I find Twitter and it's user base incredibly interesting. On the one hand it's portrayed as an "Everyone" product. There's no reason you or your friend Bill or your boss or your Grandma couldn't use it. Because of that people have historically signed up in droves and it's valuation has increased.
In reality though (and this is entirely anecdotal), Twitter isn't something that everyone can use. A lot of people find it difficult to figure out what they should say, how to keep track of who they follow and simply how to engage with it. It isn't that everyone product. You do still have an enormous community of people though that use it frequently and keenly and recently their monetization offering (advertising platform) has become far more impressive.
I would guess then that the valuation and share price has to come down a bit (which this is a signal of) to reflect the change from an "Everyone" (Facebook, Google, Amazon) offering to "Quite a Lot of People" (Pinterest, Tumblr etc) product.
Yea, I know it's a really tired subject, but twitter really needs a major overhaul from a usability perspective. I think they should keep the 140 characters as a limit for what is shown in peoples feeds, but the character limit should be much higher. This is particularly important when you get into a conversation with many people, and the handles start taking up most of your 140 characters (as Marc Andreessen recently pointed out). It's also really hard to follow conversations, and they get separated somewhat arbitrarily. You might scoff and say that this would basically facebook-ize twitter, but honestly I don't think that's a bad thing. Facebook is moving into twitter's space, so twitter shouldn't be be so slow to act or it will get eaten, IMHO.
Also, I use twitter to keep up to date on some of the industries I'm interested in, and while it's a great tool it's still frustrating sometimes, since there is a flood of info throughout the day. TweetDeck makes it better since I can group things by interest and triage depending on how much time I have. I guess you can do that with the web interface but I have never found it as natural as with Tweetdeck.
I think the reason why Twitter is not an "everyone" product (even though it's marketed as such) is not the interface, but something way more essential: most people simply have no use for it.
Twitter is good for people who are not only interested in constantly sharing their thoughts, but also have something interesting to say, otherwise they'd find no audience. In addition, they must be good at doing it in 140 characters. Even the ones who are strictly consumers on Twitter fit a niche - they're usually interested in some subject X which is tweeted about by certain people of note.
My grandma doesn't have witty things to say all day, and any interest she might have on what other people say is supplied by Facebook. There is no way she'd ever do anything on Twitter besides signing up and immediately forgetting about it. The best UX in the world couldn't save Twitter for her.
Twitter was able to find an active userbase because even if only 1% of people find it useful, that's plenty of people if you consider the human population. But it should never be seen as something that is useful for people in general. Regular people sign up because of marketing, but they never stay.
"A lot of people find it difficult to figure out what they should say, how to keep track of who they follow and simply how to engage with it."
I have been using online messaging and chat since ... 1991 ?
BBS forums, irc, unix talk, MUD/MOO, ICQ, classic mailing lists and thousands of web forums.
I still find it hard to view a conversation thread on twitter.
If I see a comment that is interesting, and is obviously part of a thread or conversation, it's still non-obvious how to view that entire conversation or respond to specific parts of it in any way that resembles a thread.
Well, take the wired telephone (please!) Of course, "everyone can use it" but I bet since its invention, a few power users have made 100x as many calls per week as the average person has. They're the real benefactors. The only difference is that on Twitter you get to see who is doing this.
>recently their monetization offering (advertising platform) has become far more impressive.
I wonder whether a saturation point will be reached with regard to our willingness to view ads in general. More specifically, might this happen in a way that impacts the viability of ad-supported models that rely on the "build an audience, then ad them to death" approach?
Google Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, and others all command a great share of our attention and rely largely on the model. Youtube also seems to be showing more ads. I have also noticed that some sites which feature, say 1 minute or less news clip videos, show 15-30 second ads before each one. Personally, I have stopped using these because I find it obnoxious. I get that they need to make money, but at some point, they crossed my personal threshold.
The net is that we are more and more inundated with ads, and I wonder if the effectiveness of those ads will wane to a point where their value can no longer deliver the massive value upon which so many companies rely.
This is an insightful comment, and the takeaway discussion is: is Twitter a product for just "quite a lot of people", or can they bend it to a product for everyone?
