Today, Twitter moved into a new, much larger office in San Francisco. The space, which was previously Bebo’s SF office, is right around the corner from their old one.
A few members of the Twitter team spent much of the weekend decorating the new digs with a number of Twitter-themed elements like birds and @ symbols. Check out some of the pictures being posted to the web by Twitter employees below. And yes, there is a DJ booth — and apparently vanity mirrors in the toilet stalls.
[photos: flickr/ryansking, twitpic/caroline, yfrog/robey, twitpic/wfarner, twitpic/jennadawn]
Update: And a bunch more pictures from the @twitter Flickr account:
As Scoble would say, you can follow the Twitter Team List for up to date photos in real-time
http://twitter....om/twitter/team
October was M&A month. Twitter didn’t get bought out.
Their new users count is declining. Most majority wavers are bored with it.
They are dead in the water.
move on.
Yep I wanted to be the first to call it on this post: these pictures will come back to haunt them!
Any company without a revenue model has no business building offices with custom furniture.
Didn’t Google not have a revenue model when they secured 25 million and use that to build their offices?
Agreed, especially since it isn’t their own money.
“Any company without a revenue model has no business building offices with custom furniture.”
Which means they must have something up their sleeves. They certainly have, they work on that since 2006 (sort of).
PS: Congrats to the employees who can now be more productive and creative. Quiet astonishing to be honest, on par with Google.
And new Facebook HQ.
I hope this is the truth and that Twitter becomes a faded name of 2009
i’d agree if I didn’t use Twitter.
oh wait, I forgot. I got bored with it and haven’t used it in weeks. its just so much easier to use facebook. or seems to be
Useful link, the team are tweeting about this office pic set right now http://bit.ly/i2bnN , it looks really good. Not sure about the black floor though, makes everything look darker.
Cool office, but I figured it would be bigger…to fit all the social media gurus.
For some reason I thought there would be more…
they all use macs and think theyre cool and trendy. who would have guessed?
LOL. If they ALL use Macs and insist on continuing to use Ruby on Rails – I know for a hot-ass fact I’ll never be working there. I don’t like either. Bummer, ’cause they haven’t done anything with the site yet I don’t completely understand on a developmental level. Holding my own there would be no sweat. I think I’d rather work with something more ambitious that already has an assload of programming behind it, like Facebook or something non-web like robotics.
No whales? I guess they’re losing their sense of humor & history…
heh. that would have been pretty funny. maybe in the bathroom. who knows, maybe there’s a whale there someone, the space is pretty big.
A blue whale toilet would’ve been funny – looks like a whale with a bideh.
Is anyone else singing the Jefferson’s theme song when looking at these pics? Well, we’re moving on up…to a deluxe apt in the sky…Love the modern space. Happy for them!
Never seen a toilet seat on stilts. They do that so nobody gets too comfortable.
Speaking of bathroom…
What’s w/ the really odd toilet bowl seat. It’s like it’s on stilts. Possibly for the ladies who choose to “hover”?
Nice placement of the mirror too…
Those things are for people with mobility problems, not sure why they took a photo of it though…
That whole bathroom looks very nursing home to me.
I think it’s a wall-hung toilet. They are much more popular in Europe, or so I heard from people traveling there.
So out of curiosity, why do they need an office? Its a web-app that doesnt need anything hands on except for fail-whales…its not like they’re innovating new features.
They KINDA are, like lists and now the retweet thing. Basically you have a huge, trendy looking office full of 20-something people who dress like they’re in an indie band and obviously get all their stuff from IKEA, sitting around all day listening to awful music, drinking Starbucks, playing on Macs, and trying to keep their RoR site from crashing 200000x per day. Twitter is something 4 dorm buddies could make with PHP in one week and run themselves on one big-ass server. They don’t need an office bigger than their bathroom.
lol…i love posts like this. its quite amusing when people voluntarily reveal their own obliviousness.
of course there’s nothing revolutionary technology-wise about twitter. they have never claimed their technology is revolutionary. what is revolutionary about twitter is its simplicity. its LACK of features IS what’s revolutionary. by staying simple, twitter is an incredibly flexible platform for mass communication. additional features (like Facebook has) would actually restrict its usefulness and flexibility.
Very well put Marc! I am sure he(wallmountedjackrabbit) wouldn’t have said what he said if he was the individual that developed twitter! Huge successes do not have to be complex, just well executed!
That’s really nice. Where are they setting up a space to figure out a revenue model?
+1
that’s the conference table. to wit: “for the birds”
hahaha
They could have at least tried to make it look a little more professional to keep some hope alive that they’re going to make some real money.
