1. Twitter's Sara Haider

Geek Out with Matt Navarra is sponsored by Pinterest. Inspire your audience and grow your company on Pinterest with a free business account. Learn more at business.pinterest.com. It's time to geek out. So it feels like ages ago since we first teased the idea of working on a podcast, but here we are. Finally, we're on air, so to speak. And hello and welcome to Geek Out with Matt Navarra, sponsored by Pinterest. I am Matt Navarra.

And I'm Martin SFP Bryant. This is a new podcast for tech and social media professionals, geeks, and anyone else interested in what's happening in the worlds of tech and social media.

Every episode we'll be discussing the week's most important news and chatting to a very special guest.

First though, I think we should probably explain why we're doing this.

Yeah, well, basically Martin and I used to work at The Next Web where I was director of social media and Martin was editor-in-chief, and we thought, Hey, you know, this would be a fun idea to do a podcast. So I started asking around to see if anyone was interested to find out what special guests might come on the show. And amazingly, we had yeses from everybody we asked and we had a sponsor interested really early on. So here we are.

Yeah, that's basically it, isn't it? We've lined up some excellent guests for upcoming episodes, including key names at big tech companies, journalists, even a politician. So do stick with us, subscribe, and you'll get a new episode every week.

But more on them as we continue through the series. But if you do want to get in touch with us on Twitter, use the hashtag Geek Geek Out Questions, and you can find me there as Matt Navarra.

And on Twitter, I'm Martin SFP.

Our guest today is Sarah Hyder, Director of Product Management at Twitter. So Sarah, welcome.

Thank you for having me, Matt.

Great. Could you just tell everybody a little bit about what you do and your background before Twitter and now at Twitter? Because there's a lot of people like me who are complete nerds and geeks who are complete fans of yours, but at the same time, there's a lot of people that have probably no idea and would love to know a bit more about you.

Sure. So I'm in product management at Twitter. I've been in product management for a few Come next month, it will have been 10 years since I started at Twitter. And I actually started as an engineer. About a year out of college, I went to the University of Waterloo. I'm Canadian and got some strong roots there. And joined as a very junior engineer a year out of college, working on internal tools. And I've worked on several, several teams at Twitter over the years. And at some point, I moved into product. And that's what I'm doing now.

And you're now kind of in a position of transition, I guess, from one role to the next. So that's something that's exciting for you as well, I would imagine.

Yeah, about to change teams and tackle some new adventures. So I'm excited about that.

Well, great. Well, we're going to talk to you a bit more in detail in a few moments. But what we would first want to do is talk a little bit about some of the things that are going on in social media in the last week. There's been a ton of news that have been plowing through the Twittersphere and all the other platforms I gather news from. So I'll just hand over to Martin and talk a little bit about what's been going on this week.

Absolutely. Yeah. So, uh, just to explain the kinds of news we're going to be covering in this show, since it's a brand new podcast, uh, it's basically the kinds of things you'll find in Matt's Facebook group, the Social Media Geek Out. So if you're a member of that, then it's the kind of things that get discussed in there we'll be discussing in this show. So largely social media, but lots of other tech stuff as well. Uh, and the first thing this week is, uh, around, um, Facebook saying it may remove like counts. Um, and at the same time, YouTube phasing out public-facing subscriber Tribe accounts. And, uh, so this is, this is an interesting trend we're seeing now where, uh, we've had Instagram, they're testing the removal of, uh, like counts, uh, publicly, uh, in 7 countries at the moment. And, uh, now their parent company Facebook saying they're going to do the same thing and, and try that out, uh, all around the idea of mental health and not being stuck in a feeling that you're not popular enough because all your friends are getting more likes than you. And, uh, with this idea, you'll still see how many likes you're getting, but no No one else will. And then the only popularity contest you're going to get into is with yourself. So if you want to compete with yourself, that's what you can do. But there'll be less of a feeling of, oh, they're more popular than them. Matt, what are your thoughts about this?

Yeah, this has been a long time coming, I think, because part of the reason now we're seeing things to do with regulation from different governments around the world to do with social media is this concern over digital well-being and what people's motivations are for posting certain types of content. And, you know, we've had issues around, you know, polarizing polarizing content and misinformation. And some of these like counts are a part of the problem, some think, I think. So I think it's a good move that it's being tested. And as you were just discussing there, there's a couple of places that they're trying to remove these kind of counters of vanity metrics, I think is what people tend to call them, to see if that has a positive or negative impact. And I guess it's not just around positive and negative for the user. But as a business, there's a question mark over that as well. And I think from the most uproar I've seen is typically from marketers and influencers who often don't actually understand what the changes are. That, you know, this isn't a foolhardy removal of all of the metrics so you can't see them on your post. This is more on the kind of public-facing side. But I don't know, Sarah, if you kind of had thoughts on this at Twitter at all. Is this something that you've kind of been following with any interest at all?

