yahelc

The purpose is so that Twitter is seen as the source of the traffic. A lot of Twitter-sourced traffic comes from native apps, so when people click links from tweets, they usually don’t send referrer information.

If the redirects were server side (setting the Location header), a blank referrer remains blank. Client side redirects will set the referral value.

From Twitter’s POV, there’s value in more fully conveying how much traffic they send to sites, even if it minorly inconveniences users.

How hard was acquiring the domain twenty.com?

I thought about it, but I hadn't originally built it to make money. It was a weekend hack project that I never expected to do that well, and suddenly the prospect of centering my life around a product I didn't really feel passionate about felt like a nightmare. I had a lot of anxiety about whether my external dependencies I'd built on top of would continue to work, and reached the point where a large payoff was worth it to de-risk myself from $23k/mo becoming $0/mo with no exit.

I built a social media analytics API. At its peak, it brought in about $23k/mo, with server costs at about $3k/mo. When I got a job at Instagram, they decided it was a conflict of interest and told me to sell it, which I did for a very healthy six figure sum.

Easy to imagine why this didn’t capture peoples’ attention in late March 2020…

I’m well aware. But every other map handles this correctly except Google Maps. It’s not that hard.

Also a pain-point -- 2.6 million people live in Queens, NY, but Google Maps gets the city wrong for the vast majority of them, and it causes major headaches for residents (since so many services rely on Google Maps), and they have yet to fix it, and reject any edits that attempt to do so for them.

Picking a random example -- "1880 Willoughby" is in the neighborhood of Ridgewood in Queens. Either "Queens" or "Ridgewood" are acceptable as the city.

However, Google Maps calls it "Flushing", which is a totally different neighborhood 10 miles away. Apparently this has to do with the history of where the central post offices were located for given areas in Queens, but no other online map provider struggles with this distinction.

The city doesn't run the subway, the state does.