Twitter is so powerful. When Paul Graham wants to say something, he takes to Twitter to do it. Not Facebook. Not Hacker News. Not reddit.
The same goes for many of the most influential people in the world.
Twitter has incredible utility for powerful people but very limited utility for average people. Maybe the exact opposite of facebook. On Facebook, my friends interact with me. On twitter, I speak into the void.
I find the exact same thing; on every other social platform you get out more or less what you put in and it's reasonably easy to build persistent acquaintances and even intimate friendships over time.
I decided to make a concerted effort to participate more on Twitter a few months back, but if you have a low number of followers hardly anyone interacts with you, it's like being in a big crowd where a few people have megaphones and everyone else is whispering. I suppose I could buy a bunch of followers for $ in order to seem more worth talking to but that's a bullshit tactic and I don't respect platforms where bullshit is rewarded. Twitter seems to function best as an adjunct to other media than as a self-sustaining ecosystem.
Frankly I feel Twitter has made the internet (and by extension, society) worse in numerous ways - the dumb 140 character limit (notwithstanding this being inherited from SMS), its appalling user interface, and the overuse of simplistic metrics to score everyone and everything they say, promoting the crudest sort of lowest-common-denominator social proof.
As far as I can see the best way to be popular on Twitter (other than already being famous to start with) is to be an ass, which will get social approval from people who feel the same way but are inhibited from expressing that for whatever reason. The good things about Twitter (speed and flatness) persist despite the other factors rather than as a result of them. If it shut down tomorrow I think people would get over the loss within a week.
I did the same a year ago, largely agree with this, though I would note that it has been extremely useful to follow journalists (and comedy people/funny users). Specifically in regard to journalists however, I feel, just barely, that its worth it. One is able to gain a sense of what these people actually feel, away from an editorial board. Which is both enlightening and highly useful, if you actually devote time to reading journalism. Its also been very useful for organizing, as in, "there is a rally ya'll, come to such and such, like, now". More than once I've missed emails or other communications that would have pulled me into an action, meeting or other event but saw references to it on twitter and was able to make it at the last minute.
It's interesting to see how the power and reach of every word on Twitter by politicians or journalists, yet Twitter is unable to profit from it. On the other hand, nobody cares about the power of a Facebook posting or an instagram, yet Facebook makes so much money of the frivolity.
It's reminiscent of the way that broadcast news was transformed as profit became a motive (basically the themes that are explored in the movie 'Network').
News orgs were never in themselves meant to be profitable, yet they were at the heart of the big three network's identities (and had enormous reach).
You can reach people on Twitter, but there's some question as to how much you can influence people. Periodically I see articles from people with hundreds of thousands of followers who admit to being unable to translate that into sales, or hits to their site, or votes, or whatever.
Twitter is a great platform to keep your name in the public consciousness. So... indispensable if you're a Kardashian. Other than that, though, it's not clear. A lot of people are wasting a lot of time building up a subscriber account that ends up being meaningless.
Facebook makes money because people give it a lot more information than they give twitter. Too much, IMO.
Look at all the articles written when Beyonce posts her pregnant body on Instagram as an example. we only think twitter has so much influence because thats where a lot of techies hang out.
Care to share which of pg's tweets you found powerful? I would say that when pg has something to say, he takes to his blog. I dont think his tweets are within an order of magnitude as valuable as his blog. And for that reason I don't agree with your assessment of Twitter.
I don't think you're giving the distribution mechanisms enough credit. The only reason that the POTUS's tweets hold so much weight is because every 24 hour news company reports on them endlessly. It gets power from magnification.
Twitter simplifies re-broadcasting and discovery..
Only people who know Paul Graham will know about his blog, but his tweets can be re-broadcast to a much wider audience through re-tweeting, who can be exposed to him without having sought him out or known about him in the first place.
I've discovered, and subsequently followed, probably half of my twitter feed through re-tweets from my existing feed.
I have to imagine that's the same for a lot of others.
Torvalds. David Brin. Tim O'Reilly (although Tim uses or used to use multiple platforms in an ongoing fashion). Randall Schwartz. A few others I'm not thinking of right now.
