Rebranding could very well be the most strategic decision an organization ever makes. Brand equity, after all, represents the sum total of how customers, end-users, and other stakeholders feel about the organization – and why they choose to interact with it in the first place. It can’t be bought, it must be earned and strengthened over time.

Executed well, a rebranding can build on that foundation. It can keep the brand fresh and competitive – even relevant – amid the relentless pace of changing consumer trends, and of course shifting competitive pressures.

A botched effort can just as easily dilute years of hard-won brand perception and damage carefully cultivated relationships with stakeholders. So organizations normally decide to evolve their brands only after months, or even years, of careful planning. 

Elon Musk’s Twitter was not one of those organizations.

MORE THAN A MERE PAINT JOB

Earlier in my career, I was part of a team responsible for rebranding a multi-billion-dollar global tech company. The inside joke among staff was that our logo was a time capsule of sorts, with colors that instantly reflected a long-lost decade that no one necessarily wanted to remember. Not exactly a recipe for success for a company selling advanced technology solutions.

For six months, the marketing department quarterbacked an organization-wide effort to identify every possible impact of the planned change. Notably, only the logo and color scheme were changing: the actual company name was untouched. Our team painstakingly identified, reviewed, debated, and project-planned every last asset that fell within the scope of this strategic initiative. Stakeholders throughout the company were pulled into the all-hands effort.

While a few cynics in other departments jokingly called the effort a paint job, thankfully they were in the minority, and in the end the updated look did wonders to rejuvenate brand perception. As the new branding rolled out with military precision across the organization’s products, facilities, websites, and apps, it spawned long-overdue – and healthy – discussions about what the organization meant to its stakeholders.

DON’T TWEET THIS

Consider, for a moment, where we’re at a week after Elon Musk announced via a middle-of-the-night tweet storm that Twitter was being renamed as X. Specifically, the twitter.com website has a new logo, the x.com domain redirects to twitter.com, and the corporate @twitter account has shifted to @x, but only after the company forced the original owner of the account, Gene X. Hwang, to give it up. Don’t worry though, they offered him some merch and a VIP tour of their HQ building in return.

Consider what hasn’t been touched yet:

• The apps have not been updated.
• Color schemes, font choices, layouts, and all other design elements remain unchanged.
• Email and other corporate messaging still reflect the original domain.

Even the removal of the physical sign on the corporate headquarters building in San Francisco turned into a mirror of how little advance planning went into this change. Police showed up soon after the workers began taking the hardware down, as a permit for the work had apparently not been secured.

The patchwork, reactive tone to this rollout betrays the fact that the company’s remaining staff hadn’t been spending the last six months focused on this critical change. We’re forgiven for assuming they learned of the rebranding at the same time as the rest of us did.

UNDERSTANDING THE WHY

To be fair, Mr. Musk has a solid case for radically shifting his company’s brand direction. Even before he launched his bid for the company, Twitter had been losing money amid tepid advertiser interest, a stagnant user base, and weak end-user engagement. Leadership at the time was hesitant to make the fundamental changes necessary to refocus the organization, address its core challenges, and position it for an increasingly turbulent future.

The original microblogging mission was no longer sustainable – particularly in light of intensifying competition from Meta’s Threads, Jack Dorsey’s Bluesky, and Mastodon. Mr. Musk had been hinting for months that his long-term goal for the platform is to replace it with an ambitious X app that incorporates far more than just microblogging or messaging. This would be akin to Tencent’s WeChat app in China, which counts over 1 billion monthly active users and is widely seen as the definitive “everything app”, including text messaging, streaming, videoconferencing, gaming, and mobile payments and banking. 

Ambitious, sure. But unfortunately, Mr. Musk lacks the resources to pull it off. He fired three-quarters of his staff, and has wrestled with failing infrastructure and outages ever since. From a development perspective, it’s difficult to see him attracting and retaining the kind of talent – in numbers and quality – required to build and maintain an “everything” platform at this scale.

