Feature Friday: Embed This Tweet

Comments (Archived):

1. Agreed – great feature. The ability to RT right from this post is a wonderful add, and that’s exactly what I’m going to do.

2. Amazed this wasn’t done sooner. Interactive content portability is a keystone of the internet. Are there other publishers or services that haven’t (yet) done this?

   1. tumblr?

      1. But tumblr does such a great job with reblog….on second thought, reblog is different. I guess my thought here is that tumblr has always been inner focused; and it’s worked to their benefit so far. But still embed would be good.How about Disqus? Seems like that would make sense.

3. Cool feature. Speaking of embedding tweets and YouTube clips, yesterday @BloombergTV featured one of my tweets on their air. I looked for a YouTube clip of that segment so I could embed that in a blog post, but no dice. I’ll try this new feature instead and just embed my tweet. Edit: I’ll have to wait until I get the new Twitter.

   1. Congrats on that Dave!

      1. Thanks, Arnold. 

   2. which tweet was it?

      1. This one. 

         1. you would make an incredible journalist Dave. you ask hard questions and good questions.

            1. Thanks, Fred.

         2. Clearly heard the Mortal Combat “Brutality” while reading that one.

            1. The Subzero freeze followed by the monster uppercut?

   3. Jon was doing some serious dancing yesterday.Resignation has become a legal tactic in these cases. 

      1. I was surprised he didn’t take the 5th. I think a lot of observers were.Ross Doubthat had an interesting column recently about Corzine, how he epitomizes American meritocracy — successful athlete, elite schools, worked his way up at Goldman — and that didn’t prevent him from blowing things up. But I think there were a couple of red flags that popped up during his term as NJ governor.One was the car accident I alluded to in that tweet. The other was his relationship and six figure loan or gift to the woman who was the head of a public employee union. Both examples of imprudence, and the second an apparent example of ethical casualness.

         1. Corzine is living proof that winner does not equal leader.

            1. so how do we separate out winners vs leaders

         2. He’s a very interesting guy.He’s trading blow up at Goldman got him the CEO’s job but his run as CEO was incredibly successful.  Getting into NJ politics was a real rebound move as was MF Global.

   4. awesome!

4. I’ve warmed up to Twitter over time, in large part because it really seems they are motivated by a vision. They obviously think deeply about what they do and why they do it.

5. Anyone else not seeing new Twitter on the web yet?

   1. Yeah, I’m still on the old one 🙁

      1. SAME.

      2. Just got the new one and used it. Cool new look for Twitter. 

   2. Me too. Bummer. 

6. I like this a lot.Because it’s dynamic and continues the conversational string as you can retweet regardless where embedded.Because it plays into one of my favorite things about Twitter, that each tweet carries it’s own context with it. A shared tweet invariably (by definition) has relevance and context. A shared comment doesn’t necessarily and the reason I don’t push Disqus comments to Twitter.

   1. Agree, avoiding spliting the conversation in different places is key to keep all the context. I don’t push comments on Twitter either for that reason. Neither I like when people push tweets into Facebook or Foursquare check-ins into Twitter (there are always exceptions, but most just make noise).

      1. The best way to get heard is to stop making noise.

         1. For this reason I’m not on twitter. To not make noise. And to not consume noise.Maybe one day soon it will make sense for me to be heard thru that format.

            1. No rush, but twitter is a really powerful tool to hopscotch messaging around the globe to communities of interest.You have some very specific passions and interests. My bet is that you have communities on Twitter that will be really great to connect with.

            2. You’re probably right.Though I know lot of non Facebook types, so you can imagine they wouldn’t tweet either.

            3. It might make sense now for you to listen through that medium. You may come across some interesting links you wouldn’t see otherwise.  

            4. Great suggestion to ease into it. Thanks for the nudging.The only person who was interesting so far was Alain de Boton.

