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June 23, 2008

John Adams’ New Job: Fix Twitter

Michael Arrington

54 comments »

John Adams, Twitter’s new Ops Engineer (and apparently a descendant of the guy from the HBO series), said in a Twitter message today (where else) that he’ll soon be working to “fix twitter.”

While I’m guessing that isn’t exactly how Twitter would like to have him describe his new job, we wanted to know more. So TechCrunchIT’s Steve Gillmor put a camera in his face and made him talk (link to video is here). Interview above, although he tones down “fixing twitter” to “working with the team to solving their problems”. Good luck John, and thanks for being such a good sport with the interview.

I spoke with Twitter co-founder Biz Stone about Adams’ hire via email this afternoon. He begins on July 7, Biz says, and has worked previously at Apple, Inktomi, iFilm and others as a security and network engineer. They’ve also hired Rudy Winnacker from Google, where he has been a systems engineer for the past five years.

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This entry was posted on Monday, June 23rd, 2008 at 8:33 pm and is filed under Company & Product Profiles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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Comments

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  1. Classic

    June 23rd, 2008 at 8:37 pm

    “… that so many people rely on…”
    My god, do people actually ‘rely’ on Twitter ?

  2. John Adams

    June 23rd, 2008 at 9:04 pm

    Correction — I’m an Operations engineer, not Director

    Fix the front page?

  3. Timothy Sykes

    June 23rd, 2008 at 9:05 pm

    Thank u lord, my prayers have not been in vain!

  4. Michael Arrington

    June 23rd, 2008 at 9:08 pm

    Hey John, it’s fixed, it just hasn’t come through on the widget yet. no idea what’s up with qik right now. hopefully the video will be back shortly.

  5. Rob La Gesse

    June 23rd, 2008 at 9:12 pm

    @classic - yes. For breaking news, feedback on business ideas, help with research, etc. Twitter is an extremely powerful tool. And it can be fun as well.

  6. Dave Winer

    June 23rd, 2008 at 9:18 pm

    Twitter is not IRC. It’s asymmetric. If you can hear me, that doesn’t mean I can hear you. And not everyone who hears you can hear me. That’s the biggie. Programmers always think it’s IRC.

  7. James Andrews

    June 23rd, 2008 at 9:19 pm

    I’ve known John for 12 years. He’s a great engineer. He really knows what he’s doing. Will be nice to see such talent set towards improving Twitter. Congradulations John!

  8. hey

    June 23rd, 2008 at 9:27 pm

    Is it really time to ‘fix twitter’?
    or
    Re-evaluate our purpose as humans?

  9. Sean E

    June 23rd, 2008 at 9:31 pm

    Can we stop hearing about Twitter and fixing it? It is getting old and is no longer news. Instead, after they fix it, post something about that.

  10. Phil

    June 23rd, 2008 at 9:34 pm

    Oh shut up “hey”, it’s so old now. Ppl mostly engage in pointless activities.

    Great point Winer, I always have thought about it as IRC too.

    Twitter is here to stay, the name is too entrenched, no matter what the 3rd party clients (twhirl, alerthingy, etc. or Winer thinks about “decentralizing “) think they can do.

    John seems like he’s smart and can get this service up to snuff. Good luck John.

  11. Squidly

    June 23rd, 2008 at 9:41 pm

    Yeah, IRC without the “you haven’t been lurking for 20 years, so sod off” mentality.

  12. MrCashyCash

    June 23rd, 2008 at 9:44 pm

    Anyone notice that “Buzz Up” link at the bottom of each article?

    Techcrunch can’t be that anti-Yahoo! right?

    Right?!

  13. Russoue

    June 23rd, 2008 at 9:48 pm

    Why are there so many blog posts about twitter? Why are there so many blog post against Yahoo?

  14. Phil

    June 23rd, 2008 at 9:51 pm

    Why are there so many whiners?
    STFU!

  15. Joel Strellner

    June 23rd, 2008 at 10:17 pm

    That was very insightful. Although I cringed near the end when he mentioned MySQL was acquired by Oracle. At least he was corrected…

    I hope that he is able to work his magic there and doesn’t end up leaving like the last guy.

  16. Meg

    June 23rd, 2008 at 10:53 pm

    I have yet to meet a single human being who has a purpose or reason for everything they do. And I’m not sure I’d like them if I found them.

    If you’re sitting around on TechCrunch waiting to roll your eyes at people who enjoy/find value in Twitter, I hate to break it to you, but you’re really not exactly seizing the day much more, are you?