Also: What’s with the double decker toilet?
I take it you’ve never seen bay area offices? This is pretty much standard decor for any company here. I love the fact that my office isn’t a cubical farm, and yes we’re profitable. And no I’m not a twitter employee.
Very nice indeed
Nice! Looks pretty sharp.
Idiots. Keep burning cash.
We’ll look back at this era and wonder what the fuck was wrong with us when we praised this piece of shit as the future of tech.
Future? The US traffic went down EIGHT percent! EIGHT!
But global traffic rose. The internet is more than just the US. You also neglected to mention that this could be due to increased use of clients. The stat you are referring to measured visits to the actual twitter.com site. Most people use a client to access it.
I think Twitter is a joke. Not only is it a fad that is going to pop but it is also stealing from the blogosphere.
Remember the good old days when you read people’s blogs containing robust and thoughtful posts?
Now we have a 140 character chatter loaded with bit.ly links and “look at me I am an internet whore who does cartwheels in bikini”’s.
Even TC has been dumbed down due to all the inane headlines pertaining to Twitter.
I am looking forward to the day Twitter goes the way of the dinosaurs: extinction.
Tracey, you are quite wrong. Twitter and micro-blogging is not a fad. It is just that the usage won’t be as fanatical. Psychological habits of people to disperse short burst of information to the world gives twitter legitimacy. Not many people can create crafty winded lines of words like many bloggers do. Get quickly to the point (remember, fast paced society right here).
Twitter is here to stay. It will just involve. And it will have extreme usage in spurts. Like say the Iranian election rallying. And traditional media will be what will aid its continued usage.
Or maybe people just don’t care that much about blogs anymore. The “Look at me, I’m an expert” or “yay look I had a baby so i an qualified to give you all mommy tips” days might just be winding down.
Maybe you should try posting some pics of you cartwheeling in a bikini, though I don’t even think that would make Gabbr worth going to.
Agree Tracey. I love how people counter critcism of Twitter with nebulous statements like “Twitter will evolve”. Into WHAT exactly? It has no business model whatsoever. Even advertising is a very poor business model because there’s no purchase intent with people on Twitter – it’s a huge chatroom for people to kill time while they’re at work.
Does their traffic reports ever include API usage?
If not, traffic stats really don’t matter. Every one who uses it often uses an app to connect and tweet.
I agree. The employees better save their money since their time is limited.
Throwing money without thought of the future is what I’m seeing in the pictures. It’s similar to Google but I can forgive Google for it because they’re constantly branching out into new projects; Twitter needs to get a long term survival plan before they live it up.
I’m mean a DJ Booth?! That just screams, “We have more money than we know what to do with!” The problem is when you have money like that and waste it on frivolous things you’ll end up in the cold. Just ask MC Hammer, and all the dot-coms from 2000.
I hope for their sake the pictures are reflective of a young innovative staff, and not a “I just won the lottery!” mentality.
You know Bebo had the space before, and these excesses may be attributed to the Bebo build out (DJ Booth specifically here).
From what I can tell they spent the money on things they needed, like conference rooms, and they used the recession to look for a space that was already decently built out with some other web 2.0 dot com money.
Oh and the bathroom was like that even when it was an AT&T bathroom years ago. I have no idea why, but I found it really weird when I visited my AT&T rep.
Ok lets call the lighting guys to brighten up the place a bit and get a smoothie stand rolling.
The place looks like a company who has already been around for 15 years and the founders are off at the Alps for the corporate retreat.
Just don’t get any goats please.
i disagree, bring on the goats!
It’s all fun and games until someone gets poked in the eye with a goat.
where’s the cafeteria
Feels more like a trendy SF restaurant than an exciting startup.
Glad to see they’re spending the Series D well, and that this $1bn-valued company with next to no revenues isn’t all style over substance…
+1
+10000
lol…you’re so bitter. its hilarious.
dj’s help you work smarter.
A DJ booth, huh? Who do you have to know to get that gig?
love the decks in the office. every company should have that!
Classyyyy ! Love it seriously !
I was expecting something different…I don’t see any classic Twitter brand colors. Weird….
The wooden logo actually has a very Twitteresque feel to it.
I’ve been in that old Bebo office. It was completely empty which I guess is good for ping pong and pool table space.
Where are you going to put the pool table and Kegerator Twitter? I look forward to have an office space that sweet.
So that’s what $100 million gets you these days
No rollerskating? Twitter sucks.
it would be pretty awesome to have an office with a roller rink. also “rink” is an awesome word.
a rink? The entire office should be a rick! Desks on skates, although bashing into each other might be a problem… and motion sickness. Maybe just a bar in the rink.