Yeah, that's a really good question. In our prototype app, TWTTR, we've been testing new layouts for conversations on Twitter. And one of the things that we have been trying to learn about is what if we put the engagement actions, so the like and the retweet button, behind a tap, along with the counts, kind of behind a tap. And testing out what we can learn from an experience like that. And the motivation for us behind that is really around, can we let the content stand first? Can we clean up the UI to make it easier to read? Can we encourage people, even though it's a subtle change, can we encourage people to read the content first before looking at the engagement counts to make a judgment about the quality of that content? And I think it's been really interesting because it is a change and a lot of people, you know, we've heard from a lot of people that they really miss those counts and that it is an extra tap to get to them and that that can be challenging. But we've also heard from people that they're finding that they're actually reading the content more. And this is something we want to dig into and I don't I don't know if this is the exact right solution to get to what we're looking for. And we are, you know, testing out various options here. But I think something around encouraging people to read the content, not having immediate reactions based on those counts, is something that we're really, really interested in. And, you know, I think you've mentioned you know, what do, you know, how people are thinking about this. What do those numbers do for the competition and your psyche and vanity metrics and whatever? And that's something that we're thinking about as well. But we're kind of taking a, a comprehension angle to it in our prototype app at the moment and trying to figure out if there is something that we can do to make the content really stand first.

If Twitter totally got rid of any kind of retweet counts and like counts publicly, it would end ratio shaming. The idea of where people talk about the ratio of someone who's shared a particularly controversial or maybe bad opinion and they've got 1,000 replies and 4 retweets and 5 likes and things. Maybe a mixed blessing for some people who like shaming people on their ratios, but it might make things a bit more calm and pleasant and less confrontational. I don't know. But yeah, interesting stuff.

I think this is why our prototype app, which we call internally, we call it little t. It starts with a little t, tWtTr. I think that's one of the great things is that we can test some of these things and take people's feedback into account and understand how the changes to these features feel before we bring them into the main app. I think, you know, there are a lot of, lot of different use cases and scenarios in which you might get a lot more replies than likes. One is kind of the ratio that you were talking about. Another one is if you ask a question. If you ask a question, maybe it's, what's your favorite sushi place? Or, you know, should I watch this TV show or whatever? You'll see a lot more replies than likes. And we're really trying to understand what are the patterns that we see for certain kinds of content, especially for really engaging and interesting content, you know, what are the patterns that we can see around engagement for those conversations? And so it's not always as simple as like, oh, this is, you know, it's got more replies than likes and therefore it's a ratio tweet. So just something to think about.

We'd have to make this podcast about 2 hours long because I could literally spend about 2 hours just discussing that topic on its own. So this stuff fascinates me. I hope it was interesting to everybody else. But what else is happening on this week as well, Mark? And there's a couple of other stories we've been picking up on.

Yeah, so, been interesting, viral deepfake app out of China. Now, we Brits, Matt, would call it ZAO. Americans would probably call it ZAO. But it's been very popular, apparently, in China, although there's been a bit of controversy around it as well. Basically, the idea is it supposedly deepfakes you into popular films. So you can put your face on you in, uh, Titanic. You know, suddenly you're in, in a big scene out of Titanic, for example. So this is the idea, you know, deepfakes. Uh, people have probably read quite a bit about them, uh, and the panic around them, around the idea that, uh, you can make, uh, I don't know, you could make Donald Trump, uh, say something that he's never said and put that up as a, a video and, uh, cause a massive storm and of controversy, uh, that kind of thing. And obviously the idea of just normal people people being deepfaked into being put in situations they were never in, that kind of thing. There are concerns around it. But this app, mainly people have been— from the report from a site called Ruddy China, basically people have been worried about this company behind the app, Momo, them basically collecting lots of face data and what they might do with it and might it end up with the Chinese government, that kind of thing. So perhaps some legitimate concern there. But also, Concern around terms and conditions and terms of service on that particular app. But to me, that seems exactly the same concerns we see on all these apps. People complaining about, oh, it says they can make copies, as many copies as they like of my photos and put them in any country they like. You know, it doesn't mean that the CEO is going to be pinning them up in his holiday home or something. It's so they can move them around to servers and things. So for me, I mean, the company has clarified a lot of stuff about how they'll use the data they collect. For me, I think it's more about making sure that companies are really clear about how they use data. What were your thoughts about this story, Matt?

Well, this reminds me a lot of all the stories that seem to be coming out at the moment regarding social networks in terms of there's a kind of an instant expectation or assumption that whatever any of these— some of these apps are doing, and I know this isn't a social network per se for this particular app, but whatever they do, it's always with a bad intention. It's always with bad motives. It's something that's kind of— they've got kind of a sneaky craft thing that they're trying to do that's not in your interest. And so I kind of try and always see the positive in most things, and that's probably not always to my benefit or to everyone's benefit to see things in that way. So I don't like the fact that we're so cynical now and we're almost expecting it to be a negative thing and it's not a positive thing. You know, I like the idea of some of these AI and deepfake stuff, the technology behind it and how that could be used in more useful and helpful ways. But at the same time, you know, we know that people will inevitably abuse that technology. So I'm hopeful that this isn't an example of a new technology that's being abused for bad things. But we don't know. But I guess this is just yet another thing for someone like Twitter to be thinking about and worrying about in terms of content that goes out there that looks even more plausible and could lead to additional concerns about fake news and things. Is that something that gives you any sleepless nights at Twitter, Sarah?

Yeah. The app that you're talking about specifically is definitely very interesting and a new take on what's possible in this space. And I think this is something that, you know, a lot of folks are thinking about, and we're certainly keeping an eye on to see how it progresses and how these things are used. And look, if we see the use of these deepfakes to spread misinformation that is in in violation of our policies, whether that's governing election integrity, integrity, or targeted attempts to harass or abuse anyone, or any of the other Twitter rules, we'll take enforcement action against that account. And what we've seen is that, in general, attempts to execute misinformation campaigns that could include these kinds of synthetic media or other tactics, they tend to use other tactics that are against our rules today, such as account manipulation, automation, spam, etc. So definitely something we're keeping an eye on.