I think what investors are looking for is a move towards a product that is for everyone. But given that Twitter's core business / USP is precisely that it is not like "everything everyone else is using", could the conclusion thus be that investors had too high an expectation of what Twitter has to offer the world?
Interesting. I had not thought about that aspect before. When I think of it, Facebook’s UI is probably a lot more easy to use for most people. And even then some still struggle :)
In October, Twitter reported a disappointing 7% fall in timeline views per user - a closely watched measure of engagement - despite a 23% growth in its user base in the third quarter.
"Despite"? Not "because of" by any chance? That would be my first thought, that they simply diluted their hardcore audience.
This is what happens when you continually base valuations on number of users, rather than, say, revenue, or profitability. Yes, a user base can be an indicator of a company with traction - but if there's no revenue, or no functioning model which will lead to revenue... the value is entirely hypothetical, and based on weak foundations.
I expect to see a lot more of this sort of thing, which will culminate in the current bubble conclusively popping. It'll only take a few more S&P announcements like this to cause a panic sell-off, at which point... let's party like it's 1999.
Twitter's valuation isn't based on users - the stock is down ~35% this year despite user growth being 22% and revenue more than doubling.
The stock is being trashed because they missed earnings.
The S&P report itself said Twitter is experiencing very strong growth and little competitive pressure. It was downgraded because Twitter are investing their cash rather than hoarding it. Bond holders want companies to hold cash. What is good for bond holders is usually different to what is good for stock holders.
The long case on Twitter is that the fundamentals are good, the company is growing like crazy and that the market is undervaluing based on earnings which mostly missed because of one-off employee option and other writedowns as well as reinvestment.
Well it is also the difference between bonds and equities. You might value a company on users if you think it could monetise them down the line for equities as you will share in that.
Bonds however just rely on the company having cashflow to pay the interest and then repay the capital. Number of users, future profit etc are much less meaningful compared to whether you will get your money back as promised.
It's not hypothetical. Twitter has significant revenue. When revenue is generated from eyeballs (ads), then yes, number of users and engagement is a valuable metric (yet not the only one).
This may or may not directly apply to twitter, but I really don't understand how unprofitable companies with no direct revenue model get such large valuations based on: number of users, and "potential" to profit from advertising.
Snapchat? Tinder? Twitter? Quora? Tumblr? Etc.
It seems like these are the companies that are viewed as prestigious and noteworthy by the media and startup community. Everybody wants to be the company that gets a massive funding from VC and millions of users. But all of these companies still have yet to prove they can really do it.
The only returns for investors so far is based on the fact that the theoretical valuation keeps going up, and it's self perpetuating. At what point are investors going to expect real earnings to justify the valuation?
Nobody (or very few people) seems to want to solve a real problem, or offer a really useful product that people are actually willing to pay for.
Everybody just wants to get a million users, get a bunch of money from investors, and cross your fingers that maybe one day you can figure out how to actually make the thing profitable. And if it doesn't work out? Well it's somebody else's problem right?
It's sort of funny that, as long as the investor community all agree on $X valuation -- you NEVER need to make a single dollar in profit because the next guy in line will cover your "loss." Or finally some giant will buy you out to acquihire or get rid of competition.
Probably sounds like I'm just a hater and ranting, but just my 2 cents.
Twitter solves a "real problem". Relatively convenient 1:N communication, where N is the number of twitter users and at the same time a method to selectively subscribe to some of those messages by certain criteria (hashtags, selection of users). There is a reason why Television channels love Twitter, it has essentially the same characteristics as traditional broadcast television, plus some form of interactive feedback. That the system is centralised and has few message types is purely coincidental.
The math goes something like 'expected customer lifetime value * number of customers'. Where the lifetime value is based on either some base assumptions about conversion to a premium product or some base assumptions about what they feel they can make of their users in terms of ad impressions or some other relatively low yield income stream. If this yields a huge number then everybody is happy.
This is further inflated by exits such as whatsapp and instagram, after all if they are worth that much then surely this other non-related product will be worth at least as much or more.