Looks like a lot of brand new iMacs in there.
The imac in the dj booth is not a new gen iMac as you can see the aluminum framing the screen , also the 2 imacs on the same desk both have black plastic backs so they are also the old 5th gen , not the current generation which has a whole alu body and the screen not framed by alu borders.
How long are these guys going to keep borrowing and spending other people’s money with no revenue of their own? Or are they just waiting to sell out to someone with deep pockets?
Is it only me who finds that toilet rather strange?
no, judging from the tweets, even the employees think so.
It’s a toilet seat rise. Makes it easier for people in wheelchairs to use the toilet.
Instead of the whale, I think Twitter should use a photo of this toilet.
+Over 9000
Traffic is down, no scalable revenue in site. All this is more burn. Looks like 1998 again (spend lots of money that doesn’t belong to us on crap we don’t need.)
This is the perfect office for twitter – all style, no substance.
At least everyone will have a nice place to work for the 24 months it takes them to burn through their cash.
Wouldn’t it behoove Twitter to turn a profit before they go splurging on things like DJ booths with really nice turntables for vinyl and cd/dvd?
Call me old fashioned, but shouldn’t a company turn a steady profit before splurging on in-office DJ booths?
I seem to remember a lot of tech companies that went bottom up in the late 90’s spent money like this…
If it makes one engineer happy to spend an extra hour at work a week, it’ll pay off within a few months.
Spending an extra hour a week playing on turntables isn’t going to help, and the others it drives away cause they don’t like that music will be worse.
When an org is tiny, things like that can work when they all share similar tastes and such but the second you start growing to a size they look like now you are going to have a lot of conflicts of taste that really should be left alone instead of poked at.
I’m not sure, but I think that may have been there when Bebo still ran the space.
They should have a kept a few Bebo logos up – as a reminder of the Dark Side.
Having a cool place to work is about attracting the best developer talent.
.. and running a business is about generating shareholder value.
Listen son, let me explain a bit how tech startups work. They aren’t your mom and pop restaurant.
Twitter isn’t trying to grow organically. They are trying to get as big as fast as they can. That means overpaying for talent and spending lavishly on perks so that you can attract the best developers. The best developers means features are delivered faster which will mean more market share and then (finally) an exit.
Money spent here is peanuts compared to the potential shareholder value that could be created. If you don’t understand that then don’t even bother replying.
+1 well said. exactly what i thought
Gee, thanks for the explanation, DAD.
here comes 1998
here comes 1998!!
Listen, Dad: Being an “Engineering Manager” at “Clinical Care Options” doesn’t make you an expert on tech startups.
Call me crazy, but the newest feature out of Twitter is lists, you could probably source that through oDesk without a problem. Precisely, what features are they developing currently? Also, their “best developers” should work on making a reliable service, Twitter’s downtime is legendary.
Tim’s just angry because he either:
1) Works at Initech.
2) Is an executive at Initech and thinks all companies should run this way.
3) Thinks of people as cogs in a sweatshop.
4) Is from the 1950’s.
5) Some combination of the above.
This is HARDLY a lavish set up. If you want to see lavish, go look at a Goldman Sachs building (or the private residences of their executive team). And since Bush gave them a bailout, ALL of us should be considered stockholders in that company, yet they’re already handing out the same outrageous bonuses and salaries to each other as before.
I believe you have my stapler?
Creating a place where employees want to be is an OBVIOUS thing to do. Workplace conditions can mean everything to good labor.
I guess Google, Apple, and the rest — who are public companies — who create comfortable, inviting environments aren’t very good at business. Right?
They’re trying to *attract* people. Beyond a paycheck, the little things go a long way. And little things don’t have to cost a lot. I doubt this is a dot-bubble type deal where they’re squandering cash. But I suppose it remains to be seen whether Twitter is a dot-bust in the long run.
This assumes all the “good labor” wants to work in an environment which feels like a teenager’s fantasy. That’s fine if all you need are nerds and creatives, but not sustainable. I’d wager that if/when Twitter goes public, there’ll be a bunch of real offices appearing in corners, the occupants of which won’t appreciate hipster douchebags prancing around their ‘DJ station’.
I’m an ex-Googler, and I can tell you that when the heat is on, I would have traded in my free lunches for a better salary, and my primary-colored office space and beanbags for a little privacy and style.
It looks more like a night club, not an office. Good luck, guys! You will hang out well there!
I could never work there with all those Macs.
and i would have gotten away with it too if it wasn’t for all you pesky Macs.
Enjoy it! 3 months more of fad and it’s over after that. Please make sure you sell the shop before then…..