There's been another story this week as well about Twitter. Martin, what has it been all about?

Yeah, yeah. Sarah, we won't ask you about this one. We'll let you sit this one out because I'm sure you don't want to comment on your CEO's security arrangements. But we should mention it. Jack Dorsey's Twitter account was hacked and it was spewing some rather distasteful things. Yeah, for me it was less a story about Twitter and more a story about personal security and how we look after our data and how our phone numbers, particularly because this was related to the security of Jack Dorsey's phone number as opposed to his Twitter account. And so it really makes you think about how many weak points there might be in your security arrangements and that you might not be the CEO of two public companies, But you still wouldn't want something like that happen to your account. So thinking about things like having an authenticator app or a physical security key for logging into things like Twitter is probably preferable to connecting up through SMS and not having your phone connected to too many services, all that kind of thing. Matt, what are your thoughts?

Yeah, I think I agree with much of what you were saying there and a lot of the reports reporting, you know, a lot of reporting was focusing around, you know, the ways that your accounts can be attacked by those bad actors that want to do it. And so, you know, I always forget that, you know, the SMS, the two-factor auth stuff there isn't as, you know, safe as sometimes maybe you assume it might be and that it's better to use these authentication apps. I think obviously from a Twitter point of view that, you know, the obvious headline grabbing mentioning was this is the CEO of Twitter, and, and if their account isn't safe, whose account is safe? And I, you know, I think that that's an interesting make for a headline, but I don't think that, that for me that was the most exciting talking point. Neither was the content that was put out. You know, the second I was on TweetDeck and I saw a tweet go out and it was saying some of the stuff that these tweets said, you just knew, or anyone with any kind of interest in this stuff would know, this isn't him tweeting, this is somebody that's taken over the account. And of course there's questions over the account security and things, but, um, it was an interesting story. And I think today there was actually a story about Jack saying that he hasn't actually got a phone number right now after, after what's gone on. And I guess he's reviewing how he tackles that. So I think it's a— it was an interesting story, let's put it that way.

Yeah, absolutely. And we should just say that in response to this, Twitter posted that the phone number associated with the account was compromised due to a security oversight with the mobile provider. This allowed an unauthorized person to compose and send tweets via text message from the phone number. That issue is now resolved. So obviously, if you have ever tweeter via text message, and you're not doing that anymore. I used to do that. Actually, I used to use that service years ago when I was in Japan in the middle of nowhere, and I could tweet, and I couldn't read anything that anyone might reply to me, but it meant I could tweet from like the remote Japanese countryside. So it can be useful, but yeah, having a full security audit of how different ways your accounts can be compromised, and thinking about that sensibly is always important. And just some breaking news coming through as we record relating to that story: Twitter support has said, "We're temporarily turning off the ability to tweet via SMS or text message to protect people's accounts. We're taking this step because of vulnerabilities that need to be addressed by mobile carriers and our reliance on having a linked phone number for two-factor authentication. We're working on improving this, say Twitter. So there you go.

Good stuff.

Well, that's—

yeah, I think it's some valid points in there. Hopefully, uh, there won't be another incident with any other executives from social media companies because that's, that's not good for news headlines for them. We're going to speak in more depth with Sarah in just a moment, but first, Geek Out with Matt Navarra is sponsored by Pinterest. Now, you might already have your own impressions of what Pinterest is, but it's worth understanding the platform properly. Basically, Pinterest is a visual discovery engine. It's where you find and do what you love. It's not really a social media network work. It's more like personal media.

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So inspire your audience and grow your company on Pinterest with a free business account. Learn more at business.pinterest.com. So Sarah, we've got a couple of questions for you, and one of the first things that everybody who spoke to me this week who said, oh, you're speaking to someone at Twitter that's senior, you've got to ask them this question, and I bet you can guess what question that is.

Any, any ideas what they wanted me to talk to you Is it about, I don't know, maybe editing tweets?

There you go. You know exactly what the score is. So this is a question that you have been asked and others have been asked at Twitter so many times, and it'd be really boring for me to now just ask you the same question again about is there going to be an edit button? So I guess what I wanted to know is there's clearly mixed opinions externally. There's also mixed opinions, I'm guessing, internally at Twitter. There must be people there that think it's a good idea, people that think it's a bad idea. Could you just tell them, the audience that are listening, into this a little bit about what, what the dilemma is for creating an edit button and what issues it could cause as well as the benefits it could give. And then, and I'd just love to know a bit more about what your opinion is personally about what you think about an edit button.

Sure. So I'll start by saying that I think everyone internally agrees that if, if we were to implement an edit feature, we would have to do it in a responsible way because the potential for manipulation, you know, having someone retweet something that you edit to say something else at some later time is, you know, a vector that we would want to avoid. So there's definitely some tricky things here that we would want to consider and be very thoughtful about. And it's, as you can probably imagine, not as simple as, you know, as may meet the eye. One of the powerful things about Twitter is that stuff can travel very, very quickly. And so we want to be careful that, you know, the people that are helping amplify certain messages know what they're amplifying. You know, having said that, we want it to be easy for people to fix typos because I think the majority use case here is for people to, you know, add in that extra word that they forgot or that apostrophe or, you know, change the spelling of something that they spelled incorrectly. And we totally get get that. And there are other things that we could do to maybe help you compose your tweets in a way that reduces the chance that you've made a mistake. So that's something we're thinking about as well. But just something to keep in mind is that tweets have always been, you know, immutable, which is maybe a technical term, but uneditable. And we syndicate tweets to a lot of places. It's not just to the apps. You know, we syndicate tweets all over the web. We syndicate them over SMS. And we'd have to be very thoughtful about how we would issue corrections or changes should they happen. That's all to say that it's, it's, it's a, it's a significant amount of effort. And it's not that we can't do it, but it's just not a top priority right now, given all of the other things on our plate. When you, when you take a when you have a think about the effort versus the value. And, you know, from a product perspective, those are the kinds of trade-offs that we think about every day. Personally, I am not anti-edit. I think it would be a useful feature. But I definitely agree with the prioritization at this precise moment, which is it's not at the top of our list.