In the end, valuations have a pretty high random component and the perceived market can push that up or down tremendously.
Who even knows what drove this company to issue a warning like this, maybe one of their bigger customers is planning a take-over bid. It wouldn't be the first time something like that happened either.
>It's sort of funny that, as long as the investor community all agree on $X valuation -- you NEVER need to make a single dollar in profit because the next guy in line will cover your "loss." Or finally some giant will buy you out to acquihire or get rid of competition.
If companies get swallowed up by the Google/Facebook behemoths like so many do then investors usually get their exit, to make an example of 2 from your list Tumblr was bought for $1bn by Yahoo and Snapchat allegedly had multibillion dollar acquisition offers from Facebook and Google. Apparently the megacompanies don't buy these smaller companies for the value that could be generated by revenue streams from them(when and if), but more a combo of the "strategic advantage" - so their competitors don't snap them up first, or out of a fear that one of them could end up being a direct competitor to them one day, as is the case with the Facebook Instagram acquisition and attempted Snapchat acquisition.
Facebook, Google and LinkedIn already proved it. No investor wants to feel dumb that they didn't invest their money in the "thing that looks just like FB and Google" even if the business model isn't a complete 1:1.
You are mixing together vastly different companies (public, private, mature, start-ups), and then ignoring companies that did make the transition to profit. So yeah, seems a bit like a rant.
Aside from issues from a consumer standpoint, I was actually interested in testing the advertising for mobile apps. Unfortunately, they don't have an SDK for conversion tracking. They rely on third parties that charge for the conversion tracking. This is absurd. Every other advertiser I can think of provides conversion tracking. Without it, the advertising is worthless. It is the thing that provides value compared to other advertising mediums.
Twitter have recieved a lot of flack lately for their poor handling of abuse complaints. Particularly in relation to #gamergate. I've no idea whether that makes a difference, but it's worth considering: abuse, like spam, is going to be a big problem for any communications service.
One of the worst aspects is they'll close any issue referring to now-deleted tweets without any action.
I'm quite certain tweets are soft-deleted and accessible by the abuse team (if the Secret Service wanted one they'd get it) so it comes across as callous indifference.
When they rate a bond as junk yes. We can be suspicious when they rate some garbage as AAA, but given the economics of the ratings business when they tell you something is junk then it probably is.
There is no _the_ way to use it. But I can tell you about how I use it:
- I follow a couple of industry professionals and companies to stay up to date with their updates. As a MSFT developer I follow MSDN, the .NET team, but also important players like Scott Hanselman and Scott Guthrie. By doing this I always get the latest updates.
- I never follow more than 50 people and unfollow everyone who posts too much... If there are so many tweets that you don't have time to read them, you're not being effective. Be picky about who you follow. You don't have to follow your followers in return.
- I use Twitter a LOT to communicate with people I'd otherwise have no access to, because I don't have their email or they are too busy answering me through the company mailbox. Twitter makes everyone (except for celebs) reachable. If I need some guy at Google who write library X, I just send him a tweet.
- I use the search to find what people are saying about my product, but sometimes I also use it to engage with people who are talking about a subject I'm interested in.
I used some library, something didn't work, asked a question on Stackoverflow, didn't get an answer. What to do?
Twittered the author, he twittered back, telling me that there's a bug, and here's the workaround, and invited me (and all his followers) to try that new product that replaces the thing I was using.
So it's a unique communication tool which found a sweet spot with opt-in, brevity, low involvement, and publicity.
(It's can also be anywhere from crappy to decent as a social network, a news aggregator, a blog site ... but I wouldn't bother with these aspects)
Sign up and follow people with similar interests. I follow very few people (approx 80) and remove anyone who starts tweeting things that's no longer relevant to me.
Within that timeline I get a decent amount of tech info from respected people in the industry and other small snippets from friends.
If you do as most people seem to and follow 500+ people you're never going to be able to keep up with the noise and to me it loses its value.
It sounds like Twitter didn't have enough cash to finance its growth and that the IPO didn't result in enough cash available to do whatever needs to be done.
