Hot on the heels of news that it rejected an acquisition offer from Facebook, Twitter has announced that it has acquired Values of n, a startup that produced information management applications including Stikkit, a post-it note application and I Want Sandy, an Email assistant. The primary goal of the acquisition appears to have been to bring Rael Dornfest to the Twitter team. Dornfest is the founder of Values of n and former CTO at O’Reilly Media, whose responsibilities also included editing the O’Reilly Hacks series. He was also the head of the RSS-DEV group, which created the RSS 1.0 standard.
Values of n’s products will be shut down on December 8, but that they may eventually reappear as part of Twitter’s service or as open sourced libraries. For more on the shutdown of Stikkit and I Want Sandy, read the Value of n blogpost here.
Excellent de-worsification, as Peter Lynch would say!
I wonder what price they were willing to pay to acquire that mind.
Whatever they paid, its nice to see talented engineers being rewarded.
Hmm… looks like the Twitter API has been hacked.
http://apiwiki.twitter.com/
There’s a huge difference between the API Wiki being pranked with a logo change and the API itself being hacked – which it wasn’t.
SO the net of this foolishness is that twitter still sucks and I Want Sandy is gone. Ain’t the web grand?
I really, really don’t think they should be shutting down I Want Sandy. It’s a tool that a lot of people use daily – it keeps them organized. And now what, it’s going to vanish? If so, people are going to take these bitter feelings out on the source – Twitter.
If anything, Twitter should keep IWS around and diversify their products. If Twitter is outdone and abandoned someday, maybe they’ll have a reason to stick around.
Shutting down Sandy! Noooooooooo! Please say it isn’t so…
this is great congrats to everybody
How can we trust the Twitter team to not just pull the plug on us again? This is a very bad move. They are (or should be) losing the trust of a lot of people.
not really care with twitter. as long as i can use it for my marketing tools, its just fine with me.
a price would be nice?
Follow Twitter on Line Spout. http://www.line...t.com?q=twitter
You left out Blosxom (http://en.wikip...rg/wiki/Blosxom), probably the coolest thing he’s done.
Great acquisition and thats a good bunch of engineers!
I was an early fan of Evan Williams work with the Pyra application, a project he abandoned to pursue Blogger.
I was an early user of Blogger, which he sold to Google who let it stagnate while other blogging platforms advanced.
I was an early user of Odeo, which Williams dumped when he couldn’t figure out how to make money with it.
I’ve been user of Williams’ Twitter, watching other applications snap at its heels while it struggles with uptime.
I’m a Stikkit user, only to find that app being thrown under the bus as the creator goes to join Williams at Twitter.
…Sometimes it’s discouraging to be a web application user.
yi yo yo