            5. I find interesting links from lots of non-famous people on Twitter, and retweet them every day.

            6. As a curated inflow of interesting links from people who you would like to learn from, Twitter is hard to beat.There’s no other way I’d be able to follow what great entrepreneurs and VCs from half way around the world think!Key is to find the right people to follow, and from diverse fields that you’re interested in – for instance you might follow a great architect and pick something up!

            7. You’re right, the key is the people you follow. Until now it has not been easy to find them. Maybe the new version will help (can’t know, still on the old one).

            8. I’ll take a stab at some faces of mine and see if the tweet.

      2. I only do badges. I like to celebrate good stuff in like

   2. Before this feature, I would cut & paste tweets into posts occasionally. Such as this one, “A Handful of Dust”, which featured a Roger Ehrenberg tweet/foursquare check-in.

   3. That’s an astute distinction. 

      1. Thanks Dave. Context is key..a great lens for understanding and designing for behavior online.

         1. Somewhat related, I’m not a fan of taking the first sentence of a blog post and turning that into a tweet. I think the onus is on the blogger to summarize his post in the characters he has left after including the link to it. 

            1. True…Some people write great headlines and that does it. Some just have followers who want  to know that there is something new to read from a blogger. Some don’t know you and need that extracted value.I”m listening to you on this. I should vary my tweets more;)

            2. It just seems to me that your point about comments would apply to blog posts too. But try this experiment: tweet the same post both ways, once with a pithy description or headline, and once with an opening sentence that ends in an ellipsis. Use Bit.ly or some other way to track the clicks through and see what works best.

            3. A / B Testing. HuffPo does that to a tee. They’ll have the same story with 2 headlines, and they watch real-time which one gets clicked more within a few minutes, then they kill the lesser one, and keep the more popular one. You have to watch closely to notice that.Also, food retail marketeers have done it for years- ever noticed why this box of cereal is purple and the other red, but they are fairly identical. Someone is doing A/B test marketing.

            4. True

   4. As a counter thought, I came here today because of FAKEGRIMLOCK’S comment to tweet. I’m a regular so I may have stopped by regardless, but his tweet triggered action.

      1. Interesting.Maybe context was carried through prior connection. Kind of sign language for club members?

         1. Tweets are headlines – GRIM comments are the headline that grabs you to go read that section of comments.It is  a natural use of the form.

            1. GL is a master phrase maker for certain.Sometimes that makes really great comments. I’m a fan.But personally, I learn more from conversations.Someone said that there are people who write in exclamation points and those that write in commas and semi-colons. Very true.

            2. Why can’t a comment lead you to the conversation?A comment can be excerpted to be a tweet (via engagio), and it will take you to the rest of the conversation. I think the lines are blurring a bit. What’s a tweet that started as a comment? A comment or a tweet? Or just an expression of your thoughts that you broadcast? It’s confusing a bit because Twitter is both a read and write platform, whereas we were used of thinking that comments only appear under a post. Not totally true anymore. Every piece of comment can be set free to be shared or embedded across social channels just like its cousin, the tweet. I will write a post to expand on this idea.

            3. I just re-shared this quote “there are people who write in exclamation points and those that write in commas and semi-colons” on Twitter, Tumblr and Facebook in 1-click. Go find them 🙂

   5. I disagree with your last part. A comment can be made to have context. Watch us 🙂

      1. Ahh…thought I’d hear from you on this William ;)Some comments most certainly. Some comments have their own context when written to be transported (like a tweet). Some comments are just sign language to your known networks.But every comment pushed to Twitter and Facebook? This is mostly noise not signal. I push ‘unsubscribe’ to many because of this.The magic of a tweet is that it is a container for its own context.The magic of conversations on Disqus is that the conversation not the comment is the context. That’s what needs to be captured and shared and still be dynamic.Otherwise it’s just a quote. Useful but tiring when overused.

         1. Ha! Have u tried to share a comment from Engagio? We automatically embed a link that takes the recipient straight to the original context. That’s was a v1.