So if you put the information together:
The IPO was triggered b/c some investors wanted to get out. The public funding was insufficient to fund whatever initiatives are going on. The debt issue was an attempt to get capital asap. The rating could have been easily predicted and so it must be the case that Twitter's management chose to take the hit of the bad PR in exchange for the cash provided by the debt. This suggests that Twitter expects to be in for some tough times ahead.
All this is probably very rational decision making and is probably the best bet the company has in an increasingly competitive market.
I've never understood why Twitter doesn't run way more ads than they do. When I view my Twitter timeline in a browser there's an enormous amount of unused space on both sides of the timeline and it would not bother me one little bit if they displayed some ads in that space. In fact, it would be much less distracting/detracting than sticking sponsored tweets into the middle of my feed.
Like most people, I find ads kind of annoying, but Twitter's an unusual case — I would be 0% less inclined to use Twitter if they put some ads in that totally unused space.
Twitter might lose approximately .01% of their users if they ran ads, but they'd be making billions in profits.
Interesting how Peter Thiel who froze $45,000 of assets of Facebook competitor Diaspora* has taken a special interest in bad mouthing Twitter, call them "horribly mismanaged" etc. It's very clear he wants Twitter to fail. Peter Thiel influenced the debt downgrade with his comments. Knowing how the world works Thiel may very well have called up an analyst and played some dirty tricks as in the case of Diaspora*.
Twitter has become a dumping ground for what used to be RSS. The "twitter" traffic is now really over at Instagram. Instagram needs to upgrade their product mix (multi- accounts), but geeks and news organizations are propping Twitter up, but it's not a general conversation or personal broadcasting tool anymore.
I really don't know how anyone didn't see this coming. The Twitter IPO was the nail in the coffin for the company. It was wishful thinking that they would ever become profitable with their current model.
Twitter is an elegant and open platform. It is what you make it. And over the course of Twitter’s relatively short existence, millions of users have creatively found ways to extract utility from it. Businesses use Twitter to grow – without paying the service anything. Businesses have also been built directly on top of the service.
So why can't Twitter take these and go directly to their users with them as use case options?
It's not open. After killing off lots of development happening in their platform with the token limit decision, they effectively shut off that avenue. No sane developer will base his bread and butter on Twitter now.
Some effects of that decision were positive, like increasing engagement with advertising. Lots were negative, namely non competition on mobile app space, or lack of innovation in the use of the platform.
I personally think it was a short term vision move, that effectively killed twitter in the long term. It'll never evolve as much as it needs to survive, now that it lost its developer ecosystem.
Don't be fooled! I doubt the many developers of third party clients were happy to be surprise informed overnight that their apps would all be banned or limited to 100k users.
I just read BBC's article about Twitter not being able to make a profit. It's the classic 'investor story time' narrative where Twitter now have to scramble to make money via whatever means necessary - even if that means harming the product. Example of harm recently are:
• Many spinoff projects not related to Twitter, like Music, Flight, and a myriad of other, quite splintered attempts at adding new features.
• ADs getting more aggressive; instead of a simple injected AD in the timeline - now we have newsletters and 'sign up' with the email you have registered with Twitter. Twitter cards are also being used to show rich media for 'partnered' brands. A far cry from small, polite injected ADs. Very few people make time for watching video in a Twitter reading session.
• A constantly shifting API that developers cannot trust, and have to relearn constantly. On top of sunsetted in-house features. Remember Twitter Anywhere? I feel like Twitter Widgets will vanish over-night and without much warning too. It turns out; I rely on these solutions very heavily. The 'very little adoption' argument is used to sunset these features, and it's a terrible argument, because it destroys webs of trust with developers.
What Twitter must realize is that Twitter is plumbing. I know that microblogging existed before it, and there are countless (better) alternatives like app.net - but things like app.net are geek toys just like Diaspora. Sure - the greybeard hackers love services like that - but it's not especially for the masses, and also services like Diaspora/ADN will never achieve the status of 'plumbing' (despite app.net's tagline as a platform for Apps.). Twitter got there first, and they must realize this.