CODERS KNOW

Fortunately, rebranding isn’t rocket science. As I experienced when I was part of that rebranding team, developers and related technology resources play a key role in shepherding the company through the critical planning and execution steps. If your organization is planning to freshen the brand somewhat, consider the following:

1. Audit the brand. Task the marketing team with documenting the current brand identity, market position, customer perceptions, and any identified gaps. Leverage your developers to identify core apps, platforms, and systems used in tracking key metrics, and providing updated and ongoing reports to feed the decision-making process. Use the data to confirm strengths and weaknesses – and prioritize them.
2. Define your digital identity. Online resources like websites and apps are the face of the company – and developers are central to creating an identity that drives the rebranding effort. Since they’re the ones who will be updating the websites and apps and tweaking the user interfaces, they should be at least part of – and ideally orchestrating – all discussions from the start of the project.
3. Understand the back-end impact. Changes to front-end elements like web and mobile applications will impact back-end systems like servers, databases, and networks. Software developers will be able to translate those changes into operational requirements – which will form the basis for detailed project planning and execution. They will also be able to prioritize work packages and minimize risk to ongoing operations.
4. Improve the user experience (UX). It isn’t enough to change some colors, craft a new logo, and call it done. Rebranding efforts should improve customer engagement and help the organization expand its mission and perform at a higher level. Developers have always been key to ensuring the underlying systems support the external goals of the business. Make sure their voices are heard as part of the rebranding process.
5. Test proposals and iterate. Rebranding involves far more than drawing a new logo on the back of a napkin and handing it off to a graphic designer. Ideally, multiple branding elements should be created, then tested against each other to gather feedback and measure effectiveness. Developers are instrumental to building the right tools and managing the data.
6. Monitor performance. Never assume rebranding is a one-time act. Rather, it is a long-term process. Developers create, integrate, and manage the kinds of analytic tools that can monitor key performance indicators (KPIs), such as brand awareness, sales, and customer engagement. The resulting data gives the businesses the insights it needs to make better decisions – and helps shape the rebranding journey over time as the organization continues to evolve its branding strategy. Developers are instrumental to the success of this data-driven process.

THE BOTTOM LINE

Whatever we now choose to call the company, the rebranding effort does little to snuff out the fires that continue to dog both its day-to-day operations and its long-term outlook. As well-intentioned as the new effort is, the key resources who would have quarterbacked the rebranding effort from the moment Mr. Musk first took over, simply were not involved.

The lesson to the rest of us is a stark one: listen to your developers and use those conversations to build out your roadmap.

In this particular case, x doesn’t yet mark the spot, and it remains unclear whether it ever will.

—

Want to learn more? Connect with us on LinkedIn.

The post Developers take notes as Twitter rebrands as X – and kills the bird for good first appeared on STEP Software.

Meta bills Threads as a new app “for sharing tech updates and joining public conversations.”

At first glance, it looks a lot like a mashup of Twitter and Instagram. The visual language is all Instagram, while the functions are reminiscent of early-days Twitter – before the bots, the trolls, and the Elon Musk-imposed daily usage limits.

None of this is a surprise given how Meta itself describes Threads:

“Instagram is where billions of people around the world connect over photos and videos. Our vision with Threads is to take what Instagram does best and expand that to text, creating a positive and creative space to express your ideas. Just like on Instagram, with Threads you can follow and connect with friends and creators who share your interests – including the people you follow on Instagram and beyond.”

Already, critics note a distinct lack of certain features, including support for hashtags, direct messaging, editing, or a “people you follow” feed. Instead, the interface presents a single feed that confusingly lumps together users we follow and users we don’t.

Meta is also raising questions around its decision to tie the Threads and Instagram accounts so closely together that deleting Threads will also delete the Instagram account to which it was originally linked. The company explains that’s because the Threads profile is, by design, an integral part of the corresponding Instagram account. Regardless, this architectural quirk serves as yet another reminder to read the terms of use carefully.

None of this is a surprise, as this is a typical v1.0 release. To the company’s credit, though, head of Instagram Adam Mosseri is already responding to requests from users, and says they’re working on a list of features to add in future, including, but not limited to, hashtags, a followed-users feed, and the ability to edit Threads.

Launch quibbles aside, expect the Threads stampede to burn bright for at least the next little while. It’s early days yet, and the new platform will evolve over time. Already, Threads has a higher character limit per post (500 vs. Twitter’s 280), longer video limit (5 minutes vs 2:20 on Twitter) and its support of longer conversations is more fully-baked than it is in the competition. By virtue of its very name, Threads makes it fairly easy to initiate, join, or follow an entire conversation, as it’s been architected from the ground up to work this way.

QUESTIONING THE FUTURE

The arrival of Threads reignites the long-running debate over whether the world even needs a Twitter alternative at all. Amid the rush to sign up for the new service, there’s a quieter but still consistent undercurrent of voices saying they will not join in.