            1. I’ll retry William. Most people don’ write in headlines, they weave thoughts. Headlines make great tweets. Not everything does.

            2. I just wonder what the written word will be reduced/ uplifted to in a hundred years from now by this technology? 

            3. I heard sign language and reading minds will be big 🙂

         2. Check this image. I re-tweeted an edited comment of yours here via Engagio to twitter, adding some context to it, and @ShanaC:disqus replied to it on Twitter within a minute, and Engagio automatically generated this link which takes you straight to the vortex of the conversation:http://www.avc.com/a_vc/201…So, this proves that a comment made here can be weaved into a Twitter conversation in one-click and within a New York minute, literally.Here’s the weaving of a comment into a tweet into a reply:https://twitter.com/#!/wmou…That’s powerful stuff! 

            1. No argument that this is powerful tech.But what turns me on is not curate and publish, but curate and connect.

            2. How about DO BOTH, as GRIMLOCK would say?I think one leads to another, intertwined- no?

   6. imo, the context with embedded tweets — previously images — is created by the assets around it.the tweet now becomes part of a larger conversation.disqus should allow embeds:  allowing for scrolling out of the full post and comments around it.i do tweet comments; they’re part of the conversation also.

      1. Agree.Tweets within posts become an extended, new context.

      2. Chris,- if you’re not on Engagio, pls let me know i’ll send you an invite. you can share/curate your comments or others to Tumblr, Twitter & Facebook.

         1. ok, thanks william.i’ve added my name to the invite list, so you have my email.

7. Thanks!

8. Nicely done. 

9. Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.Nicely done.Still on the old twitter here. So, I guess the changes will be rolled out soon.. 🙂

10. ‎’The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt.’ | Bertrand Russell–QOTD :DHappy Friday all!

11. Twiiter saying that the new features to be rolled out over the next two weeks.

    1. ah. i guess i’m on the early end of the rollout. it’s very good.

    2. Anybody who downloads the new iOS or Android apps gets the web app a few hours later…

       1. That explains why I got the new web version. Thanks. 

12. Very cool feature that contributes to the need for content moving openly. Twitter also rolled out yesterday a new mobile app version for the iPhone & Androids, with an updated design that has a new button called Interactions which captures the conversations & replies/RT. That’s a subtle signal about highlighting conversations, which is a good thing.

    1. I like the quote feature the iPhone version has — makes it easy to modify a tweet and add a pithy editorial comment before retweeting it. Would be cool if they add that to the web version too. 

       1. This would be amazing yes. That way I don’t have to inelegantly copy and past stuff.

       2. Yes. Definitely. I use it often.Mind you, you can share comments to Twitter, Facebook & Twitter already with Engagio with full edits.

          1. You’ve piqued my interest in Engagio with that. I’m a slow adopter though. 

    2. Now that you mention conversations, I really like engag.io. I was late the other day and couldn’t participate in the discussion, but big congrats again.

       1. Thanks. If you couldn’t get in, pls let me know.

          1. I’m in thanks to the invites in @awaldstein:disqus post http://arnoldwaldstein.com/…As I said, I’m really liking it. A few things to polish (already active in the ideas forum), but great to be just an alpha.

             1. thanks! saw your feedback, and we’re going to have a new release next week with a few tweeks and a couple of new features. iteration is the name of the game.

13. Great reminder. We are doing this great “embed” feature for our content very soon.Thanks like always:)

    1. Who’s “we”? 

       1. “WhyNot”We are launching soon…Thanks for asking!

          1. NP. Why not add a link?

             1. Because the embedded content gives a real feel from the original platform as well as opportunity for direct action, like “follow” in Twitter case.

             2. Sorry, you lost me. 

             3. I think Dave meant why not add a link to the site you are launching.

             4. Oh:) Thanks Luke.Right now we are still under wraps but I’ll be happy to post here when we are ready.Thanks for your interest!