And has there been a version of an edit button that has existed existed internally? Because my understanding from, from speaking to a few people over the last few years is that it has been dogfooded. It's been internally tested in some capacity and you've played around with it. It's never seen the light of day. Is that something you can say has happened and you've played around with a few different options of how it might look, or is that something that has not got to that stage of prototyping it?

Or— I don't know exactly what you might be referring to, but, um, we've definitely thought about what the user experience might look and what might make sense there. But that doesn't take into account the significant effort on changing the system to allow editable text. So, you know, for all of our kind of consumer-facing and end-user customer-facing features, we often think about the consumer experience first. So that's not unusual. But it doesn't necessarily consider the— some of the edge cases or the effort needed to kind of build everything out in the backend.

If nothing else, if you did build an edit button, you'd at least stop people asking you the question, when are you gonna get an edit button? So that would be one big win.

You know, if that's the biggest complaint I get every day, I can live with that.

You can live with that. Martin, you were gonna ask something about Twitter.

Well, yeah, I was just thinking actually AI spell checking, you know, like in Google Docs, that kind of thing. Some kind of spell checking as you type would probably stop me me ever having to use an edit button anyway, because most of the things I have to delete tweets for are little typos. So that's— if I'm going to give a product request, that's not an edit button, it's inline on-the-go spell checking.

Great. I think that's an awesome idea. I imagine that even if we were to implement that, which would be very useful for you and for me, people will still ask for the edit button. So just something to be aware of. Yeah, that's true.

Yeah. Now, I've been using the prototype app you mentioned earlier for a few months now. I use it as my main Twitter app. So TWTTR, which I've been calling Twitter, but I assumed that wasn't how you pronounced it yourself. So it was nice to hear how to actually pronounce it.

Yeah, we pronounce it— I mean, T-W-T-T-R is pronounced Twitter, but internally, because that can get very confusing, we call it little t. Yeah.

So how's it going then? Obviously, you've talked a bit about this in the past, but it must be quite an interesting experience to develop in public. It's not the usual way of doing things to really have a conversation with your users, especially a massive app like Twitter, to have a conversation with your users about a new new interface approach, a new way of doing conversations. So what are you learning from the app?

Yeah, the experience has been really interesting and really awesome. And as you mentioned, it is a new way to kind of develop in the public and get real, really real-time feedback as well as, you know, the feedback from folks after they've sat with the feature for a while. And what we were, you know, what we were thinking behind this is that we want to make some changes to the way how conversations fundamentally work and are laid out on Twitter. And that's not something that we can just unveil with a big bang on, you know, on a specific day. In addition to that, the effort involved to build out some of these changes can be significant from an engineering perspective as well. What we wanted to do was test out a lot of these changes and iterate on them as quickly as we can so that we can gain some confidence in knowing that we're going in the right direction before we kind of bring everything back to the main app. What has been awesome and different is, you know, it's scary. It's new. It's scary. We've made a lot of iteration. We've made a lot of change. You know, not everyone is happy with everything we put out, especially especially at first. And it's, as a developer and as a product person, it's really being vulnerable in the public. And it's, you know, there are testing programs, there are beta programs, all of that stuff exists. But what I think has been really unique about this one is that, one, there's no NDA. Anyone who's in the program can tweet their screenshots, they can tweet at us, they can talk to reporters, they can, you know, do whatever they like. And two, this isn't— we're not testing a version of the app that's right before launch just to get the bugs out. That's not the stage that we're at here. We're testing in the very early versions of these new layouts and this new way of thinking about conversations well before we get to the, okay, this is what we call beta, which is why actually we've been kind of trying to avoid I try to avoid saying that it's a beta because it's not. A beta implies that you have alpha, beta production, and this is way before that. We are still in the kind of figuring out phase of what this is and are we onto the right thing and, you know, doing a lot of user research and a lot of both quant and qual studies to figure out how this is being used, really doing deep dives in customer feedback and really looking at the conversations that unfold from people that are using Little T to get the insights that we're looking for. So, this has been new, fun, exciting, scary. I think it's been a mindset shift for the people that are working on it to be kind of vulnerable in this way to the public because the stuff that we put out is not, you know, in a super polished state that you might expect from the production app. So it's been cool. But what it has allowed us to do is iterate very quickly and learn faster than we could doing this in our production app. So that's been pretty cool.

Great. And then one of the things we wanted to ask you, Phil, as well is a bit about people criticizing and saying they don't like things. Like I put out a tweet a couple of weeks ago when it was one of the latest updates. Updates to the app. And I showed some examples of screenshots of the changes to the conversation view in Threads. And there was a lot of people that thought it was great. But there was also a lot of people who were saying, this is rubbish. It looks awful. And what are they doing? They're stupid at Twitter. What are they doing? How does that feel to you as working on a project and you're seeing that kind of conversation going on?