Despite the hype over feature comparisons and big-ego billionaire clashes out in the market – and potentially within the ring if the Musk vs. Zuckerberg cage fight actually happens – the arrival of Threads represents something of an inflection point in the history of social media, perhaps the end of the Big Social era and the early stages of a transition into what we view as the Post-Social age. It means a growing number of people are questioning the why of social, and whether they’re getting out of it what they’re putting in.

Based on the experience of the last 15 to 20 years or so of social media – with its litany of concerning mental health impacts, trolls and cyberstalkers, rampant mis- and disinformation, and cyber stalking and cybercrime, among others – that equation is a negative one for many, and the debate over whether or not to register for Threads is part of a healthy – and long overdue – global discussion over how digital citizens ultimately want to spend their time.

SPRINGBOARDING OFF OF THE TRIED AND TRUE

Debates notwithstanding, what jumps out as particularly well-executed is the way Meta tied the Threads launch into Instagram. As new users first register on Threads, notifications fan out across their Instagram network. The registration process itself makes quick work of following any or all Instagram connections. The app even allows a user to follow someone in Threads before they’ve installed the app – and will then auto-follow that individual once they get on-board.

This deliberate integration with Instagram addresses the key reason why competing apps – notably Mastodon, Hive Social, Post News, and Jack Dorsey’s still-in-beta BlueSky – have all flared in initial popularity, only to fade back into relative obscurity as new users realized there was no one around to talk to. This is not the case with Threads, and that means it has a better chance than most to stick around beyond the honeymoon period.

Meta also has rather deep pockets, so it’s easy to see the company happily funding the new platform over time while Mr. Musk struggles to convince advertisers to return to Twitter. Notably, by Musk’s own estimate his initial $44 billion investment is now worth less than half that. He has famously clashed with vendors over payments for everything from rent, catering expenses, travel, and network services as part of a broader drive to cut costs.

Indeed, the arrival of Threads is a case of coincidentally perfect timing, as it comes immediately after Twitter’s latest decision to place significant limits on the number of tweets that can be viewed within a given day. Social media is based on maximum engagement and unlimited use, and this most recent edict spawned a particularly strong response among the Twitter community.

Notably, the limitations were imposed just before the June 30th renewal date for Twitter’s network services contract with Google Cloud.

THE LEGAL OPTION

To no one’s surprise, Twitter isn’t entirely pleased with Threads. Hours after its initial go-live, Musk had his lawyer, Alex Spiro, send a cease-and-desist letter to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg that says X. Corp., the holding company which owns Twitter, “has serious concerns that Meta Platforms has engaged in systematic, willful, and unlawful misappropriation of Twitter’s trade secrets and other intellectual property.”

The letter further accuses Meta of poaching Twitter’s staff: “Over the past year, Meta has hired dozens of former Twitter employees… these employees had and continue to have access to Twitter’s trade secrets and other highly confidential information.” The letter further explains, “The workers owe ongoing obligations to Twitter,” and many of these sale employees “have improperly retained Twitter documents and electronic devices.”

Meta says the claims are baseless, adding that no ex-Twitter employees were ever assigned to the Threads development team. Recall that Mr. Musk has laid off around three-quarters of Twitter employees since taking over, and he famously criticized some of them as they departed by saying they added “no value”.

The letter is a clear signal that Mr. Musk is worried about the new competition – as he should be.

THE BOTTOM LINE

Threads represents the biggest single threat to Twitter’s future, as it addresses virtually all of the technical failures built into previous wannabe-competitors, namely the fact that they all forced users to rebuild their networks from scratch. 

While Threads is far from ideal in its current form, like any software developer with a reasonably mature understanding of how software development is supposed to work, Meta is listening to its community, drawing up a roadmap for future updates, and communicating its strategy to stakeholders.

This is how software development is supposed to work. Meta seems to get it. Mr. Musk? We have our doubts.

Check back here over the next few weeks and months as we continue to share thought leadership on one of the most significant battles in the software and services space in recent memory. We’ve established our own account on the new platform –  https://www.threads.net/@stepsoftware – and invite you to connect with us there, as well.

The post Is Meta Threads a Twitter killer? The answer may surprise you. first appeared on STEP Software.

