Stop me if you’ve heard this one. Founder of company leaves to start another company. Comes back a few times. Takes role of “Interim CEO” and starts personally doing customer support for celebrities. Haven’t heard that one? OK, well then check this out.
The other day, one Kim Kardashian (powerhouse app developer) PERSONALLY emailed Twitter and complained about the lack of editing support for tweets. You know, that feature that only famous people ask for because they constantly fuck up and say things that come back to haunt them? Yeah, that feature.
After a while she gets a personal response…from the previously mentioned Interim CEO Jack Dorsey!
Response time? About a half hour. Not bad, Jack. Not bad.
Mind you, Kardashian does have 33M followers so it’s a pretty good show for Dorsey to respond personally. She was pretty excited to hear back, too:
Oh wait, that was a smoochy pic with Kanye. Here it is:
EVERYONE IS HAPPY!
(Ugh, #FounderOfTwitterUnderstands. Why is everything a hashtag?)
Imma let you finish, Kim…but Taylor Swift had the best demand aimed at a company of all time…all time.
If this really happens, the edit feature that is, an exciting part of Twitter will die. That true real-time, off-the-cuff nature of the service will flush down the toilet. Yes, people say stupid shit all of the time on Twitter. Sometimes it’s even news. Being able to go back and edit a tweet opens up a gigantic can of worms:
– Is there an edit log?
– Can you go back and edit the contents of old tweets?
– Does the tweet get tagged as “edited” ala a post on Facebook?
– Etc. Etc.
Kim doesn’t want to edit tweets, she wants to erase the stupid things she says. The others lining up for this feature? Politicians and others in the limelight. We watch live TV because something crazy or stupid might happen. It’s not edited. Ever watch something with a few second delay? It sucks. I personally don’t want Twitter-on-delay.
Ohters might, I guess:
Also, these aren’t the kind of features that get your company to 500M users, it’s the type of feature that you think about when you’re afraid of losing the ones you have…especially the famous ones with 33 million followers.
It’s good to see Jack being active on Twitter, but I hope that his daily docket doesn’t include celebrity feature requests and is full of ways to bring Twitter to the masses once and for all.
Oh, also to take another company public.