I was up way too late on Wednesday night watching the Blue Jays-Rangers game turn into an actual demolition derby in the seventh inning, and if you were anywhere near Twitter when Jose Bautista hit that three-run homer and flung his bat about forty feet into the air, you know exactly what I mean. My timeline just broke. Not literally, though it felt close. Replies loading five seconds behind. Everyone posting the same six-second clip from a slightly different angle. It's the kind of moment that reminds me why I still open that app compulsively during any big game even though half the time I complain about it.
And that's the weird part of this week. Two days before that bat flip, Twitter announced it was laying off 336 people, about 8 percent of the company. Jack Dorsey, who just got named permanent CEO earlier this month after doing the interim thing since Dick Costolo left over the summer, sent around a memo about moving faster and being more disciplined. A couple other execs echoed it in their own notes. The stock's been stuck below its IPO price for a while now and investors keep openly asking when user growth is going to start looking like a real number again instead of a rounding error next to Facebook.
Here's my honest, not especially hot take: I don't think Twitter's problem is headcount. I think Twitter's problem is that the thing it's best at, live chaotic everyone-yelling-at-once bat-flip-level real time reaction, is not the thing it's been trying to sell to new users for the last two or three years. They keep bolting features onto the side. Moments launched a couple weeks back and it's basically a curated highlights feed, which is fine I guess, but it's solving a discovery problem, not a "why should my mom sign up" problem. Meanwhile the actual killer use case, watching a game or an awards show with a few hundred thousand strangers at once, barely gets mentioned on earnings calls because it doesn't map cleanly onto a growth chart.
I'll admit I have a soft spot for this because I've had a Twitter account since basically forever at this point (this blog is almost four years old, my Twitter is older than that), and the app has never once been better at anything than it is at "something is happening right now and I want strangers' opinions on it immediately." Not Facebook, not Instagram, and definitely not whatever Google Plus is doing these days, RIP mostly. If I'm being a little unfair to the product team, fine. I use the thing every single day. I just wish the company acted like it knew what it was good at instead of chasing whatever metric the last board meeting was unhappy about.
Layoffs are always rough for the people involved though, and I don't want to make light of that part. 336 people losing their jobs two days before your product has one of its best nights of the year is a genuinely strange bit of timing, and nobody planned it that way on purpose. Corporate calendars don't care about the ALDS schedule.
One small tangent since I'm already off topic: I started using Tweetdeck again just to run a column of nothing but game hashtags during stuff like this, and it's honestly a better live-sports second screen than any of the official apps MLB or the networks have put out. Been true for years and still nobody's really beaten it. If you haven't touched Tweetdeck since Twitter bought it back in 2011, it's worth a second look. The column setup alone makes it feel like a completely different product than the main timeline app.
Also, a small correction from last month: I mentioned the new Nexus phones as if they were already shipping, and they're not, not quite. Preorders opened a couple weeks back but the 5X and 6P are still a bit out depending who you ask. I'll actually get my hands on one before I write anything more definitive about them.
That's it for tonight. Back to watching baseball.