Yeah, I mean, people— I mean, we listen to all of the feedback. And what I try to do personally is to see what the actual feedback is beyond any of the snark or the name-calling or whatever, to try to see if there's anything beyond that. I also find that if you just respond to people online and just say, "Cool, thanks for your feedback. What did you mean by this?" They tend to be a lot more civil. But, you know, we started this venture almost a year ago. I think it was last November I tweeted a very, very early screenshot that was kind of delayed deliberately bad and ripped the band-aid off on all of the negative and all of the negativity that was going to come with it. And, you know, change is difficult. People don't like change and people can often react very badly or, you know, very passionately to change. But that's okay because in those comments and in those reactions there is actually good information to glean out of that to actually to understand what it is about the change that people don't like. And to also understand that with any change, even if it's the best possible change you can make, there is still gonna be some negative reaction. So last November, I made this tweet. It got a lot of positive responses. It got a ton of negative responses. And, you know, from a personal perspective, you just kind of have to harden and expect that. And that was new for our team. And that was kind of one of the first things that we did that really kind of pulled the bandaid off on being vulnerable in public this way. And now, looking at it almost a year later, you know, I think both myself and the team are way more comfortable when we do actually put out things that we, we are more proud of and we are more polished about, that we have the learnings of getting all that negativity out of the way, that we know how to react and how to get the best out of the the responses that we get. So it's all been a learning experience. I think it's been, on the whole, very, very positive. It really helps the team and myself understand how to even interpret reactions online. So it's been pretty cool.

And conversations is the first part of what you're testing, because I think it was discussed at the beginning that we're looking at various things and using this app to understand new features or test new features out of or new UI, new UX. Are you able to tell us what the next thing is? If conversations and threads has been done and when it gets done, is there a roadmap in terms of what those things are, or is that yet to be decided?

Or, uh, yeah, so to reiterate, uh, little t and conversations right now are synonymous together because that's the thing that we've been testing. Uh, but we do intend to test more things in in little t outside of the new conversations layout. Nothing to share on that right now, but I am excited for where prototyping can lead us in the future.

Good stuff. Okay. Well, something else, just changing the pace slightly to talk about the mental health conditions that people are trying to link and associate with the use or excessive use or continued use of social media. Part of the reason that regulation is being thought to be brought in for these social platforms is a discussion about the fact that young and vulnerable people are affected by use of social media. And there's things that now we've seen with platforms like Facebook and Twitter and others that are trying to promote a healthier use of social media, to have a healthy relationship digitally, and to give them tools and features that enable people to control their online life, I guess is what you would call it, such as removing like counts or such as giving them counters for how much time they've spent online. I just wondered if, you know, do you think that Twitter is doing a lot in that space? Do you feel that sometimes Twitter's accused of maybe moving slowly to tackle some of these product challenges or to not be as reactive to these things as maybe others? Do you think that's a fair criticism? And what is Twitter doing in this space to address some of these concerns?

Yeah, this is a really interesting topic. And I think, as you probably agree, It's kind of new territory for this decade, maybe. If you told me 15 years ago, 20 years ago that this is something that we'd have to think about, I would have maybe said it was something out of science fiction. But this is something we definitely think about. And one of the ways that we think about this at Twitter is that we want Twitter to be a daily utility for you. In which you learn something, engage with something, and kind of try— we want you to leave the experience being smarter or more knowledgeable than you were before. And we, you know, in that light, want this to be a daily utility. So we don't actually have specific goals around the time that you spend in the app. We want you to get value out of the app every day, but we don't need you to spend hours in there, and we want to be mindful of, you know, things that we do that would encourage that. We want you to get use of it every day, but also not be— we also aren't as concerned of you being a monthly user, because we don't think that if you're using it once a month that you're getting the value that you might, that you could be getting out of it. So, maybe that sort of kind of sets the framework of how we're thinking about this. It's not about time spent, but it is about being utility day to day. And then we also are thinking about controls and different features with respect to the way the app works to give you more control and to make your experience on the app better. For example, one of the things that we're testing in Canada right now is a hide replies feature. So if you are the original author of a conversation, you're the, you're the person who started the conversation, you have the ability to hide replies within that conversation if you don't feel like they were productive or you don't like them or whatever. We're trying to balance that with some transparency to make sure that people aren't just outright censoring folks that are participating in the conversation by making those hidden replies transparently viewable on a different screen. But it can help if someone's written something kind of nasty underneath your conversation. You don't have to continuously see it every time you go back to that conversation. So doing things like that to kind of help your experience. Another thing is algorithmically, we've been working on hiding and downranking, really, replies that are less productive or can be considered toxic so that you don't even see them. And we think that those are important things for general mental health and safety. As well.

Martin's got itching to ask about something that he's really fed up with or wants to change about Twitter. Martin?

Yeah, DMs. I use DMs loads, and I've always said there's been talk over the years about a standalone DMs app from Twitter, and there's been reports in the past about perhaps Twitter working on one and then maybe abandoning it or whatever. I've always said that Twitter should have a DM app, a standalone messaging app app for private messages using Twitter accounts. Call it Slide. And yeah, it'd be a cool little messaging app that I would use loads. So do you think we'll ever see a DMs app? Is it something that's been worked on in the past? What's happening there?

This is a good question. We are reinvesting in DMs. And we've been building out a team A lot of them are based in Boulder, which, you know, I'd love to talk about kind of the way we've been thinking about distributed teams and stuff too. And we've been working on awesome features and also kind of some table stakes things in DMs that we haven't been able to get to in more recent years. So everything from performance, search, a better secondary inbox, and there's more to come. On DMs. And, you know, like I said, we're building out the team. So definitely watch this space. You know, I'd be curious to hear from you why you would want a separate app versus just using the main app. And I would be curious to hear from you what is it about Twitter DMs that makes it, you know, that makes it something that you want to use versus another messaging messaging app. Just so I can understand where you're coming from with the question.

