrats to the guys - and hope they continue creating interesting tech in old
blighty after the vesting period is over.

~~~
c0g
Do you have a link to the compression stuff?

~~~
drosteam
[http://www.cv-
foundation.org/openaccess/content_cvpr_2016/pa...](http://www.cv-
foundation.org/openaccess/content_cvpr_2016/papers/Shi_Real-
Time_Single_Image_CVPR_2016_paper.pdf)

------
tlrobinson
I know nothing about Magic Pony, but I'm starting to wonder how much of this
craze is a form of "keeping up with the Joneses", except with tech giants and
ML/AI startups instead of suburban families and their cars, etc.

~~~
tsunamifury
Its not, its a fundamental shift in how you power your applications. Not
acquiring and building this talent at a major firm would be the equivalent of
sticking to steam power in the face of oil.

------
Negative1
This is amazing to me, not because it's a great purchase but rather because of
the absolute tone deafness that Twitter is demonstrating.

People are not using Twitter because of many reasons and bad image compression
is probably not one of them. Unless Twitter is planning some massive pivot
what they should have spent their M&A budget on companies that will help them
improve their growth situation directly (in my opinion).

~~~
niftich
Twitter's massive pivot is actually well underway:

\- They bought Crashlytics and released Fabric.io, a souped-up Twitter SDK +
Crashlytics + their bundled ad platform MoPub. The idea is you'll develop your
app with this SDK and get crash reporting, usage stats, ad serving, 'Sign in
via Twitter', Twitter integration, and all of this other stuff [1] for free.

\- They bought Digits, which is a 'log in with your phone number'-as-a-service
and made it free to use. It's now integrated with Fabric.

\- They just bought Magic Pony which will help them better classify non-text
posts so that their currently-awful suggestions are better.

Fact is, 'Twitter', the service where people post tweets, is no longer their
primary growth area. It's their most externally visible, sure, but they want
their SDK inside every app, and mine data and serve ads, just like Google and
Facebook. This might actually work, because their SDK has some very nice
things you might want anyway, compared to the other two that only give you
identity, integration, and ads.

[1] [https://get.fabric.io/kits](https://get.fabric.io/kits)

[2] [https://get.digits.com](https://get.digits.com)

------
mox1
It would be super cool if Twitter let me write my own algorithm to decide what
I get to see.

Or even better, let me "publish" an algorithm and let other people use it.

------
fhood
I am pretty sure this whole article is just a euphemism for a new drug that
twitter execs are super into right now.

------
swang
Twitter should spend some of the money getting someone to actually improve
their web ui. Click a link to an individual tweet and read it. Now you click
out of it to read the person's timeline. Here comes the janky timeline
refresh. I mean shouldn't someone spend some time so it doesn't look like they
had to pull the user's timeline?

I still get errors sometimes where I see, "1 new tweet" and it's the top tweet
in my timeline, except here it is again.

------
rubyfan
The bit about the Twitter Cortex team reads like an MBA approach to product.
If I just rub together some PHDs and engineers then magic will happen.

------
Alexey_Nigin
This is very sad news.

The #1 reason why I moved from Facebook to Twitter was that the latter service
used straightforward algoritms for deciding what to show me. When I opened
Twitter, I could be almost sure that the timeline would only contain posts
from people I followed, arranged in chronological order.

Of course, there were some exceptions. Firstly, they always had ads. I see how
many people here get angry about it, but I think ads on such site is perfectly
normal. After all, they have to make money somehow, right?

Secondly, there were times when I saw "While you were away" box. This was the
thing I found annoying from the beginning. How did Twitter infer that I was
interested in these five posts more than in those five posts? It got worse
over time. In fact, now this box shows up after a few hours of my absence, as
if I am expected to check Twitter 10 times a day.

And it appears that they are planning to take these features to a new level. I
really hope they don't do everything they talk about, but if they do, maybe I
will have to seek a new social media service.

~~~
rconti
I can't laugh hard enough at this. I agree I (sorta) hate the Facebook
filtering algorithm, but I find Twitter even more impenetrable. It's just
impossible to figure out what's going on. Here's my timeline, just opened it
up for this comment:

* Account I follow, 15s ago.

* PROMOTED post from 5 days ago. (here I've already run out of browser real estate on a 27" display because the tweets take so much damn room. Scroll down a page)

* While you were away: post from 3 days ago

* While you were away: post from 4h ago

* While you were away: post from 1 day ago

* While you were away: post from 3 days ago

* While you were away: post from 6h ago

* While you were away: retweet from 2 days ago

* While you were away: post from 1 day ago

* Actual twitter post from user I follow, 2h ago.

* PROMOTED from 18 days ago

For all intents and purposes, the Twitter feed is less chronological, less
useful, and less content-dense than Facebook, and that's saying something
considering that Twitter is supposedly a 140char service.

I had to scroll through 3 pages of crap before I got to the actual
chronological twitter you speak of.

Also, they have this horrible habit of making tweets with a white background,
then a tiny grey divider between tweets so it can be hard to tell at a glance
when you've moved from one section of content to another -- much like when
GMail went from colored message threading to all-monochrome.

~~~
Bombthecat
When you had to scroll through three pages to get what you want. They archived
what they wanted.No?

------
gh-lfneu28
Magic Pony Technology, you say?

[http://www.fimfiction.net/story/62074/friendship-is-
optimal](http://www.fimfiction.net/story/62074/friendship-is-optimal)

------
banhfun
Where is Twitter getting this money from?

~~~
joeblossom
They have a lot of cash on hand:
[http://finance.yahoo.com/q/ks?s=TWTR](http://finance.yahoo.com/q/ks?s=TWTR)

It's likely money left over from the IPO & previous fund raising events.

------
tacos
I guess they've given up on making the text part of their product make a damn
bit of sense.

~~~
simonswords82
I wondered this too. Twitter's app is broken - numerous complaints by power
users that they should be addressing but instead they're busy buying
companies?

~~~
MOARDONGZPLZ
I think probably team of people who develop and fix bugs on the app aren't the
same team that buys companies, so Twitter can probably do both.

~~~
simonswords82
Obviously it has the resources to do both. The point I'm making (badly) is
that if their core product is broken perhaps buying other companies should be
put on hold until they fix it.

~~~
MOARDONGZPLZ
Ah, gotcha. When you stated that the app is "broken" I assumed you meant
buggy, not "broken" as in a bad core product.

------
ultramancool
This headline is far better if you don't know what Magic Pony is.

~~~
gfosco
Even a magic pony can't save Twitter.

~~~
yabatopia
That's why Twitter also plans to acquire Magic Beans. Guaranteed to grow
instantly up into the sky!

~~~
TeMPOraL
Magic Enterprise Beans?

------
kami8845
Another sad moment for the London startup scene as one of the most promising
startups of recent years get acqui-gobble-hired up by $BIGCO

~~~
Spivak
For most companies in the startup scene getting bought by a larger company
that has the scale and resources to apply your tech to bigger and more
interesting problems is the planned exit strategy.

~~~
kami8845
While not 100% comparable this feels as weak a move as selling Facebook to
Yahoo for $1B

London needs strong, original startups. It's dire if you're looking for
employment out here.

------
ck2
Tensorflow, MagicPony.

I sense a trend here (machine learning).

