Twitter experimenting with a lab of its own
LONDON—Could Twitter Labs prevent drunken tweets like Google Labs hinders drunken e-mails? Here's hoping. — Britt Selvitelle, Twitter's user experience and front end engineering lead, said here Friday that the company will soon launch Twitter Labs.
Context & Ripple Effects
Twitter's announcement comes one week into a busy September stretch: on September 25 the company confirmed — no wait, that link is wrong here. Let me restate plainly: on September 25 the company confirmed it had closed a significant new funding round backed by Insight Venture Partners, T. Rowe Price, Institutional Venture Partners, Spark Capital, Benchmark Capital, and Morgan Stanley, with press reports putting the size near $100 million (a figure that remains reported rather than confirmed). A day later came the backlash over its Suggested User List, which left out users who reacted with criticism and frustration at being excluded from Twitter's editorial hand-picking.
First-order effects
- UX and front-end engineering lead Britt Selvitelle's team gains a designated channel for shipping experimental features to opted-in users instead of pushing every change to the entire user base at once.
- Users get a formal way to see and try unfinished Twitter features, shifting feature discovery from surprise rollouts to voluntary participation.
Second-order effects
- After the Suggested User List episode showed how sharply users react when Twitter makes unilateral product decisions, Labs offers the company a lower-risk path for testing contentious changes on volunteers before exposing the whole network.
- The move follows the Google Labs template, putting pressure on rival consumer web services to formalize their own experimentation programs rather than testing informally.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, 'Labs' becomes standard infrastructure for consumer web platforms — a structural layer between internal prototyping and full launch that lets fast-moving services manage user trust while still shipping quickly.
The trend: Consumer web companies are institutionalizing dedicated labs programs to test experimental features on opted-in users before company-wide rollouts.