Twitter is important, but it's always been vulnerable as a company. When Twitter does something which upsets the community of users, it is often due to this vulnerability. Here's a story about an earlier time a billionaire tried a hostile takeover of twitter. Updated w/citations Back in the 2010-2011 a lot to people though twitter was a mess. It was through two founders as CEO and the COO had taken over. This opened the the door for Bill Gross at Idealab to try to take over twitter. He did it by creating a fund to buy up twitter clients.

The open easy to use RESTful api, and even federated twitter that @blaine built and @fredwilson signed off on trying as an experiment, twitter as protocol. That experiment failed, because it was built in XMPP and because the tech didn't scale at the time. Scaling twitter became the priority. We did get oAuth and ActivityPub out of those early hackathons at @OReillyMedia organized foocamps. The open api meant that a federated twitter wasn't needed, until the api got closed, of course.

Twitter is important, but it's always been vulnerable as a company. When Twitter does something which upsets the community of users, it is often due to this vulnerability. Let me tell you a little known story about an earlier time a billionaire tried a hostile takeover of twitter Back in 2015 Bill Gross at Idealab tried to take over twitter. He did it by creating a billion dollar fund to buy up twitter clients. If he got enough clients, he could make them post to his own twitter like microblogging site in addition to twitter.

This is kind of amazing, the @PortlandPolice now have their own live stream, so you can see from their perspective what it's like to be surrounded by thousands of angry citizens demanding police be held accountable. @PortlandPolice Please get a better camera person for your live stream, they keep messing up, can't seem to keep the camera stable and horizontal.

If you want to understand what happened with Shadow and the failure of the Iowa Caucus app you have to understand how electoral campaign tech work is done and funded. Let me tell you a story to make sense of it. The caucus app is firebase / react app built by one senior engineer who’s not done mobile apps and a bunch of folks who were very recent code academy graduates who as of a couple months ago worked as a prep cook for Starbucks and receptionist at Regus.