Right here’s a tidbit of startup historical past that will not be broadly identified exterior of the tech companies themselves: The primary variations of well-liked Android apps, like Twitter, had been constructed by Google itself. That revelation took place by way of a brand new podcast with Twitter’s former senior director of product administration, Sara Beykpour, now the co-founder of the AI information startup Particle.
In a podcast hosted by Lightspeed associate Michael Mignano, Beykpour reminisces about her function in Twitter’s historical past. She explains how she started working at Twitter in 2009, initially as a instruments engineer, when the corporate employed solely round 75 folks. Later, Beykpour moved to work on cell at Twitter across the time when different third-party apps had been rising in reputation on different platforms, like BlackBerry and iOS. A kind of, Loren Brichter’s Tweetie, was even acquired by Twitter to kind the idea of its first official iOS app.
As for Twitter’s Android app, that got here from Google, Beykpour mentioned.
The Twitter for Android shopper was “a demo app that Google had created and gave to us,” she mentioned on the podcast. “They did that with all the favored social apps on the time: Foursquare … Twitter … all of them appeared the identical in these early days as a result of Google wrote all of them.”
Mignano interjected, “Wait, so again up; clarify this. So Google needed corporations to undertake Android, so that they construct you apps?”
“Sure, precisely,” Beykpour responded.
Twitter then took the Android app that Google had constructed and continued to develop it. Beykpour was the second Android engineer on the firm, she mentioned.
In truth, Google had detailed its work on the Android Twitter shopper in a 2010 weblog publish, however a lot of the press protection on the time didn’t credit score the app to Google’s work, making this a forgotten little bit of web historical past. In Google’s publish, the corporate explains how they applied early Android greatest practices throughout the Twitter app. Beykpour instructed TechCrunch that the publish’s writer, Virgil Dobjanschi, was the primary software program engineer.
“If we had questions, we had been alleged to ask him,” she recollects.
Beykpour shared different tales about Twitter’s early days, too. As an illustration, she labored on Twitter’s video app, Vine, (after returning to Twitter from a stint at Secret), and had been beneath strain to launch Vine on Android earlier than Instagram launched its video product. She met that deadline by launching Vine roughly two weeks earlier than Instagram Video, she mentioned.
The latter “considerably” affected Vine’s numbers, and, in Beykpour’s opinion, was what led to the favored app’s demise.
“That was the day the writing was on the wall,” she mentioned, regardless that it took years to finally shut Vine down.
At Twitter, Beykpour had led the shutdown of Vine’s product — an app nonetheless so well-liked that even new Twitter/X proprietor Elon Musk retains teasing bringing it again. However Beykpour thinks Twitter made the precise determination with Vine, noting the app wasn’t rising and was costly to run. She admits that others may even see it in a different way, maybe arguing that Vine was under-resourced or didn’t have management’s backing. However finally, the closure got here all the way down to Vine’s impression on Twitter’s backside line.
Beykpour additionally shared an fascinating anecdote about engaged on Periscope. She joined the startup proper because it was acquired by Twitter, and after leaving Secret. She remembers having to formally rejoin Twitter beneath a pretend title to maintain the acquisition beneath wraps for a time.
At Twitter, she additionally talked in regards to the problem in getting assets to develop merchandise and options for energy customers, like journalists.
“Twitter actually struggled to outline its consumer,” she mentioned, as a result of it “used a number of conventional OKRs and metrics.” However the truth was that “solely a fraction of individuals tweet,” and “of the fraction of the folks which might be tweeting, a subset of these are answerable for the content material that everybody truly needs to see,” was one thing that Beykpour says was tough to measure.
Now at Particle, her expertise constructing Twitter is informing technique for the AI information app, which has the purpose of connecting folks with the information they care about what’s happening round them.
“Particle is a re-imaging of the way you consumption your every day information,” Beykpour says on the podcast. The app goals to offer a multi-perspective view of stories and whereas additionally offering entry to high-quality journalism. The startup is seeking to discover one other method to monetize reporting past advertisements, subscriptions or micropayments. Nonetheless, the specifics of how Particle will do that are nonetheless in dialogue. The startup is at present speaking with potential writer companions on methods to compensate them for his or her work.