             5. If your site isn’t live, you can use something like this as a placeholder and a way to gather email addresses of those who might be interested, so you can contact them when it launches: http://launchrock.com/ (Got that idea from David Semeria).

             6. Thanks Dave!

             7. Ok Dave, here we are:www.whynot.lyThanks a lot!

14. After 444 total Tweets (@brucewarila:disqus ), I just learned (here) that there is such a thing as a permalink for a Tweet.  It took me a few to figure out that clicking the date was the secret to obtaining the permalink. Twitter should offer more inline user hints.  Also, it seems that the new features have not been rolled out to every server yet?  I don’t see the same things you see.

    1. @VictusFate was kind enough to explain that to me a while back. Otherwise, I wouldn’t have known either.

    2. Respectfully and honestly, I’d be surprised if there are many folks to whom that wasn’t clear. And I love serendipitously discovering features like this. It’s fun.And yes they are rolling the new new twitter out over the course of a few weeks, the way they have done in the past.

    3. I agree with you Bruce. After 1373 tweets, I just found out that when you  reply to someone, it only shows up on the twitter feeds of the people who follow both you and the person that you are replying to. It is crazy to me that after using the service for close to 3 years, I am just finding out something as basic as that.

       1. Put a “.” before the @ symbol and all your followers will see it. 

          1. Thanks Dave, that is good to know. Shana- Most of my friends that I have told about this did not know about it beforehand. I’m curious,  is this something that the majority of Twitter users know? 

       2. I just found that out now…

       3. Twitter modified this behavior in May 2009.  Before that you would have seen all your friends replies, however they decided that it was too confusing to the average user and led to too much noise (I agree). From my experience with our users, most Twitter users don’t understand these types of nuances.  Only the “power users” realize this and include a “.” before their replies.

    4. I was not aware when I wrote the post that the new web UI/ux was not yet rolled out to everyone. Android and iOS is out but I guess they are slowly converting web usersThe new web UI/ux has an “open” link to get to the permalink, making that much more obvious

       1. We have it in Canada. Yeah! For once, we beat other parts of the US 🙂

15. I tweeted twice about twitter yesterday.The first was how I couldn’t believe it had taken them so long to rollout a workable tweet embed widget – http://bit.ly/sRJiMSThe second was that the new release seemed to have fallen into the Innovators Dilemma and a larger %age of users are probably now overserved – http://bit.ly/ru5Xrw – Seems we agree on the first and disagree on the second.

    1. Can you explore the overserved thought? 

       1. I think the site is complicated now with lots of functionality average users wont use. I agree wholeheartedly with Fred that less is more, but I dont think New Twitter is less, I think it’s more.Brand pages, inline media etc are the latest additions which are taking them from simple messaging protocol and interest graph to fully fledged social network. I’m not talking as to the business case for doing these things (which I am sure makes absolute sense) only to the feelings I now get as a user where I am deluged with options where previously it was simplicity incarnate.——-CANT REPLY TO THREADS BELOW AS REACHED LIMIT 🙁

          1. I wonder what the ‘average users’ on Twitter looks like.My sense was just the opposite. That new Twitter is trying to find more ‘average’ users.

             1. I don’t think the average user will be embedding many tweets.

             2. No, but the average power tweeter will.That produces happier producers of tweets – pretty important. They have to serve both sides – the average tweeter and the average follower.

             3. there has been speculation that a large amount of twitter is broadcast, with people tuning in to listen.  The embed could be within this model

             4. The average internet user doesn’t embed much of anything. Only content creators embed content.

             5. I’d consider myself an average twitter user.  Follow a couple hundred people, have a couple hundred followers, tweet a bit. Push content to twitter via Tumblr, etc. Probably visit the twitter website once a week – maybe.My entire consumption is mobile (iPhone) or semi-mobile (iPad).I’m sure the stats are out there (forgive my laziness for not finding them – company holiday party last night), but I’m curious what % of active users are consuming via the web vs. mobile.So what’s an average user?

