It’s Hack Week at Twitter. According to a post on its engineering blog that kicked things off, the company will be holding its first Hack Week through Friday October 29, giving employees a chance to be “building things that are separate from our normal work and not part of our day-to-day jobs.”
The past five weeks have seen Twitter roll out a number of significant changes on both the front- and back-ends, including a redesign of Twitter.com and new technology for its search architecture. Everything seems to be running smoothly, and while still promising to “keep an eye out for whales,” Twitter employees will be able to spend this week on innovative projects that fall outside their normal job duties.
“There aren’t many rules,” says the blog post. “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.”
The idea sounds rather reminiscent of Google’s 20% time. But it also echoes the brainstorming session at the podcasting company Odeo that eventually led to a project called “twittr.”
If you have an idea for what could be built, you can direct a tweet to @hackweek. (Not recommended for Twitter’s third-party developers.)
