Borrowing a page from Facebook, Twitter has decided to have a “hackathon” in which engineers will be temporarily free to build whatever they desire without being confined to their day jobs.
To keep with the spirit of driving innovation in engineering, we’ll be holding our first Hack Week starting today (Oct 22) and running through next Friday (Oct 29). In this light, we’ll all be building things that are separate from our normal work and not part of our day-to-day jobs. Of course, we’ll keep an eye out for whales.
There aren’t many rules – basically we’ll work in small teams and share our projects with the company at the end of the week. What will happen with each project will be determined once it’s complete. Some may ship immediately, others may be added to the roadmap and built out in the future, and the remainder may serve as creative inspiration. (Twitter Engineering Blog)
Adopting a strategy from their iPhone engineers, Twitter is currently seeking suggestions from users on what features they should build, and is asking the community to tweet their ideas to @hackweek (which is Twitter’s official account for their week long hackathon).
A quick tweet search (which is now thankfully a lot more stable) reveals that users are requesting some innovative ideas, with some of the best suggestions highlighted below.
@hackweek Please build categories/tags for favorited tweets ! We need a way to organize the real time info saved from twitter. (via @andersonsantos)
@hackweek I’d like the ability to change the order of my lists, or at least have them appear alphabetically instead of in order of creation. (via @egibbard)
@hackweek I’d like to be able to sort my tweets by importance. Thanks! (via @crizcraig)
@hackweek “News View”: tweets with links only, ranked by trending popularity of the links (among friends or all of twitter) and time decay (via @wxmn)
@hackweek Friendly URLs: username/year/month/day/id http://engineering.twitter.com/2010/10/hack-week.html (via @jlantunez)
Whether Twitter incorporates any of these ideas into Twitter’s future DNA only time will reveal, although it’s great to see the company asking for ideas from the community (even if a few are a bit eccentric).
Do you have any suggestions on what Twitter should build? If so, feel free to sound off in the comment section below!