             6. No more numbers needed. Really well said.You are probably right. So the next obvious question is whether these new features play to something you want to use?I’m probably not ‘normal’ in this case but I”m excited.Interested in how you see the usage of this.

             7. Well, I guess the question becomes who is going to embed tweets (assuming that’s the main new feature we’re discussing). The whole concept of embedding (whether it be Twitter, YouTube, etc), is that you need to have somewhere to embed it! Arnold, you have a blog, so you have a place to embed. I have a blog (or two), so I have a place to embed. For bloggers and content providers, I think it’s awesome. You can have good discussion around a single tweet, as evidenced many times on AVC and others. But again, getting back to the average user – I wonder where they are going to put the content.

          2. I see. I only just now got the new new twitter today on the web. I will see how I like it. I have been LOVING the new iPhone version yesterday. That was very clean and simple. I hope they followed through on the web based one with this.

          3. In the beginning Twitter was like the command line. A bunch of conventions you had to memorize and type in manually. Not a problem for power users but too intimidating for most people.This update is like adding a GUI. I think it’s a big deal.

             1. I also like the changing photos on the home page before you log in. Reminds me of Bing.

          4. How do you know the business case for doing these things makes absolute sense? What do you think the business case for them is?So far, the most compelling business angle on Twitter I’ve heard of is the DataSift approach (which Mark Suster did a great job of explaining on his blog, after his firm invested in it.).The usefulness of that data depends, in part, on scale, and adding new features to Twitter can help it hold onto and perhaps expand its universe of engaged users. But whether licensing the data fire hose will generate enough revenue to produce an attractive ROI for Twitter’s investors, I don’t know. @dhh David H. Hansson* highlighted how big the denominator is in this recent tweet:Twitter has taken more than a billion dollars in VC. They’re 6 years old and have 600+ employees. Somethings gotta give soon.— DHH (@dhh) December9, 2011*Disqus isn’t picking up the @ symbols for me, for some reason.

             1. twitter is in the attention and advertising business, the more it can do to attract & retain mainstream users the more revenue they will earn. all the new features, inline media etc all help to that end.

             2. Twitter seems a lot better at attention than advertising*. Too easy to tune out promoted tweets. My bet is that licensing its stream to companies like DataSift has more revenue potential for Twitter than advertising does. Whether that’s enough to make for an attractive ROI for Twitter’s more recent investors, as I said, I have no idea. It would be interesting to see the numbers in Twitter’s S-1 if it ever goes public.*For an example of a company where that’s reversed, consider Yahoo. I bet Yahoo has more advertising revenue and higher profits than Twitter, but it lacks Twitter’s cultural/zeitgeist cachet and, presumably, its upward trajectory

16. @TWITTER:twitter  WORKING HARD TO UP GAME. IT ALMOST AS GOOD AS HIRE GRIMLOCK.

    1. haha

    2. Is that possible?

       1. I was thinking the same thing. I think FG would like our project. And so will you, I believe. 😉

       2. IT POSSIBLE IF ENOUGH ZEROES AT END OF CHECK.

          1. 😉

17. Yay, no more screencapping and hoping it wasn’t going to distort!

18. Finally no more photoing!

    1. Been relying on Blackbird pie as a wordpressplugin

19. true to the experience, plus more better.nice.

20. we talked about this before, fred… about time.

21. features like this should help boost viral-coefficient… for a company that’s about sharing (sharing interests) it’s ironic they left in friction to share their own assets.

22. Not only is the new UI/UX fantastic in my opinion, I have never seen a product update that more clearly lays out a company’s vision for the future.