They probably signed the lease well before the 8% drop last month!
Revenues? Who needs revenues? Turn and burn, baby. Turn and burn.
wow…this is where VC money goes.
I hope they dial in their business model soon. You can’t burn cash forever.
Wandering why the twitter logo is not using the brand colors. Like the glowing birds on the conference table, was expecting more twitter birds around.
Correct me if I’m wrong here, but is that a custom made marble table with birds in it?
Must be in preparation for their next valuation of ONE TRILLION DOLLARS!
I’m fairly certain they may have added the birds themselves.
tipex!
Nope, they look pretty inlaid to me.
Bull market! Bull market!
I thought 8% = $8 Twillion in Twitter Dollars???
I wish they would spend some time unlocking accounts they locked. Been forced off Twitter for a month because Twitter support can no figure out how to unlock my account.
Twitter will be bought within 6 months and these offices shut down
burned down!
I’m confused — didn’t they just make major deals with goog and msft. do you really think they gave it away for free? They probably made enough to pay for 10 of these offices.
Rohit, I see your point, but they still have no way of sustaining themselves long-term, which is why I think they’re just positioning the company to be sold, which will ultimately suck for a lot of Twitter employees.
just another reason to have a company worth a billion dollars i guess.
although i cant believe they get away with having a turntable. are they planning on having a head office by day and nightclub by night to generate some revenue? lol
Seriously. Get the Yahoo lap-dancers in, charge $20 a cocktail.
I can’t understand why a (albeit freaking huge) database which does little more than store one-liners, and a web app which displays them, could possibly require this many staff to maintain, or have cost this much to develop.
+1
Architecture for twit is garbage. They can’t even keep the system running smoothly and all they do is store 140 chars at a time. Good luck with the digs. The top is in on this high-flyer. Time for crash ‘n burn.
I think I need MG’s sarcasm to help me out in this reply…
It looks great! Like a chilling lounge….
are they trying to be the fastest cash burning startup?
The now have room for all the funny Twitter employees. Are they up to 140 characters now?
I am glad to read that TWITTER has a lot of friends. It is easier to talk about others´s projects than stablishing one. I like TWITTER because it has helped me to find a lot of information for my work. Nobody knows how it will develope in the future but it has a great beggining. Congratulations to TWITTER team!.
Nice to see other cool people are stuck in a cubicle too.
Every office needs a DJ station.
Let’s party like it’s 1999!!!!
I don’t think the industry as a whole is in a bubble, but it’s clear Twitter is in a bubble-like state.
I understand when Facebook makes these investments. Facebook has a business model, even if it needs improvement, they are making money.
Twitter’s cash flow is nil! Dumb investment. Enjoy the party though!
Twitter can easily make all it’s money back within months by just activating advertising, they know that. Shit, we all know that.
I have faith that Twitter knows what they are doing, and even an exit right now whould make them profitable, they are just not willing to sell for an easy $400 million that would not even dent the budget of Microsoft or Google.
Twitter has already won, they are just coasting at leasure right now.
Power users don’t access Twitter via the web. Unless advertising revenue comes via tweets forced into our streams, only a very small portion of users will see them. If I start seeing spam Tweets from users I can’t unfollow, I’m outta here.
yes but for every 1 that leave another 1000 will get down.
Get down? And/or boogie?
Now I see what the DJ station is for.
The best of luck to the Twitter team.
All I’m saying is they are never going to have enough revenues to justify such an absurd valuation ($1B). Making a few million dollars with massive operating costs is not sufficient to overcome such a deficit.
Twitter has another problem that’s been developing for the last year while they become a mainstream application. They’ve become the MySpace for micro-blogging. Nearly every new Twitter user call themselves a “social media consultant”, “social media expert”, “social media marketer” or an “internet marketer”. Will the future of Twitter be a bunch of marketeers doing market research on bots, spammers and other marketeers?
Think about it:
Twitter has accomplished the hardest part of startups, creating a known brand. Then they slayed the second hardest part, getting people to give a damn.
You know why Twitter has a billion valuation? Because they could spin off their hot brand right now into a million different deals and ventures and make a ton of revenue. Of course they need to be careful with such decisions as earlier this year TC unveiled some secret documents that clearly show business proposals come in rapidly.
What if Twitter opened up to include a Facebook type of social networking?
At this point they can create new products and slap the name “Twitter” to it and instantly they will get a ton of free PR and interest for it based on already having killed the “get users” dragon.
They can just go out and buy 10 small companies happy to sell their operation to Twitter for $3 million each and instantly have 10 new products to slap their name on and BOOM, they rolling like Google did. Its not whether Twitter can justify the billion valuation, it is whether the people running it can emulate Don King (or Sergey lol) and find the pathway to the money. It’s there trust me.