What should have been a 21st century digital political coming out party quickly turned into an unmitigated technological meltdown as Twitter’s servers failed under the load of an estimated 600,000 visitors. The plan was for Elon Musk to introduce the Florida governor in a Twitter Space virtual livestream, then have DeSantis take the stage and announce his bid. But it quickly devolved into a string of glitchy audio as Musk and his team wrestled with technology that refused to cooperate.

After about 20 minutes, Twitter pulled the plug on the livestream. When a new livestream was restarted, only a few minutes later, less than half of the original audience stuck around to hear him announce his candidacy.

Musk’s apology – “That was insane, sorry.” – did little to stem the rising tide of headlines that focused more on the collapsed infrastructure than on DeSantis’s message. The hashtag #DeSaster quickly gained momentum, while the @JoeBiden account jokingly tweeted “This link works” alongside a donation link for the President’s own campaign.

David Sacks, the venture capitalist who moderated the event, said the platform simply got weighed under by the crush of attendees.

“I think it crashed because when you multiply a half million people in a room by an account with over 100 million followers, which is Elon’s account, I think that creates just a scalability level that was unprecedented,” said Sacks, who was also a product lead at PayPal when Musk owned it.

His comments suggest the company’s infrastructure wasn’t prepared in advance to handle the anticipated traffic. Which, for a web services company that lives and dies on its infrastructure, is a frankly surprising admission.

ONGOING IMPACT

 Within hours, Twitter’s chief engineer, Foad Dabiri, tweeted that he had had enough: 

“After almost four incredible years at Twitter, I decided to leave the nest yesterday.”

In doing so, Dabiri adds to the mass exodus from a company whose staff has been decimated by 80% since Musk took over late last year.

That exodus lies at the root of the chaos that derailed the DeSantis event – and adds to a long list of outages and anomalies on the platform over that time.

NetBlocks, which monitors internet outages, reported Twitter, which experienced nine widespread outages throughout 2022, suffered at least four similar incidents in February alone.

According to a New York Times report based on interviews with current and former employees, Twitter has shuttered one of its three main data centers and has significantly cut staff and leaders responsible for back-end infrastructure like cloud storage and servers.

Meanwhile, reports of anomalies on the platform continue to pile up. On March 1, two days after the company pink-slipped another 200 staff, a global outage took down user feeds and the For You timeline and search services. Less than a week later, an API issue broke links, images, and a number of third party apps.

Last week, another bug – possibly due to a botched server migration – resulted in tweets that had been previously mass-deleted suddenly reappearing in users’ profiles. The company, which disbanded its media relations team and now responds to media inquiries with an auto-generated poop emoji, did not comment on this latest issue.

DEATH BY 1,000 CUTS

On an individual basis, each of these outages is hardly cause for alarm. But when viewed within the broader context of a gutted IT competency  coupled with Musk’s highly public campaign to cut costs to the bone, they suggest an organization increasingly unable to keep the lights on. Thinking that Twitter can host high-profile events that attract the equivalent of a mid-sized city’s population is bordering on madness.

The truth is it can’t. And Twitter’s lesson is a stark one for organizations of any size and in any sector who think drastically thinning out back-end spending will help the bottom line.

Unfortunately for them, it never seems to work out as intended. All it does is defer necessary spending while increasing the potential for outages – which ultimately costs the organization, directly and indirectly, far more than any miniscule savings realized by slicing necessary pieces off the infrastructure budget.

It’s the same lesson learned by too many car owners who thought delaying routine maintenance would be an easy way to save some cash. It didn’t work with the old Chevy and it won’t work with Twitter. Or any other business for that matter.

THE BOTTOM LINE

Back in March, we wrote about this very issue. The DeSantis debacle now serves as a stark validation of those fears, and reinforces why this issue was universally important then, and it remains so today.

As staff members begin to plan summer vacations and their kids prepare to finish off the school year, now is the ideal time to shine the light on infrastructure spending and strategy. Because while any cost-cutting-related failures here may not necessarily be as globally witnessed as last week’s Twitter meltdown was, they will undoubtedly be painful to your bottom line.

The post DeSantis campaign launch livestream meltdown reaffirms Twitter’s tech decline first appeared on STEP Software.

The New York Times reported on March 26th that Twitter had sent a copyright infringement notice to GitHub. The company asked the developer forum to remove a repository containing what it said was leaked source code. GitHub removed the code the same day, and while it was not immediately known when the leak first occurred, the Times reported the code had been exposed for a number of months.