So Twitter should give us back the API we all grew to love, and not deprecate it to impress investors. It needs an eco system. It's what made Twitter take off in the first place. When I first joined Twitter in 2007; it was classic bottom up technology, built by the people and the API evangelists. The recent bait-and-switch to 'consumer product' annoyed a lot of people. It's time to see whether Twitter can do another bait-and-switch and go back to its roots.
If they manage to achieve this bait-and-switch - it will be monumental. It will be big news. And I will not be muting Twitter in my timeline for it.
[+] [-] ilghiro|11 years ago|reply
In reality though (and this is entirely anecdotal), Twitter isn't something that everyone can use. A lot of people find it difficult to figure out what they should say, how to keep track of who they follow and simply how to engage with it. It isn't that everyone product. You do still have an enormous community of people though that use it frequently and keenly and recently their monetization offering (advertising platform) has become far more impressive.
I would guess then that the valuation and share price has to come down a bit (which this is a signal of) to reflect the change from an "Everyone" (Facebook, Google, Amazon) offering to "Quite a Lot of People" (Pinterest, Tumblr etc) product.
[+] [-] nhstanley|11 years ago|reply
Also, I use twitter to keep up to date on some of the industries I'm interested in, and while it's a great tool it's still frustrating sometimes, since there is a flood of info throughout the day. TweetDeck makes it better since I can group things by interest and triage depending on how much time I have. I guess you can do that with the web interface but I have never found it as natural as with Tweetdeck.
[+] [-] rmsaksida|11 years ago|reply
Twitter is good for people who are not only interested in constantly sharing their thoughts, but also have something interesting to say, otherwise they'd find no audience. In addition, they must be good at doing it in 140 characters. Even the ones who are strictly consumers on Twitter fit a niche - they're usually interested in some subject X which is tweeted about by certain people of note.
My grandma doesn't have witty things to say all day, and any interest she might have on what other people say is supplied by Facebook. There is no way she'd ever do anything on Twitter besides signing up and immediately forgetting about it. The best UX in the world couldn't save Twitter for her.
Twitter was able to find an active userbase because even if only 1% of people find it useful, that's plenty of people if you consider the human population. But it should never be seen as something that is useful for people in general. Regular people sign up because of marketing, but they never stay.
[+] [-] rsync|11 years ago|reply
I have been using online messaging and chat since ... 1991 ? BBS forums, irc, unix talk, MUD/MOO, ICQ, classic mailing lists and thousands of web forums.
I still find it hard to view a conversation thread on twitter.
If I see a comment that is interesting, and is obviously part of a thread or conversation, it's still non-obvious how to view that entire conversation or respond to specific parts of it in any way that resembles a thread.
[+] [-] logicallee|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unclebucknasty|11 years ago|reply
I wonder whether a saturation point will be reached with regard to our willingness to view ads in general. More specifically, might this happen in a way that impacts the viability of ad-supported models that rely on the "build an audience, then ad them to death" approach?
Google Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, and others all command a great share of our attention and rely largely on the model. Youtube also seems to be showing more ads. I have also noticed that some sites which feature, say 1 minute or less news clip videos, show 15-30 second ads before each one. Personally, I have stopped using these because I find it obnoxious. I get that they need to make money, but at some point, they crossed my personal threshold.
The net is that we are more and more inundated with ads, and I wonder if the effectiveness of those ads will wane to a point where their value can no longer deliver the massive value upon which so many companies rely.
[+] [-] unknown|11 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] stingraycharles|11 years ago|reply
I think what investors are looking for is a move towards a product that is for everyone. But given that Twitter's core business / USP is precisely that it is not like "everything everyone else is using", could the conclusion thus be that investors had too high an expectation of what Twitter has to offer the world?
[+] [-] cpach|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] spindritf|11 years ago|reply
"Despite"? Not "because of" by any chance? That would be my first thought, that they simply diluted their hardcore audience.
[+] [-] madaxe_again|11 years ago|reply
I expect to see a lot more of this sort of thing, which will culminate in the current bubble conclusively popping. It'll only take a few more S&P announcements like this to cause a panic sell-off, at which point... let's party like it's 1999.
