Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge
One of my chief criticisms of Twitter over the years has been that the company would much rather talk about new features than actually ship them. “Twitter’s CEO keeps substituting talking for doing,” is how I put it in January, amid an extended podcast tour for Jack Dorsey in which the CEO acknowledged every possible criticism from every one of the company’s critics while doing little to address them. The problem has never been that Twitter doesn’t know what products to build — it’s that it has an awful lot of trouble actually building them:
At Twitter, good ideas languish for years. The expansion of a tweet from 140 to 280 characters required such bruising internal battles that the designer responsible quit in exhaustion after shipping…