    Oh! And your mom’s expecting you at dinner upstairs any minute now. She says she made that pudding you like… should lift your spirits.

  17. Kayembee

    June 23rd, 2008 at 10:55 pm

    Here’s a track diplaying the many,many services revolving around Twitter…

    http://www.jogtheweb.com/reade.....rackId=148

    Tips: The reader can be minimized for better readability, jog to the very end to land back automatically on this post.

  18. Greg

    June 23rd, 2008 at 11:02 pm

    Let’s just all slow down and wait to see what happens. More than likely what’ll change will be mostly invisible to users, like efficiency & company culture, or even *gasp* better code!.

  19. Pat

    June 23rd, 2008 at 11:30 pm

    No pressure or anything, John. ; )

  20. Tony

    June 24th, 2008 at 12:43 am

    @17 Kayembee, that was a delightful and useful introduction to various twitter tools. Thank you.

  21. David Bennett

    June 24th, 2008 at 1:08 am

    What was the url for your Blog again, John?

  22. David Bennett

    June 24th, 2008 at 1:17 am

    http://www.retina.net/tech/

  23. Prdo

    June 24th, 2008 at 1:22 am

    WTF Michael
    What’s next, writing about the new chef in Google that specializes in tuna sushi?
    So you actually posted an article based on a twitter about some software engineer who joined twitter? OMG that’s what I call nano-blogging.

  24. David Bennett

    June 24th, 2008 at 1:30 am

    Great interview - I wish you the best, John.

  25. PixelRobot

    June 24th, 2008 at 1:35 am

    Good luck with that, John.

  26. Faisal Riaz

    June 24th, 2008 at 2:20 am

    Twitter has taken benefit of absence of Jaiku (acquired by Google). The day, Jaiku is back, twitter will find no way….

  27. Philip Buxton

    June 24th, 2008 at 2:51 am

    Kayembee that was cracking.
    However, can’t get TwitThis to work (WordPress doesn’t support the plug-in). Anyone know the code for a Twitter button to add to the bottom of posts? Maybe Mr Adams can make some :)

  28. John Adams

    June 24th, 2008 at 4:04 am

    My blog, was http://www.retina.net/tech

    I’ll post Velociy, day Two, tomorrow. Thanks for the best wishes, all!

  29. Dario Salvelli

    June 24th, 2008 at 4:23 am

    Congrats John. I read your blog in order to follow your work on Twitter. Yes Winer, Twitter isn’t IRC.

  30. Benjamin Franklin Bache

    June 24th, 2008 at 4:44 am

    John Adams second job: Apologize for Alien and Sedition Acts.

    Good luck on the new gig John.

  31. John Adams

    June 24th, 2008 at 4:45 am

    Wiener wrote:

    >Twitter is not IRC. It’s asymmetric. If you can hear me, that doesn’t mean I can
    >hear you. And not everyone who hears you can hear me. That’s the biggie. >Programmers always think it’s IRC.

    Sure, it’s asymmetric, in that people don’t know if the respondent can respond immediately to prior messages — that’s because of the lack of real-time status data, but the service should respond at real-time rates.

    Why should status be slower than anything else?

  32. Marcus

    June 24th, 2008 at 5:26 am

    Oh John, you really *must* know that one never disagrees with Mr. Winer.

    When Mr. Winer writes something, you simply agree with him: tell him he made a good point and build him up. Be careful to not expand on his ideas. He invented RSS and its brilliant polling model DON’T YOU KNOW. He doesn’t need any ideas YOU come up with, nor any ideas he failed to consider.

    What’s this? You say you weren’t disagreeing with him?

    Well, just to be clear on that point, you should openly embrace his words, and follow the correct Winer Interaction Protocol (WIP).

    These posters have it nailed:

    # 10 “Great point Winer, I always have thought about it as IRC too.”
    # 11 “Yeah, IRC without the … mentality”

    #29 ( “Yes Winer, twitter isn’t IRC” ) is a rather dangerous, and should be used only by WIP experts who can mask their distain with obsequiousness.

    “Go OBAMA!”

  33. Jason

    June 24th, 2008 at 6:02 am

    How can you people POSSIBLY compare Twitter to IRC?!?

  34. Dana Koor

    June 24th, 2008 at 6:23 am

    Glad to see someone crossing back from the Porn world :)
    At least there are no more worries about monetization.

  35. Radom

    June 24th, 2008 at 8:22 am

    Jason: “How can you people POSSIBLY compare Twitter to IRC?!?”