23. Is it just me or is the text of the tweet not selectable? 

    1. not selectable .. which is very limiting

24. I was at a Christmas party last night and several of the 50-somethings were down-talking social media. “A bunch of kids and hipsters telling each other what they ate for breakfast.”So I waded in and pointed out that in the space of the last two months, we’ve raised nearly $200,000 for the @AdamiTulu:twitter + @ZiwayProject:twitter to build schools in Africa that will create self-sufficiency, break the cycle of poverty and stop kids from becoming orphans.Absent the power of Twitter and other social tools, there is NO way that would have happened.I don’t know if the 50-somethings are going to become Twitter users because of yesterday’s update, but I do think it’s going to create a big huge wave of “tweet consumers” who get led into the product in a much more natural way.When Twitter’s brand becomes “connecting to the news and information you want in real time” instead of “tell people what you eat for breakfast”…that will be yet another tipping point for an insanely great company.

    1. Twitter — interesting news.Raising $200K for schools in Africa — priceless news and evidence of “good” let loose in the world.Unless I have missed something, Aaron Klein is a damn good man.Well played!  Happy Holidays!

       1. Well, to be clear, I did not raise all of that money. I’m really proud to be a part of a team that did. It’s a cause near and dear to my heart. And we’re very excited about the results.It certainly made a few of those folks at the party re-assess the value of Twitter! 🙂

       2. As usual, you have not missed anything, dear JLM. :)Spot on about Aaron Klein.

       3. That he is

    2. On a related one, I was at a Bryan Adams concert yesterday. And, of course, the big screen was just capturing the pre-concert twitter feed. I half thought I’d take a pic and send Fred. Then I realized he must have been seen many of theese anyway. ‘real-time’ is key. 🙂

       1. Real time is indeed key.

    3. that is great to hear, congratulations and thank you. 

    4. I’m sure there are plenty of 20, 30, 40, 60, et.c.-somethings who don’t get it either, and plenty of 50-somethings who do get it. Sounds like you just went to a very particular party.   

       1. That’s certainly true but it’s a refrain I hear from “normals” above 40 who don’t get social media.There were some people who instantly “got it” last night and I have a feeling #NewNewTwitter might have a shot at doing that more broadly.

    5. #usguys have raised something in the realm of a million dollars in the past 10 days to feed families going hungry in a rather small, relatively obscure part of BC, Canada. All because of Twitter.

       1. That’s awesome!

25. they effed copy/paste !! on the iphone app .. can’t take the text over to a translate app …big news .. not everyone’s stream is only in one language, ok?

26. I remember when Google Wave had this functionality.  Its great to see more services adopting dynamic content capabilities.

27. It took so long for a former board member and lead investor to get a feature implemented…. Wow, I thought Mr.Wilson had a uber amount of clout.

    1. Shhhh 😉

28. A few things I don’t think have been mentioned already.1, the tweet is cleaner because it is not an image.and  2, the fact that you don’t need yet another app – photoshop – screenshot then crop the tweet. ( often with people’s bg that ads noise to the information )Those two reasons along are winners on my book.

29. I “almost” gave up on Twitter once Google+ hit the street. Boy was that a bonehead idea! Of late, I’ve discovered that you can sync Buffer to ifttt and Twitter that helps a lot with the content syndication model. This new embedded Tweets model will surely help Twitter compete w/ G+

30. Fred if you were to tweet  @kWIQly:disqus  anything cool or constructive about this screencast  (our first – it needs TLC just like Gotham Gal ) http://kwiqly.com/screencast  then I would practice this great new feature with a blog page dedicated to tweets from supportive commentators with you in pride of place. Not that you need the attention but,  I , like you have been thinking of doing this for wanted of the convenient embed feature !ThanksPS – re your previous post If I ever see you in a bar with Gotham Gal – I willFirst, introduce myself to her briefly when you are being pitched at (shouldn’t have to wait too long) and a lady should not be left alone in a bar !Second – back out before you know I’m there –  so you can enjoy your evening (as you should)Third – send photo and transcript, inviting you to take my callYou have been warned ! 🙂

    1. I will take a look

31. This will be a good feature for power users / authors / content creators and their ilk.  Unfortunately, it seems the vast majority of Twitter users aren’t of that type.  Just look trending topics… yikes.It seems like Twitter keeps moving away from features for early adopters and more towards mass adoption fit.  While this is a natural evolution, it makes the tool less usable for me.I said to someone yesterday: “We’re early adopters and they’ve clearly crossed the chasm.”

