It was called “Flocks”. It even had transient/temporal flocks based on geo check-in and sound-fingerprint flocks for movies, tv shows, and events. We implemented the Shazam audio signature algo from a research paper we found.
The thesis was: it’s more natural for people to have conversations when there’s a shared context.
It became a widely known project within the company back then, but ultimately, like most things at Twitter, never shipped.
Also, “nest-ed comments” on different “branches”.
You could work backwards and find the bird-related concept and then build the correspond technology?
What would “feathers” be?
“Feather” (a play off a quill) was my prototype (I built a lot of prototypes there in my “spare” time :)) for a richer, write/tweet only app. You could author long-form content, quickly jump into the camera for recording video or taking a picture (goal: frictionless citizen journalism), and other stuff. I wanted to build a delightful tweeting experience and at the time, it felt like the mobile implementation was just yanked wholesale from Web.
During the pandemic we started a sort of "virtual mst3k": cue up a film, everyone presses play at a particular time, and tweet along with jokes and the occasional screenshot. We're now up to film #300 and still haven't run out of "bad" movies. An endless source of cinematic surprises.
("bad" is very loosely defined, but if it's a critical success or made a lot of money, that's probably not it. We've seen a lot of Roger Corman, Shawscope, Hammer, Amicus, Cannon Films, Dino de Laurentiis etc)
> ultimately, like most things at Twitter, never shipped.
This is why the "Twitter will die instantly when 80% of the engineers are sacked" takes were wrong, isn't it? 80% of the engineers were working on products that would never see the light of day, instead.
Sweet project.
Thanks for the kind words! <3
Maybe Google can try replicating Reddit in YouTube - it would just be serving text instead of video; discovery would be via their recommendation algorithm, i.e. no subreddits. Frankly, they can kind of already do this, you can post community messages on YouTube. They just need to tweak the algorithm to recommend such messages.
They can't. Google as an organization just doesn't understand social networking.
They've had comments and forums (community?) for ages. Do you know how to engage in that community? Do you know how to even track your own comments? Etc.
On YouTube actually yes, it’s in “History”. :P
edit: great idea though it functions pretty much exactly as you described, get into product if you're not yet!