Go on, Martin.

Sales pitch.

Sales pitch.

Do your best. Go on. Well, part of it is I just like the idea of a DM app called Slide.

I think it's a cool name for an app. They're never going to get through finance. They're never going to go with that.

True. Yes. But other than that, when I look at the amount of messaging I do, there's a lot of it through Facebook Messenger. There's a lot of it through, you know, WhatsApp and things. But other than that, a lot of the messaging I do is through Twitter DMs. And a lot of the time I'm on TweetDeck and it's a column and it's a bit fiddly, or it's— I just feel like there'd be more space to breathe with features in a standalone app.

So let me just kind of re-ask that. Are you using DMs because you're already are you already on Twitter? Or is there something specific about the people that you're connected to on Twitter and those are the people you're messaging? I guess I ask that question because I wonder if that changes if it's in a separate app. And now, you know.

Mm. Yeah, yeah. So for me, I suppose it's around the idea of the people I'm connected with on Twitter are generally a broad professional network. So people I work with or talk to a lot professionally, but also the kind of people who are maybe people I messaged 5 years ago and suddenly I want to just check up on about something with them, that kind of thing. A lot of, you know, tech investors and people like that who I might be speaking to occasionally. It's just a great way of pinging them because they're obviously all in Twitter. And so for me, it's just like the best messaging app out there in terms of the network I have available at my fingertips.

I'm glad to hear you say that. I'll definitely let the DM team know that we've got a fan here. Yeah, I mean, you know, no plans right now for a separate app, but we'll, I'll definitely take that feedback back to the team.

Sorry, we should just say as well, you mentioned wanting to talk about distributed teams because this is something that's absolutely huge at the moment with tech companies wanting to expand beyond the increasingly expensive tech hubs. And so, you've got companies like like Automatic that are entirely distributed. So, yeah, how is Twitter looking at expanding its distributed network of stuff?

So I think we're at an exciting time at Twitter in that we are more and more distributed than before. And I think there's still a long way to go. And there's still a lot of challenges that we're working through. But we have kind of reinvested in encouraging distribution and remote work. Like I mentioned, you know, we've been building out this, this DAMs team in Boulder. We also have teams in New York, Boston, Seattle, London. And we are getting better every day, every week, every quarter. We're getting better at how we work together together remotely. So one example of the— some of the processes and practices that we've adopted is what we call the silent meeting. And what this involves is often at the beginning of the meeting, there's a product of work of some kind. Maybe it's a document, maybe it's a deck. And we all together, we read the material silently and leave comments in the doc. And then after that period of silent reading, we talk about the important comments or the ones that are still kind of outstanding out loud. And one of the things that is really cool about this is because some of the meatier parts of the conversation, they happen synchronously but not out loud. So you're not dealing with, you know, AV issues or like, I'm sorry, you're not close enough to the mic. Mic or whatever, the other things that can happen in meeting with remote people. It also helps people who may be remotely don't know the right time to jump in. Not just remotely, sometimes people sitting in the same room with you don't know the right time to jump in. This gives them an opportunity to have their opinions heard or ask their question in a way that's kind of a combination of synchronous and asynchronous that is best best of both worlds. We've taken this concept in a lot of the meetings that we have at Twitter now. I find that it's very effective, especially getting to the root of, or the meat of what we need to discuss in a meeting.

Yeah. Would you get to the point where you're hiring, say, a really talented developer who happens to live in a remote part of Scotland or something to work on this team you're talking about in Boulder, for example? Because a lot of companies now are hiring around the world wherever the talent is, rather than just saying, oh, we're opening an office in London or wherever.

Yes. And so we're doing both. And I work with a lot of people who work out of their homes or out of other kind of working spaces in areas that we don't have offices. And it's working. It's working really well.

One of the questions that I desperately need to get in here, otherwise, if I don't get this in by someone else who's asking me to ask is gonna go nuts. But I am asked by people on Twitter, on Facebook, in any, any messaging app they can get hold of me on is, Matt, can you get me verified? And I'm sure I've spoken to a lot of Twitter staff and they've said to me over the years, yeah, that's what my friends and family say as well. And one of the things that we heard about verification was a little while back now that there was a big process of review for the whole verification setup in terms of how it would be, how people would apply, what the meaning of it was behind it. I think there was a job that was posted from Twitter. I don't know if it was earlier this year or end of last year for somebody to kind of head up that team. As far as I'm aware, verification as a process is mostly closed except for exceptional circumstances, which you understand that happen with big politicians or whatever else. I just wondered if you could give us any insight into where things are with Twitter and verification and what the state of play is. Sure.

So as you mentioned, verification is on pause. Let me just kind of revisit the history and intention behind verification. So originally, back in, I don't know what year, more than 10 years ago, before, before I joined Twitter, the intention of verification was to help people figure out, you know, official accounts versus versus impersonators or parodies or what have you. And what happened over the years is that people started to take verification not only as authenticity of the account, but also as a form of endorsement from Twitter. And that is— was not the intention, but also —just saying that, saying that, oh, like, verification is not endorsement is also not enough if that's the perception that people are having. So we had to kind of really take a step back and think about, you know, what verification is supposed to mean and what it would mean regardless of what we want it to mean. What is the perception? Because the perception is the reality. So, you know, it's a complex. It's a complex thing. And we want to be thoughtful about how we go about thinking about verification. So it is on pause and I have nothing else to share about that at this moment.