[+] [-] nikcub|11 years ago|reply
The stock is being trashed because they missed earnings.
The S&P report itself said Twitter is experiencing very strong growth and little competitive pressure. It was downgraded because Twitter are investing their cash rather than hoarding it. Bond holders want companies to hold cash. What is good for bond holders is usually different to what is good for stock holders.
The long case on Twitter is that the fundamentals are good, the company is growing like crazy and that the market is undervaluing based on earnings which mostly missed because of one-off employee option and other writedowns as well as reinvestment.
[+] [-] cmdkeen|11 years ago|reply
Bonds however just rely on the company having cashflow to pay the interest and then repay the capital. Number of users, future profit etc are much less meaningful compared to whether you will get your money back as promised.
[+] [-] jrallison|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] leeber|11 years ago|reply
Snapchat? Tinder? Twitter? Quora? Tumblr? Etc.
It seems like these are the companies that are viewed as prestigious and noteworthy by the media and startup community. Everybody wants to be the company that gets a massive funding from VC and millions of users. But all of these companies still have yet to prove they can really do it.
The only returns for investors so far is based on the fact that the theoretical valuation keeps going up, and it's self perpetuating. At what point are investors going to expect real earnings to justify the valuation?
Nobody (or very few people) seems to want to solve a real problem, or offer a really useful product that people are actually willing to pay for.
Everybody just wants to get a million users, get a bunch of money from investors, and cross your fingers that maybe one day you can figure out how to actually make the thing profitable. And if it doesn't work out? Well it's somebody else's problem right?
It's sort of funny that, as long as the investor community all agree on $X valuation -- you NEVER need to make a single dollar in profit because the next guy in line will cover your "loss." Or finally some giant will buy you out to acquihire or get rid of competition.
Probably sounds like I'm just a hater and ranting, but just my 2 cents.
[+] [-] orbifold|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jacquesm|11 years ago|reply
This is further inflated by exits such as whatsapp and instagram, after all if they are worth that much then surely this other non-related product will be worth at least as much or more.
In the end, valuations have a pretty high random component and the perceived market can push that up or down tremendously.
Who even knows what drove this company to issue a warning like this, maybe one of their bigger customers is planning a take-over bid. It wouldn't be the first time something like that happened either.
[+] [-] pessimizer|11 years ago|reply
This only works until March 10th, 2000.
[+] [-] no_future|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mbesto|11 years ago|reply
Facebook, Google and LinkedIn already proved it. No investor wants to feel dumb that they didn't invest their money in the "thing that looks just like FB and Google" even if the business model isn't a complete 1:1.
[+] [-] smackfu|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] clarky07|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pjc50|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ceejayoz|11 years ago|reply
I'm quite certain tweets are soft-deleted and accessible by the abuse team (if the Secret Service wanted one they'd get it) so it comes across as callous indifference.
[+] [-] dabeeeenster|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] danieltillett|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fallingmeat|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Avalaxy|11 years ago|reply
- I follow a couple of industry professionals and companies to stay up to date with their updates. As a MSFT developer I follow MSDN, the .NET team, but also important players like Scott Hanselman and Scott Guthrie. By doing this I always get the latest updates.
- I never follow more than 50 people and unfollow everyone who posts too much... If there are so many tweets that you don't have time to read them, you're not being effective. Be picky about who you follow. You don't have to follow your followers in return.
- I use Twitter a LOT to communicate with people I'd otherwise have no access to, because I don't have their email or they are too busy answering me through the company mailbox. Twitter makes everyone (except for celebs) reachable. If I need some guy at Google who write library X, I just send him a tweet.
- I use the search to find what people are saying about my product, but sometimes I also use it to engage with people who are talking about a subject I'm interested in.
[+] [-] UweSchmidt|11 years ago|reply
Twittered the author, he twittered back, telling me that there's a bug, and here's the workaround, and invited me (and all his followers) to try that new product that replaces the thing I was using.
So it's a unique communication tool which found a sweet spot with opt-in, brevity, low involvement, and publicity.
