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Published · transcript-backed

Dick Costolo: evaluation

28 Oct 2020 Acquired Twitter (with Dick Costolo)

“I think if I remember correctly, we, this whole time don't ever have access to the Facebook API.”

— Dick Costolo

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Speaker
Dick Costolo
Attribution
Verified speaker
Claim type
evaluation
Recorded
28 Oct 2020
Publisher
Acquired

Transcript context

…I love the phrasing, too. Like, oh, the team has decided. It's a bad user experience and I don't think you should do it. More urgently, turned off like four hours from now or five hours from now, the number was just going to break Twitter. We need 36 hours to go make it so that that just doesn't break when you post an Instagram link and at least show the link. We hustled and did that work. Engineers stayed late that night and we did a bunch of work. People are constantly calling me and emailing me that week like, why did you do this? I didn't do it. Everyone knows that it's a better experience when that photo that you wanted to post actually shows up. Nothing I can do about it. I can't go over there and show them all the mail and say, look at all the people you've made sad. I think if I remember correctly, we, this whole time don't ever have access to the Facebook API. We were blocked from using it. You can't go use the social graph—fat chance. At this point we're like, well, why are we going to be the schmucks that keep letting everybody use our stuff when we're blocked from using all theirs? Shut that off. Then, it didn't matter because they had the Facebook social graph. It is so interesting reflecting back on it. Instagram really has a perfect fit with Twitter—the asymmetric follower model, instead of the friend model.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.

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