#NewTwitter Was Going To Be Less Ambitious, But CEO Ev Williams Wanted More

Jason Kincaid

Jason Kincaid worked as a writer for TechCrunch from April 2008 through 2012. He grew up in Danville, California and later relocated to UCLA in Los Angeles, California, where he studied biology with a minor in ‘Society and Genetics’. You can reach him at jkincaid@gmail.com → Learn More

Tuesday, September 28th, 2010

Today at TechCrunch Disrupt, our own MG Siegler led a panel called Design vs. Engineering, featuring Charlie Cheever (Quora), Jason Goldman (Twitter), and Bradley Horowitz (Google). The conversation focused on the relationship between UI and the engineering muscle driving it, and how important each is to the success of a product.

During the panel, Jason Goldman, who leads product at Twitter, mentioned that New Twitter — which is a total redesign of the site with a bevy of new features — was initially planned to be a less ambitious, more iterative product. But CEO Evan Williams stepped in and said that users needed “something much better for end users”.

Goldman also detailed some of the work that went into making NewTwitter. The product resulted from a collaboration of a three-man design team, Twitter’s engineers, and CEO Evan Williams. These three groups essentially locked themselves in a conference room and didn’t come out until they’d sown the seeds for what would eventually become New Twitter. And it’s certainly paid off — Goldman says that user response has been quite positive.

Company: Twitter
Website: twitter.com
Launch Date: March 21, 2006
Funding: $1.16B

Created in 2006, Twitter is a global real-time communications platform with 400 million monthly visitors to twitter.com, more than 200 million monthly active users around the world. We see a billion tweets every 2.5 days on every conceivable topic. World leaders, major athletes, star performers, news organizations and entertainment outlets are among the millions of active Twitter accounts through which users can truly get the pulse of the planet.

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