    1. That comment just gave me a vision for an add on to Twitter, or seperate for that matter.  Hmmmm.

32. Why stop at embedding tweets- Repost.Us lets you embed whole live articles with attribution and monetization (including any embedded elements like tweets, video, images)

33. I think it would be cool if Twitter allowed an optional embed that includes the rest of this conversation. I think it’s valuable to see the reactions in the form of replies and retweets. So the embed would look more like your image above instead. Again, this would need to be optional because most of the time you will want to go with the simplicity of the single tweet. But occasionally adding the full context of the conversation would be valuable too.

    1. Great idea

34. I completely concur! FINALLY a ‘global’ software solution that does exactly what it claims to. And it does it efficiently and attractively.

35. Fred, this is brilliant learning for all startups to learn from Twitter observing their users’ behavior and making it part of their product. Now, for all those blog posts when people used to take twitter snapshots and then link the image, they don’t have to worry about it anymore. 🙂 Grab the embed code and boom, it is done along with taking the forward the tweeter conversation to their blog post.I also like the fact that when you open the details a particular tweet now, Twitter directly takes you to the profile page of that user with the relevant tweet at forefront, seems like a hook for users to discover each other’s profile more.

36. I love twitter too. I hardly read newspapers anymore. I use twitter to keep stay up to date with the world I’m interested in and use it to keep the world up to date with me.It’s the perfect information overload filter. I run twitterific and scan the feed a few times a day.What I’d like to know is why twitter have 600+ staff and $1bn in funding. What do these people do? Maybe 100 people, but 600+?An average programmer can build the basic functionality of twitter in 2 hours – its really simple. I understand its value because of its network effect and critical mass and understand it needs smart people to handle its scalability issues, but 600+ people and $1bn? That’s a lot of people and money for a “simple” service.

    1. the # tab in the new twitter UI is a suggestion of where the 400 engineers are spending their timealso, scaling a service requires engineering

       1. DO SOMETHING USEFUL WITH 400 ENGINEERS MUCH HARDER THAN WITH 4. 

37. Late comment, unlikely to be seen, but thought I’d post anyway…My latest blog post using Twitter embeddables to the max:iPhone 4 Can Survive Being Run Over by NYC Taxi http://bit.ly/u0kEJt

    1. i like that the embeds work with photosdidn’t know that

       1. Yes, pleasant surprise. A little secret: I’m not on the new new Twitter yet, so I had to hack the html together to make these embeds work. Just looked at the source code to your post and swapped out necessary URLs and text strings. 

          1. ha!nicely done

             1. Thx

38. You said you were formerly on the board at Twitter.  According to various blogs, all investors were kicked off the board.  In reading and watching interviews with different Founders, I’m seeing founders advise against having investors on the board.  I would say my gut agrees with the Founders.  Does it matter to you if your not on the board of a company you invest in and what is the benefit of having you on the board as a Founder?

    1. Oops meant, what is the benefit to Founder having you on the board.  

    2. kicked off is incorrectwe had a contractual right to a board seatwe voluntarily gave it up when the company was far enough along that it did not need us anymorewe sit on the boards of almost every one of our portfolio companiesand we add tremendous valuei would suggest that entrepreneurs who think investors shouldn’t be on their boards go somewhere else for capitalwe don’t do the business that way

       1. Thank you for your response and setting the record straight.  I’ve just recently discovered your blog and it’s given me a lot to think about as a naive newbie entrepreneur when it comes to the relationship between founder/investor.  Thank you for blogging and also thank you for allowing anonymous comments to be posted.  I don’t comment on blogs like Techcrunch because of their mandatory use of Facebook commenting.  Again, thank you for your response, I have a lot to learn.  