No worries. Well, I'm conscious that we're rattling fast approaching the end of the time we've got with you. So there's a couple of questions that we wanted to get in there with you to talk about. One of the things that I want to I've always seen Twitter as having quite a narrow set of features and functionality for users compared to, say, something like Facebook, which is, you know, you go to post a new status update and you've got a raft of options and formats that you can use to post things. And with Twitter, you have, you know, you can attach a GIF or an image, and there's limited else you can do with, like, editing of photos that you attach to your tweet and things. And I just wondered, is that something Is that something that Twitter is conscious of and is an intentional part of how it is, its brevity? Or is there something that you see as a possible weakness that it needs development for, and that maybe being able to attach a PDF or being able to attach an audio clip in a different way and other— broaden out the functionality, is that something that has ever been discussed? Or what's the background with that?

Sure. Let me just start with maybe just a framework for how things work. Things have been thought about in the past and how we're thinking about it now. I think there was a time many years ago where we still weren't quite sure what Twitter was, and that meant that, you know, things like, hey, let's attach PDFs to tweets would be, you know, something that we could, we could have a serious conversation about. But as the years went on and we, we realized that what Twitter is for is to see what's happening and discuss what's happening and all the conversations around what's happening. And that is super important from a product perspective to, for us to kind of guide the features that we think about building and prioritize the features that we think about building. And that guidance has been very clarifying for us. And that's not to say that, you know, PDFs to tweets are a bad idea. And if we found that there was a need, a real user need around around seeing what's happening and sharing what's happening that involves, you know, attaching PDFs to Twitter and/or to tweets, and that that was an opportunity in our space that felt like, you know, people really need, then that's something we would consider. At this moment, I don't think PDFs to tweets are at the top of that list. And I think what you've said around the, you know, the brevity and the simplicity The simplicity of Twitter is definitely part of its superpower. And that's just— those are just kinds of the tradeoffs that we have to think about when we're looking at the gamut of ideas of what to do next. You know, is it guided by our very clear purpose around serving the public conversation and making sure that people can see what's happening and participate in the conversations around what's happening?

We've got two quick questions left for you. I think Martin's got one a bit about your career that we wanted to ask, and then I've got one sneaky one at the end, and then we'll wrap things up. Martin, talk a bit about that.

Yeah, yeah. You've got some really impressive apps on your resume. You've worked at Vine, Secret, Periscope, three hot apps of their time. And certainly when I was working as a full-time tech journalist, they were apps that I was following very, very closely. Very carefully indeed. Now, obviously, you're in a very senior position at Twitter. What would you recommend someone wanting to follow a career path like that?

What would you recommend they do? Yeah, I've had definitely a fun time working on a lot of different social apps. I think it was also during a time where it was kind of the glory age of consumer social apps as well.. So, the timing there was particularly— it amplified, I think, how much fun all of that was. For people who are interested in working on apps in general, I was always very customer-focused in the way I went about engineering and development. And that really lent itself myself to working on consumer-facing apps and, you know, trying to create delightful user experiences. I worked in Android for most of my engineering career and at a time when the Android user experience was notably inferior to the iOS experience. And I kind of really took it to heart that I wanted to create delightful experiences on Android. And really thinking about it from the user perspective and from the usability perspective. So my advice is, you know, to folks that are interested in that is to be super focused on the user or to find what that sweet spot might be for you and to kind of carve out— carve out roles for yourself that can utilize visualize what you think that sweet spot might be. As I had mentioned earlier in our chat, I'm often deployed in the zero-to-one phase of a project, and that's kind of been my sweet spot. I have taken things from nothing to something repeatedly. It's a special skill, and it's a different skill to be able to take something from 1 to 2 or 2 to 3. And that's, you know, that's where I shine less. And I think for folks that are thinking about their next career move, I would, I would encourage people to look at where in the development cycle they think they shine the most and to try to get experiences in those places.

Well, and we really appreciate that you've come on today's podcast with us. It's been a real pleasure to have you on. I just wanted to get one last quick thing. I did ask you before you came on about a question I was gonna ask, and I wondered if what you're gonna come up with, and it was just to ask you if there's any little unknown features or hidden Easter eggs or things that people like, oh my God, I didn't even realize that was there, or quirky things that the developers have snuck into the code that maybe some people haven't noticed. Was there anything you could quickly share with us that people could go and find that they didn't maybe realize was there?

Sure. So I've got I've got 3/4 really quick ones. I say 3/4 because 2 of them are really related. On the Twitter app, if you use multiple accounts, maybe you have one personal account and one for your company or your brand or something, you can press and hold the home button to quickly switch between accounts, which I feel like a lot of people don't know. Nice. That's very useful. Useful. And then very related to that, you can also press and hold on the second button to quickly launch into search. So that's another kind of pro tip. Nice. Good. Another thing that I recently learned that people don't always know about is if you swipe into the dash on the left where you see your profile and your bookmarks and your lists and all that stuff. At the very bottom left, there's a light bulb, and you can use that to quickly switch between light mode and dark mode. So if you were going into settings to change the mode that you're in, you don't have to do that.

There's a shortcut. Nice. That's good as well.

