In fact, Google had detailed its work on the Android Twitter client in a 2010 blog post, but much of the press coverage at the time didn’t credit the app to Google’s work, making this a forgotten bit of internet history. In Google’s post, the company explains how they implemented early Android best practices within the Twitter app. Beykpour told TechCrunch that the post’s author, Virgil Dobjanschi, was the main software engineer.
“If we had questions, we were supposed to ask him,” she recalls.
Beykpour shared other stories about Twitter’s early days, too. For instance, she worked on Twitter’s video app, Vine, (after returning to Twitter from a stint at Secret), and had been under pressure to launch Vine on Android before Instagram launched its video product. She met that deadline by launching Vine roughly two weeks before Instagram Video, she said.
The latter “significantly” affected Vine’s numbers, and, in Beykpour’s opinion, was what led to the popular app’s demise.
“That was the day the writing was on the wall,” she said, even though it took years to eventually shut Vine down.
At Twitter, Beykpour led the shutdown of Vine’s product — an app still so well-liked that even new Twitter/X owner Elon Musk keeps teasing about bringing it back. But Beykpour thinks Twitter made the right decision with Vine, noting the app wasn’t growing and was expensive to run. She admits that others may see it differently, perhaps arguing that Vine was under-resourced or didn’t have leadership’s backing. But ultimately, the closure came down to Vine’s impact on Twitter’s bottom line.
Beykpour also shared an interesting anecdote about working on Periscope. She joined the startup right as it was acquired by Twitter, and after leaving Secret. She remembers having to officially rejoin Twitter under a fake name to keep the acquisition under wraps for a time.
At Twitter, she also talked about the difficulty in getting resources to develop products and features for power users, like journalists.
“Twitter really struggled to define its user,” she said, because it “used a lot of traditional OKRs and metrics.” But the fact was that “only a fraction of people tweet,” and “of the fraction of the people that are tweeting, a subset of those are responsible for the content that everyone actually wants to see,” was something that Beykpour says was difficult to measure.
Now at Particle, her experience building Twitter is informing strategy for the AI news app, which has the goal of connecting people with the news they care about that is going on around them.
“Particle is a re-imaging of how you intake your daily news,” Beykpour says on the podcast. The app aims to provide a multi-perspective view of news while also providing access to high-quality journalism. The startup is looking to find another way to monetize reporting beyond ads, subscriptions or micropayments. However, the specifics of how Particle will do this are still in discussion. The startup is currently talking with potential publisher partners on how to compensate them for their work.
Content Courtesy – Tech Crunch