    It is federated and scales pretty well and I interpreted John as pointing out that it was *that* problem that has been solved, and not necessarily that Twitter fulfills the same function as IRC.

  36. Garlington

    June 24th, 2008 at 8:37 am

    The main question is WHO GIVES A SHIT.

    Seriously, all these twats who use twitter are one big daisy chain. This web service is of no consequence to anybody outside some piddly tech centers.

  37. Adam

    June 24th, 2008 at 9:00 am

    “The guy” from the HBO series? Try “President Adams.”

  38. mark s

    June 24th, 2008 at 9:33 am

    John -

    Good to see that you are going to be fixing twitter - remember me????? old old boston days? we almost went in to business on an ISP together back in 1992? wow i am getting old.

    Ping me if you like - best wishes

    Mark

  39. [sr]

    June 24th, 2008 at 10:04 am

    Nice! Fave line: “This is like a new priesthood…” What a choice of words.

    Good luck w/ the new gig, man.

  40. Joe Anton

    June 24th, 2008 at 11:28 am

    Glad John Adams is on the case to help fix Twitter…

    By the looks of things they may have previously relied on Sam Adams to slove their problems…

    Joe

  41. John Adams

    June 24th, 2008 at 12:19 pm

    #35, thanks. you nailed it.

  42. Sachin

    June 24th, 2008 at 9:38 pm

    Best Of Luck for this new responsibility. May you always be successful.

  43. Ross Popoff-Walker

    June 26th, 2008 at 1:37 pm

    I really hope Twitter turns thing around. Here’s what will happen if they don’t: http://tinyurl.com/5taqou

  44. Good Luck

    June 28th, 2008 at 11:27 pm

    Yeah, great video guys, but lets just be honest here: I don’t know if this guy can fix Twitter.

    At around 7:22 he says that the problem with Twitter is that the “Computational Load” (CPU) is higher than “Network Load” (IO)? How is this the case?

    Anyone worth their salt understands that Twitter must be an IO problem because they are having problems storing and retrieving all of these messages into their database in realtime. Even the IM & SMS aspects of Twitter are IO Bound.

    Streaming is so much more of an IO bound problem than a CPU bound problem.

    Give me a break, John Adams. Twitter is NOT IRC.

    On the flip side, good to see Twitter spending more of its ridiculous venture money! :)

  45. John Adams

    June 29th, 2008 at 3:15 am

    #44, You don’t understand how social networking sites function, do you?

    Network load = How much data needs to be sent to individual users each time things change. Quite minimal, when it come to Twitter, once you figure out who to send data to. I’m not talking about disk I/O at 7:22.

    Computational load is high, because every time the site goes through the database, it has to figure out who those changes go to. Caching and moving the problem into RAM would make this less of a problem, but I haven’t seen enough of the architecture to figure out if that’s the right course of action yet.

    You’re looking at this system from the “Oh look, we need to send lots of data each time” perspective, so you assume it’s an I/O bound problem. Well, no. It’s computationally (and disk I/O) bound because the site needs to go through all of the user joins, each time something happens.

    Additionally, I’m not sure why you mention streaming; In my experience, streaming is network and disk I/O bound, and also heavily CPU bound if you are selling streams for pay-per-minute (with significant db activity and many authorizations per-minute if you’re sending lots of telemetry back and forth.)

    Why do I say that this is *like* IRC? It’s not IRC because it’s not “real time”, but, it’s a set of users, with a set of statuses, over a wide area, and hopefully, over a set of distributed servers.

    We should be able to get Twitter into that state; Ultimately, I’ll be able to speak to this once I’ve had more time with the code, but right now I feel that this is a possibility.

  46. Good Luck

    June 29th, 2008 at 3:49 am

    John, a possibility?

    Let’s be totally clear, I’m not talking about Disk IO specifically either: Instead, what I’m saying is that Twitter is an IO Bound application, be it disk OR network.

    I think that it is naive of you to even think that some simple (cacheable) joins are what is bringing down the Twitter service.

    Instead, you should think about all of the IO that is going on between the IM network, the SMS network and the outbound stream networks to friendfeed, summerize, etc.

    Thus, the bottlenecks become:

    * Database [Disk IO] (from pulling-out messages for Web Users/API)
    * IM/Event-Bus [Network IO] (for pushing messages to realtime targets)

    So, what this means is that your job will be to partition message reads and writes to both storage and realtime targets.

    And with that, again, Good Luck.

  47. Eddie

    June 29th, 2008 at 9:01 am

    Can someone write a Firefox plugin that filters out all blog posts that mention twitter?

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