The optics are troubling. Any leak of source code is worrisome for any company. For a software or platform company, however, it’s infinitely worse. Source code is essentially the master key to an organization, particularly one, like Twitter, whose entire value proposition revolves around the code it creates and deploys – and if it gets out, then there’s no telling what malevolent actors could do with it.

There’s no way to sugar-coat this, a loss of this type is potentially business-killing for any company. Source code is the modern-day equivalent to closely guarded secrets like KFC’s 11 herbs and spices or the Coca Cola formula.

In a competitor’s hands, for example, it could be used to reverse engineer existing features. In a cybercriminal’s hands, it could be used to compromise the underlying security of the platform. Whatever the use case, a source code leak or breach is about as bad as it gets.

BUT WAIT, IT GETS WORSE

This would be troubling enough for any organization, but especially so at Twitter. 

That “but” is one of context – since Elon Musk took over, it’s been one slipup and debacle after another, all of them tied back to the new owner’s famously thin-skinned and impulsive management style. Beyond sheer optics, the company’s finances are collapsing, and Twitter is now reportedly worth less than half of the $44 billion that Musk paid for it.

Worse, the skilled developers and leaders who would be expected to respond to this leak no longer work for the company. Twitter must now neutralize the compromised code and toughen the security of the remaining environment to minimize the potential damage – but its remaining staff lack the specific expertise to do so.  

Instead, the company is essentially being run by a skeleton staff of those who have survived four major rounds of layoffs, and borrowed resources from Musk’s other companies, like Tesla, SpaceX, The Boring Company, and Neuralink. These inter-company transfers may be experts in their respective domains, but they lack the institutional knowledge that’s walked out the door since Musk’s arrival.

TALENT (MIS)MANAGEMENT

As part of Twitter’s legal motion to have GitHub remove the repository, it has asked the collaboration platform to identify the individual who posted the source code, as well as anyone else who might have downloaded it afterward.

Twitter has also launched an investigation, with reports suggesting executives believe the leak was the responsibility of a disgruntled former employee who left the company toward the end of 2022.

THE RIPPLE EFFECT

This latest crisis has massive implications for the millions of end-users who continue to use the service daily, as it suggests continued erosion in the company’s ability to protect its core assets from internal and external threats. If Twitter is unable to secure its own source code – or even identify the breach months after it was first leaked – then that should light off alarms to all users that they can no longer trust that their own accounts remain secure.

Twitter is already sagging under the weight of skyrocketing rates of abuse, racism, and misinformation – plus advertisers continue to shun the platform amid concerns around protecting their brand from appearing alongside questionable content. The Twitter Blue subscription service, which was supposed to help open up a new revenue stream beyond advertising, has raised barely $11 million in the 3 months since it went live. Losing its source code won’t help and adds to the freight train crash for a platform that was once considered the conscience of the internet.

THE BOTTOM LINE

Twitter’s latest headline-making mess should serve as a wakeup call to companies concerned with their own security. Every organization relies heavily on a range of software to power its business. And while every environment is unique, we are all potentially at risk if clients or vendors within our own respective organizational footprint suffer a similar breach.

This leak should also prompt organizations – like yours – to start asking questions of your own. Are you doing due diligence on your vendors and providers to uncover similar vulnerabilities? Do you trust these organizations to keep their own software resources, as well as those they build and maintain for clients like you, secure? Are you protected if they aren’t? Are you working with organizations that treat their employees well? Or not?

At STEP Software, we deal with these questions and answers every day, and are always around if you’re looking for answers in your own shop. Because the Twitter source code leak now serves as a reminder of just how costly it can be to never ask these questions in the first place.

The post Twitter source code gets leaked online. Here’s why it matters. first appeared on STEP Software.

Whether it’s an API error, or simply a notification that you’ve exceeded your allowed number of followed accounts, it falls well short of a complete outage or a network-wide meltdown. To the typical end-user presented with these errors, Twitter is still largely operational, but it seems to be experiencing a series of annoying glitches here and there. Over time, the annoyance factor adds up.

None of this is enough to trigger a mass response from the platform’s 300 million users. Yet. But it is enough to highlight an unwelcome increase in the reports of intermittent outages in the months since Elon Musk bought the company and took it private. And it’s enough to serve as a warning for the rest of us.