(It's can also be anywhere from crappy to decent as a social network, a news aggregator, a blog site ... but I wouldn't bother with these aspects)
[+] [-] lcmatt|11 years ago|reply
Within that timeline I get a decent amount of tech info from respected people in the industry and other small snippets from friends.
If you do as most people seem to and follow 500+ people you're never going to be able to keep up with the noise and to me it loses its value.
[+] [-] grandalf|11 years ago|reply
So if you put the information together:
The IPO was triggered b/c some investors wanted to get out. The public funding was insufficient to fund whatever initiatives are going on. The debt issue was an attempt to get capital asap. The rating could have been easily predicted and so it must be the case that Twitter's management chose to take the hit of the bad PR in exchange for the cash provided by the debt. This suggests that Twitter expects to be in for some tough times ahead.
All this is probably very rational decision making and is probably the best bet the company has in an increasingly competitive market.
[+] [-] ColinCera|11 years ago|reply
Like most people, I find ads kind of annoying, but Twitter's an unusual case — I would be 0% less inclined to use Twitter if they put some ads in that totally unused space.
Twitter might lose approximately .01% of their users if they ran ads, but they'd be making billions in profits.
[+] [-] unknown|11 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] MisterMashable|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jvagner|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] debacle|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ErikAugust|11 years ago|reply
So why can't Twitter take these and go directly to their users with them as use case options?
My thoughts, continued: http://erikaugust.com/thoughts/twitter/
[+] [-] sergiosgc|11 years ago|reply
It's not open. After killing off lots of development happening in their platform with the token limit decision, they effectively shut off that avenue. No sane developer will base his bread and butter on Twitter now.
Some effects of that decision were positive, like increasing engagement with advertising. Lots were negative, namely non competition on mobile app space, or lack of innovation in the use of the platform.
I personally think it was a short term vision move, that effectively killed twitter in the long term. It'll never evolve as much as it needs to survive, now that it lost its developer ecosystem.
[+] [-] 0x0|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] getdavidhiggins|11 years ago|reply
https://thoughtstreams.io/higgins/thoughts/6764/
Twitter's self immolation
I just read BBC's article about Twitter not being able to make a profit. It's the classic 'investor story time' narrative where Twitter now have to scramble to make money via whatever means necessary - even if that means harming the product. Example of harm recently are:
• Many spinoff projects not related to Twitter, like Music, Flight, and a myriad of other, quite splintered attempts at adding new features.
• ADs getting more aggressive; instead of a simple injected AD in the timeline - now we have newsletters and 'sign up' with the email you have registered with Twitter. Twitter cards are also being used to show rich media for 'partnered' brands. A far cry from small, polite injected ADs. Very few people make time for watching video in a Twitter reading session.
• A constantly shifting API that developers cannot trust, and have to relearn constantly. On top of sunsetted in-house features. Remember Twitter Anywhere? I feel like Twitter Widgets will vanish over-night and without much warning too. It turns out; I rely on these solutions very heavily. The 'very little adoption' argument is used to sunset these features, and it's a terrible argument, because it destroys webs of trust with developers.
What Twitter must realize is that Twitter is plumbing. I know that microblogging existed before it, and there are countless (better) alternatives like app.net - but things like app.net are geek toys just like Diaspora. Sure - the greybeard hackers love services like that - but it's not especially for the masses, and also services like Diaspora/ADN will never achieve the status of 'plumbing' (despite app.net's tagline as a platform for Apps.). Twitter got there first, and they must realize this.
So Twitter should give us back the API we all grew to love, and not deprecate it to impress investors. It needs an eco system. It's what made Twitter take off in the first place. When I first joined Twitter in 2007; it was classic bottom up technology, built by the people and the API evangelists. The recent bait-and-switch to 'consumer product' annoyed a lot of people. It's time to see whether Twitter can do another bait-and-switch and go back to its roots.
If they manage to achieve this bait-and-switch - it will be monumental. It will be big news. And I will not be muting Twitter in my timeline for it.
[+] [-] spindritf|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|11 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] anonbanker|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Cakez0r|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gushaprints|11 years ago|reply