39. For those wanting copy/paste, turn off Javascript.The alt-text is my favorite part of this new feature. It meant I could see the content of the embedded tweet and still get the gist while reading in Google Reader for Android. I realized I was seeing alt-text when Fred made reference to the actions I didn’t see. Very thoughtful to have considered an environment without Javascript (more common outside developed countries?). May also work when connection to Twitter not available?

40. ISif you believe what is written by the media, you will be wrong most of the time

41. understatement of this comment thread

42. That is definitely Jack’s influence. I saw a lot of the Steve Jobs approach to product launches yesterday.In the space of one press conference, they completely relaunched the entire Twitter ecosystem: web app, Android app, iOS app and TweetDeck.

43. WHEN ENTIRE STACK HELD TOGETHER WITH DUCT TABLE AND STRING, ADD NEW FEATURES NOT FIRST PRIORITY.

44. SOME ONLY KNOW HOW TO MANAGE DUCT TAPE AND STRING, AND NOT MORE. IN SOME CASE THAT ENOUGH. IN SOME CASE THAT ELEGANT. AND IN OTHER CASE IT LOOK SAD AND HOMEMADE AND NOT FLY GOOD.

45. Fred / Grimlock, can you elaborate? I’m using the Rails stack for my next business and wondered if open source is worth the risk in scalability.  So far I haven’t uncovered any showstoppers.

46. Yup. Lived it first hand

47. technical debt’s a bitch. however, can be worth it for business goals. 

48. Metal dinos can speak in ALL CAPS. Pink panthers, not so much. 😉

49. Actually, my handwriting is all caps, and has been forever. Product of architectural drafting.

50. i think you’ll find that the twitter experience with rails will go down in history. Rails new logo should just be the fail whale.

51. you’ll be fine. most of the technology that helps scaling is open source: hadoop, so called “nosql” etc vs sql (sql doesn’t scale as well in general).you can put a cache server(s) in front of the database: memcached, redis etc.also, you’ve got options of more efficient web servers. node.js is an example that doesn’t have a 2MB cost of memory per connection.rails took some criticism for scale issues in the past. these are mostly fixed, and would only be an issue at serious scale; at which point you can swap out some of the tech — twitter did this and swapped the queuing system to clojure.one of the advantages of rails is agility. this by itself makes it worth using for a startup imo.

52. Scaling has less to do with language and more to do with architecture.If you’re building a new town do you build a two-lane road or just plan for the future and build a sixteen-lane mega highway (just to be safe)?I don’t think it makes sense to plan for 60M+ posts per day (Twitter) in the very beginning. You can build as you grow.

53. IT EASY: HIRE ARCHITECT THAT KNOW WHAT DOING.WHAT KIND OF HAMMER USE LESS IMPORTANT THAN HIT RIGHT NAILS WITH IT.

54. i thought the point of twitter, tumblr, outside.in, etc etc etc is “we’re all the media now”? so are we really just scaling ignorance with these things?

55. That is good to know!  Twitter conspiracy theorists and haters should take note…glad to hear you are still bullish on Twitter’s future.

56. Jack is back

57. LIKE JOBS, EXCEPT FOR PART WHERE EVERYTHING NOT BEAUTIFUL AND NOT JUST WORK.JACK HAVE LOTS TO LEARN.

58. Nope. I just corrected traditional media with us media

59. Out of curiosity, what did you run into?Other than the iPad app still having the old UI, everything was working beautifully for me yesterday, including the new TweetDeck.

60. IOS AND WEB VERSION DROP REPLIES, ONLY SEE SOME ON BOXCAR. WEB VERSION HAVE SAME OLD PROBLEM WITH TRY TO SEND, DIALOG BOX STAY ON SCREEN, SAY HAS ALREADY BEEN SENT.LOTS OF LITTLE ISSUES WITH WEB VERSION FORGETTING WHAT STATE IT IN.

61. text not selectable, so no copy paste

62. Bummer. That’s not cool.