CUTTING COSTS – AND CAPABILITY

One of Musk’s first moves upon taking control was slashing the company’s infrastructure budget. A week after he first entered Twitter’s San Francisco headquarters as the new owner, Reuters reported he ordered his engineers to find ways to cut infrastructure-related costs by up to $1 billion annually. 

According to the report, a Slack message thread discussed a project called “Deep Cuts Plan”, and included details of how the company would reduce daily spending on servers and cloud services by between $1.5 million and $3 million. None of this was happening in a vacuum: with Musk on the hook for upwards of $1 billion in annual interest charges alone, he needed to move aggressively to reduce costs across the board.

The cost-reduction drive included significant cuts to employee ranks, as well, including senior leaders with deep experience building and running the company’s infrastructure, and front-line engineers responsible for keeping the lights on.

Multiple rounds of layoffs and at least one mass wave of resignations have dropped headcount to an estimated 2,000 from its pre-acquisition high of approximately 7,500. Of those left, only 550 are full-time engineers, leading to concerns that the company is spread too thin to properly keep its infrastructure operational. While Musk has brought in staff from his other companies, including SpaceX, Tesla, The Boring Company, and Neuralink, they lack the critical institutional knowledge that Twitter has lost since October.

THE BROADER LESSON

While no one doubts that Twitter is, first and foremost, a business that must generate more revenue than it spends, its slash-and-burn approach to resourcing has left it vulnerable to spikes in traffic, cyberattacks, and other routine challenges of delivering online services.

Musk’s near-term goal of cutting costs and gaining some critically needed fiscal breathing room has come at the expense of a palpable erosion in robustness across the platform. Post-takeover Twitter has become a landscape where an ongoing litany of seemingly small errors and anomalies contributes to a slowly growing fear of a more profound collapse.

If end-users can’t trust the platform, then the door is open to further erosion as ongoing service reductions continue to chip away at the robustness and reliability of the service. It also telegraphs a message to advertisers that they can’t rely on the platform to effectively build brand and connect them with prospects. Standard Media Index Data suggests ad revenue plummeted 71% in December 2022. A growing wave of spurious error messages won’t reassure advertisers that they should return to the fold.

Twitter should be lauded for getting its fiscal house in order. It’s fair to say its pre-acquisition leadership could have done a better job reining in unnecessary spending and aligning project investments with projected revenues. But tightening the financial ship should never come at the expense of basic operations. 

THE BOTTOM LINE

Twitter’s current challenge to simultaneously control costs and maintain sufficient uptime and customer-facing quality of service highlights the tenuous balancing act that all businesses of any type now face: Keep the lights on but do so affordably and sustainably. Cut too deep and run the risk of compromising the very capabilities that drive revenues in the first place.

Technology infrastructure such as servers, data centers, and contracts with cloud providers and networking companies may not represent the shiniest objects in the company toolkit, but they are critical to the survival of any organization – not just Twitter.

Closer to home, STEP Software may have software in its name, but we’ve long realized that great software needs the right infrastructure – designed, implemented, and maintained – to properly serve the business. We actively manage our own network infrastructure to ensure our clients’ needs are met, and we often provide guidance on infrastructure best practices to ensure the software projects we deliver will remain viable over time.

Twitter’s experience should be a warning to us all: we ignore proper infrastructure resourcing and implementation at our peril – and put the future of our business at risk if we fail to pay attention to the basic aspects of everyday technology maintenance. If you’d like to discuss your own infrastructure roadmap and how it can help grow your business, let us know.

The post Ongoing Twitter outages speak volumes about infrastructure’s importance first appeared on STEP Software.

Hidden in the rapid-fire series of headlines, tweets, kitchen sinks, and aborted verification checkmark introductions was a tiny tidbit of information around programming languages. When Mr. Musk first settled into Twitter’s San Francisco headquarters, CNBC reported he brought along a core team of software engineers and other staff from Tesla’s Autopilot autonomous vehicle team.

According to CNBC, Musk has tasked this team to review Twitter’s source code and begin planning for a revamp of the entire platform. It is this decision that deserves to be studied more closely by developers no matter who employs them or what kind of dev work they do.

Because unfortunately for Twitter, Twitter’s software environment is nothing like Tesla’s. The code that turns Tesla’s electric vehicles into supercomputers on wheels is radically different than the code that powers Twitter. Vehicles don’t need to support large-scale publicly facing search and platform services for millions of users concurrently. Tesla’s code also doesn’t have to accommodate regulatory requirements across multiple countries. Likewise, Twitter isn’t hooked up to a network of sensors measuring and responding to the surrounding environment at speed and in real-time.