Good points. I still don’t think it’s that easy.
Brand equity is crucial moving forward. For people like myself, who have used Twitter for a couple years now, I’m starting to ask ‘why do I use twitter?’ I don’t see it as a valuable brand; I see a fail whale. A critical mass of users is only as good as the quality of usage. Twitter is going to have to improve the ecosystem in order to become a top-tier brand.
To the point of M & A…Buying small companies and turning them into profitable operations is rare, EXTREMELY rare! Especially when you can’t scale your own product.
You forget who’s running Twitter. Guys who think they can get 1 billion people on the system in a few years. With the attrition Twitter has, they’ll be lucky to get to 100 million people in our lifetimes. And by the time they do, it won’t matter because all of those users will be dead and gone.
(disclaimer: I waive all rights to this post as it is only a mere idea in the interest of conversation and in no way claim anything embodied by me or my companies).
I will give you one small example of how Twitter can actually make that billion dollar revenue (screw the valuation) right now without a sweat.
All they need to do is start a lottery system that co-exist with the real results of say the New York State Lottery and create an algorithm that allows people to by virtual lotto tickets for $0.25 to $0.50 (half of real life cost) and win the amount based on money received in Twitter and the pay out amounts offered.
Twitto!
There are a ton of things that can be done.
+1
For humor…;)
I must agree with a lot of things William Blanchard says .Twitter already has deals with Google and Bing, and they are doing very well internationally (talking numbers of users). But I don´t think it´s all about the number of users , its also about how people use Twitter and I think without a doubt that the users have gotten more advanced over time, and found ways how Twitter fits with their life or business. In Europe Twitter grows, at least in terms of how traditional media relates to the service. I think we´ve only seen the beginning of the Twitter success story. There is constant buzz around Twitter and they constantly get associated with well known phenomenon like the Oscars, NASA, Superbowl, and countless celebrities and sports stars. They will be bigger and they will make money. Lots of it.
The economics here just don’t make sense. Nice office guys, but if I were a founder, I’d be hell bent on finding a business model – not fancy office digs.
Employees, those fancy chairs are your equity.
I have not been to the United States before,neither do i know how Twitter old office looks like.But from what i saw in the pictures above about their new Headquarters and Gargets put in places,i must say its wounderfully beautiful.This is a great new face of twitter.More grease to your elbow.
twitter is stupid and sucks.. who gives a flying shit about their dark ugly waste of space office? Perhaps they should make a decent product instead of wasting money on crap like this?
just in time, as their user exodus starts
What company you build SutroStyle? I see you commenting, but not much to back up your stuff.
I built a company that has 14M uniques per month and growing, and is making nearly 1M/year. There’s no external capital.
Coolness man, thanks for posting them.
Twitter is getting 3000 updates per second.
Yeah, if you fail with your dumb platform play, you are left with nothing.
However, if you win, marketshare is convertible to money. And they have won.
Oh yeah, and if you live more than 40 miles outside Silicon Valley, STFU. Seriously.
Those guys are going to all be ok, and I talked to one of their early investors last week over dinner who was grinning like the cat that ate the canary.
The HQ is a lot less extreme than a lot of previous excess and the big cost variable is rent, which nobody knows, so again, unless you do, just STFU and comment on the pics here – those are rich for comment fodder
Like the mirror next to the toilet.
That’s just fucking weird.
Wow. So angry. Chill.
I work in Redwood Shores… does that qualify me to say Twitter sucks ass?
Sure.
But don’t expect a lot of agreement from me.
Do you really see any exit less than $1B here?
They made the bet, it paid off.
Owning a giant platform of usage is valuable.
“If you live more than 40 miles outside Silicon Valley, STFU”
Really, Chris? The CEO of “a news community that connects people to the information and discussions that matter to them in every U.S. town and city” thinks opinions on tech don’t matter if they don’t come from your little part of the world?
That’s remarkably open-minded of you, and goes a long way to explain why I’d never heard of Topix until today.
Agreed. Not sure if I’d be so pompous when my company is a glorified news aggregator. Didn’t Google already do this??? And your investors are dinosaurs…all slowly dying by a thousand lashes as they try to recoup their lost classifieds revenue.
BooHoo…STFU and get back to aggregating content.
See: http://bit.ly/3UFRV6
Good stuff.
Apparently seed money doesn’t allow for a decorating budget?? If you want to add some color to The House of Twitter, Tweet me!
Gotta love the birds in the table! Great to see the tour of twitter….use it everyday.
Looks so corporate %$&%$§§