As horrible and blatant TechCrunch might have been, it's not even 1/100 as bad as Silicon Alley Insider, which ran the following headline following the story:
"Twitter Rolling Out New Website To Kill TweetDeck and Other Third Party Clients"
I'd call it anything but "blatant misreading." Everyone knows the massive hype surrounding Twitter's api. There are companies who've raised millions banking on twitter api. While I think that's bad strategy for those companies, I don't blame a bunch of folks with millions on the line to panic at a tweet from a twitter employee that threatens their existence. If I'm one of the companies that depends on twitter, I'd want to know everything behind that tweet.
It's forgivable if Alex overlooked that perspective but this is by no means techcrunch's fault. They reported what he tweeted.
Partner relationships are very sensitive. I have a product that is being sold by a reseller who has two sales people pushing it. One of the sales people heard a rumor from somewhere(a classmate) that we might be selling directly in the market so he would have to compete with our in-house sales staff for the same business. He contacted us in panic. We had to assure him that while we do plan to do in-house sales, that is for other markets. Point is, when you have good partnerships that are not just fluff, you also need solid communication.
If developers didn't care about the twitter api, they wouldn't give a shit about this tweet. Because they care about it, twitter should be very sensitive to how they communicate with developers.
>> It's forgivable if Alex overlooked that perspective but this is by no means techcrunch's fault. They reported what he tweeted.
No, they didn't. They took what he tweeted, gave it a sensationalist headline, and vomited out a few paragraphs of text designed to drive traffic to their site. That is most definitely not reporting.
>> twitter should be very sensitive to how they communicate with developers.
Alex tweeted his opinion about some cool things to come. This is not "communicating with developers", it's making an offhand comment. Twitter communicates through developers through a mailing list, and several official accounts (@twitterapi, for example), not through the personal tweets of its employees.
I don't think it's Alex's responsibility to analyze in advance how every thing he tweets might be interpreted. TechCrunch and Silicon Alley are to blame for the over-sensationalized writing.
I don't think it's Alex's responsibility to analyze in advance how every thing he tweets might be interpreted.
Let's just say we have a serious disagreement there. He essentially tweeted about private future plans of twitter, something I'm pretty sure you cannot do. If you are an employee and you tweet about strategy, you have a responsibility to think from all angles. Otherwise you risk hurting the company you are working for out of negligence--never a good thing in any employee.
Were he revealing something important, I might agree with you. He tweeted, basically, "there's some cool new stuff coming soon". There's almost no information in that. Additionally, I've seen similar things from other twitter employees.
This was nothing until Techcrunch put their spin on it.
Yeah, you have a point, but Alex Payne obviously felt it was misinterpreted, and it's pretty easy to see how that might motivate him to stop blogging (dare I say, be less private online, ironically enough).
>> Point is, when you have good partnerships that are not just fluff, you also need solid communication.
You really, really do.
While I don't think the various tech blogs that "reported" on my tweet did anyone a service by blowing it out of proportion, the onus for communicating poorly and freaking out our developers over nothing is ultimately on me.
http://techcrunch.com/2010/02/27/new-twitter-features/