Similarly, the two companies take a different approach to scripting, with Tesla using Python, and Twitter selecting Scala. Which means the tiger team from the car company entrusted with the high-priority social media code review may not have deep enough experience or environmental exposure to pull it off.

THE TAKEAWAY FOR DEVELOPERS

So, here’s some advice, offered with humility, for a Musk-owned Twitter that easily applies to any other development environment: bring in developers with domain knowledge. At the same time, take the time to assess what language or languages are being used – or should be used – for a given project. Then make sure the developers tasked with delivering the project are either trained up in the target environment, or have access to training and mentorship resources to raise their skills to an appropriate level. Finally, give them a starting point and vision to build toward – otherwise they’ll fail to understand how their work fits into the overall mission.

After job cuts that decimated every corner of the company, talent retention has become Twitter’s biggest challenge. Finding the right devs, for the right language, for the right functionality, is crucial if future-Twitter is going to realize some of the ideals Mr. Musk has recently shared via his feed. The very survival of Twitter depends on having the right developers with the right skillset and the right organizational support in place to fuel the transformation.

KEEP STAFF AUGMENTATION ON THE RADAR

The answer may not necessarily lie exclusively in Twitter’s internal complement, as the company’s need to adapt and scale, quickly, may exceed the capacity of the existing corps of developers. Despite Twitter’s latest round of large-scale content moderation contractor layoffs, staff augmentation could be a crucial opportunity for Mr. Musk to quickly build capabilities under the guidance of his core dev team.

By leveraging his carefully deployed contractor resources underneath their leadership, he could ramp up the pace of both innovation and delivery. This will be key to Twitter leaving the current market uncertainty behind and rebuilding for a very different, and lucrative future.

Given Mr. Musk’s outsized reputation and the white-hot coverage this story has generated, it’s easy to conclude none of this is relatable to any other company, or any other developer. But ultimately, the Twitter takeover is little different than any other corporate buyout. And no matter the organization, it’ll be the right developers with the right skills using the right tools working on the right projects who in the end hold the true power in any corporate transformation.

The post Twitter, Elon Musk, and a critical lesson for developers first appeared on STEP Software.

It’s easy to get overwhelmed with information, from facts to opinions to everything in between, when your eyes are glued to social media all day. This information overload can get worse if your friends on Facebook and Twitter are posting and then sharing each other’s posts. Streamline the information you consume by sticking to verified and reliable sources. Start with sites like CDC.gov, the WHO website, official national websites (think Canada.ca) and their Facebook or Twitter pages, and the social media output of scientists and doctors who are at the forefront of fighting and studying the virus that’s causing the pandemic.

2. STICK TO POSITIVE OR USEFUL NEWS

You don’t want to add to the noise with all the negative and fake news going around online. So if you can, limit your posts to those that are positive and useful. Hotline numbers, links to online volunteer groups, links to support groups, and updates from reliable sources are examples of information that is worth sharing. Refrain from reposting information shared by friends and family members, especially if these are unverified or cannot be linked back to reliable or official sources.

3. AVOID ARGUING ONLINE

Online arguments are a waste of your time because these rarely result in concrete results in real life, so avoid them at all costs. If you are tempted to set something (or someone) straight, skip the stressful confrontations and seek out a more reliable source of information supporting your side to post on your own wall.

4. PURGE YOUR FEED

If you have too many Facebook friends posting unverified information online or friends who are inclined to post useless information, purge them out of your feed. Facebook lets you do this with the Follow/Unfollow option. Simply change your settings so you can reduce the unnecessary noise and stop following them. They won’t know that you unfollowed them because you remain friends, but you get to tune them out when you need to.

5. GO ON A SOCIAL MEDIA DETOX REGULARLY

Even the most streamlined social media feeds can be overwhelming, especially if the bad outweighs the good in the news. Get off social media for a couple of hours daily. Allow your mind and emotions to reset so you can focus on what’s tangible instead of all that virtual noise in the online world.

All-day access to social media can make it seem like you’re always drowning in information. Wade through the sludge by using the handy tips above. Better yet, eliminate the useless noise altogether through selectively investing your time by learning from sources that serve reliable, responsible, evidence-based and objective information.

The post 5 Social Media Tips to Prevent Pandemic Info Overload first appeared on STEP Software.