Finally, one for little T. It's something that we've tweeted about a bunch, but I still get messages sometimes that people don't know is I'm not sure if we're going to keep this forever, but at the moment in Little T, you can swipe left to like a tweet. If you are struggling to tap and like, and you feel like that's too many taps away, we've implemented swipe to like. I love that.

I use it all the time. It's brilliant. Are you still accepting people into the prototype to eWTTLR? We are.

They tend to go in waves. So if you apply at the link, it was tweeted out from Twitter support, and I can also send you the link to send out to your audience later.

We'll include it in the show notes. Yeah. Yeah.

Well, I'm surprised or disappointed, I don't know which one it is, that you can't do something on the Twitter app where you swipe up twice, left 3 times, and down once, and the picture of Jack comes up singing a song by Rick Astley or something like that. That was what I was thinking the Easter egg was going to be, but those are good enough. —enough for me. So I want to say real big thank you to Twitter because you are our first guest on here. We really appreciate that you were willing to talk so openly about some of the things that you're getting up to. And we really hope that you come back in season 2 and chat to us a bit more. But for now, Sarah, it's been a pleasure, and I hope we get to chat some more sometime soon.

Awesome. Thank you guys so much for having me on. Thank you.

Thanks a lot. Now it's time for Quick Hits, which is a section of the show where we'll look at all the fun little things that have been spotted being tested in apps or new features that maybe you're not aware of. And Matt is one of those people who seems to spot a lot of these things and share them. So, Matt, I'll hand over to you.

Thanks. Yeah, I am the ultimate geek when it comes to this stuff, I guess. So I should figure out what we've been seeing in the last few weeks. So a couple of quick ones, and they're mostly Facebook this week. Facebook Messenger screen sharing features. So this is something that Jane Wong spotted, and it's basically an extension of of the video conferencing facilities that you see video messaging and video calls within Messenger. So we've seen a couple of apps now that have come out in the past year where you're able to share your screen since iOS enabled that feature for, for other apps. And so you can imagine a scenario now where you will be able to be having a call with one or more friends on Messenger, and then you'll be able to share the screen and show them what you're doing and what you're flicking through and what you're watching or what you're reading and things. So whether that will see the light of day, like all of these small things, who knows. But that is something that was spotted in the last week. Another thing is a minor thing, but I think it's probably more exciting than it really is, which is Facebook on its homepage where you sign up to be on Facebook and you fill in all your details about your name and register for an account, which many of us probably haven't done for a long time and might not do again. It does say the words, it's free. 'free' and always will be. But someone spotted this week that it's changed to 'it's quick and easy.' So there was instant speculation around the fact— is that a suggestion that Facebook is going to start to charge, or is there something more interesting going on there? My suspicion is probably not. It's more likely that this is just one of many A/B tests that seem to perform particularly well at onboarding people and nothing more. But maybe we'll see something else on that in the coming months, but we don't know. Also, Facebook showed off a design, a new simple, bold, fresh design, F8, for its desktop version of Facebook.com for the newsfeed. You know, brighter colors, simpler icons, and bolder text. Everything was a little bit kind of more minimalist. And finally, some people have started to see that roll out to them in different countries around the world. And then finally, also, there's a tool called socialmediatoolcomparison.com. It's a simple website that was on Product Hunt, actually, where you can go in, and as a social media manager, one of the tricky things to do sometimes is to be able to figure out which third-party management, monitoring, or analytics tool you want to use based around the criteria that you're looking for, for certain features or certain functions or a price that you can afford per month. And although this is built by a company that is itself a third-party vendor that does social media management tools itself, I still think it's a really useful tool. You can filter all sorts of criteria and figure out which platform, whether it be Buffer or Hootsuite or Socialbakers, might fit the bill for what you're trying to do. So socialmediatoolcomparison.com is the site to have a look at, and it's made by a company called sociality.io. Nice. Well, we've reached the end of the show.

I think that went pretty well for an episode one, Matt.

I was quite impressed myself, actually, and I'm quite proud of the fact that we got through it. I'm sure people are going to pick holes in some of the sound quality or the production values, but we're faking it till we make it. And that's all that matters to me. This was a throw-up as an idea many, many weeks back, and we finally made it to this stage. So I'm proud nonetheless. But next week is looking pretty good as well. Absolutely.

So this Geek Out title for the podcast came from the Facebook group. So if you want to discuss the podcast, you might want to head to the Facebook Facebook group. Yeah.

So if you want to join the Facebook group, search for Social Media Geek Out on Facebook and you will find the group. And tell us next week who is on the show.

Yes, next episode will be out next Thursday. It's the 12th of September, and our guest will be Kerry Flynn, who is a tech journalist who has worked at several different places, recently landed at CNN. So she's a real big deal now and will be discussing all sorts of exciting things around the future of social with her.

So I'm really looking forward to having her on. She's a good friend of mine, and I'm really sure she'll tell us some fascinating stuff around social with her strong opinions as always, which is exactly why we love her. So I've been Matt Navarra, and I'm on Twitter if you want to find me, send me some messages. I'd love to hear a bit more from you. And you can also use the hashtag #GeekOutQuestions, and I will have a look and see if there's anything in there that's really exciting and interesting from people listened to the show. Also, you can record a message to us through Anchor. So if you go to anchor.fm/geekoutmatnavarra, you'll find an option to record a message, and maybe we'll play some of those back in future shows. Absolutely.

I'm on Twitter as Martin SFP, so do find me there. And Geek Out with Matt Navarra is a Big Revolution production. You find out more about Big Revolution at bigrevolution.net. We'll see you next week. Thanks for joining us. Goodbye.

Goodbye, geeks.