Twitter’s silent partner and Facebook’s ad genesis: top stories you should read

Imagine if you’d helped start one of the most successful social networks on the planet. You’d probably expect people to know who you are, right? Not if you’re Jason Goldman. Twitter’s ‘secret’ early employee was more focused on making sure Twitter survived than in building his own fame. Techie glory wasn’t a problem for Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg, but, like Goldman, they also had to worry about how their social network was going to make money. It’s a path that would eventually lead them to Facebook Home. And the Facebook power duo could probably sympathise with some of the problems that startup search engine Duck Duck Go is facing now. Then again, they’ve got so much more data on their side.

Intrigued? You can read about it all in the stories featured in the latest edition of our round up of some of the top tech stories on the web.

The silent partner

In the age of celebrity tech CEOs, you hear their names often: Biz Stone, Ev Williams, Jack Dorsey. The three main men behind Twitter. But perhaps there should be a fourth: Jason Goldman. He was an early employee at the startup, sat on its board, helped it shift into the ‘new Twitter’ and is a former VP of product — yet if you Google him, the search engine thinks you’re looking for a saxophonist. Buzzfeed takes an interesting look into the role Goldman played in the early days of the social network, as well as the often under-valued work of the project managers who make the practical morning coffee runs and ensure the CEO’s ‘vision’ is solidified into actual to-do lists.

Facebook leans in

Few would have guessed that from humble beginnings in a college student’s dorm room, Facebook would have turned into a company pulling in millions in revenue from targeted ads. Vanity Fair investigates the steps Facebook is taking to change online advertising, from back when it first started thinking about exactly what business it was in to the current forward-looking vision designed to ensure it never has a Myspace moment.

Coffee & empathy: Why data without a soul is meaningless

Big Data. It’s the latest snippet of jargon that’s getting the techies excited — but what are companies actually doing with all the lovely data being generated by every click and tap? GigaOm questions why up-and-coming startups aren’t capitalising on the type of data that can tell you more about why someone keeps checking in to a coffee shop on Foursquare, instead of simply confirming that they did.

Mark Zuckerberg on Facebook Home, money, and the future of communication

In the run up to the launch of Facebook Home, Wired had a chat with the social network’s hoodie-loving leader. He speaks about how Facebook switched its focus to mobile, who gets priority when the interests of brand pages and users collide, and the questions that are above his pay grade to answer. Oh, and explains how he teaches a bunch of school kids about entrepreneurship once a week.

Meet Gabriel Weinberg, the man taking on Google and Bing

It’s pretty much Google’s internet (we’re just searching in it) — but another startup is making an interesting foray into the search space. Duck Duck Go is amassing a userbase interested in a break from all that targeted advertising with a promise never to track a user’s clicks. This article surveys the state of the search service heralded by many as an alternative to the big G, and points out the problem areas that could stop it from reaching the mainstream.