Plus garnered a bit of a "tech"/thinker corner. I don't know whether it has any remaining vibrancy/growth, at this point, or whether its mostly a matter of inertia combined with the crapitude of other platforms for the particular communicating they are doing.
Too bad Plus was so thoroughly hosed from the start by political agendas.
OT: At Christmas, I stopped accessing Facebook. I thought it would be for a few days or a week. Coming up on two months, soon, and I haven't been able to make myself go back. Even with a relatively small set of FB friends whom I actually, personally know, and who are nice and not rabid and actually respond meaningfully to some of my own contributions, there.
In some ways, the impersonal, more technical content on Plus (and here, and etc.) is easier. There is no "missing aspect" as there is with FB engagement with friends.
Twitter? Gave up on that years ago. Tim O'Reilly had an interesting post or two about some of its positive, community aspects, in its early days. But now, it just mostly seems a megaphone for the loud and discontent.
And then, too, anywhere Trump et al. are and that seems to aid his lying megalomania. I'm not inclined to lend it the (incremental) support of my participation.
If he's a particular indication of their future, well, then, welcome to the gutter, Twitter.
I agree with this, Twitter is still the best place for celebrities to interact with their fans. Elon Musk for example has unveiled more than a few of his ideas and dropped details of his products on Twitter instead of anywhere else.
Which is something of a strength and weakness of Twitter. It can be used for conversations but the 140 character limit makes it tough. As a result, Twitter is generally best used for people who are broadcasting things to a group of interested followers. If that doesn't describe you (either as a follower or a followee) then you're probably not going to find Twitter very useful.
Which a mailing list would accomplish the same thing. In fact, I would prefer I just receive email directly from people I follow, rather than a separate stupid app.
> I know a lot of creators of nerd culture. Game designers, writers, comic artists. Old, gnarled, crabby, battle-hardened pros with decades of experience. You'd have heard of a bunch of them.
> They all have something in common. It never fails to amaze me, but a single mean email or bad review can send them into a spiral. Like, they'll still be obsessing over it days later. I think, "Wow. After all these years, they still won't let this stuff roll off of them?" And then it happens to me.
> So we filter our inputs.
> ...
> Some people are mean. Some people are crazy. Some people are both. I do not let people in these categories pour poison directly into my ear.
> ...
> Twitter was designed, from Day 1, to enable any random person to send messages directly to any public figure. In other words, from Day 1, it was designed to be an abuse and harassment engine. It's not a bug. It's a feature. All that abuse and controversy is how it gets clicks and money.
To fix this "problem" they've been spending money on human moderators to filter content, tags, and ban people. They're spending money on employees to remove discussions and eyes from the site, which counter intuitive if their goal is to become profitable, nor does it solve the problem ultimately.
I don't have a Twitter account, so the only way I see it is if something gets reposted on my FB feed or some other media outlet. Which generally means someone notable and/or famous for some reason. Personally, I'm okay with this level of filtering.
Twitter is only useful because "normal" media makes news about notable tweets.
I surely don't get my information from twitter. Would seem silly to get all my information (or "important" information from "powerful" people) from a hundred character sound bites.
When people talk about getting their news from Twitter, they don't literally mean they never leave Twitter for information. 140 characters is enough for a headline and a link; you click through to articles that interest you.
Instagram has notionally the same dynamic as twitter but somehow they do a lot better at convincing their eye balls that they are welcome on the platform and have a voice. Or at least it seems to me.
I share the same feeling when using Twitter with a following mainly consisting of friends. If the sole purpose was to communicate with friends, why do so publicly on Twitter?
There is a sense that you can connect with influential people on Twitter, but the truth is your voice just gets lost in a sea of noise.
It's basically a publishing system. On Twitter I generally put only professional broadcasting related items for 90% of the content. Blog posts, that kind've thing. I rarely even read it.
There's even an app in the Mac App store that a friend of mine wrote called Wren that is just a simple little "store and tweet" system. Doesn't attempt to read anything, just lets you keep it on your desktop to tweet stuff periodically. That sums up my usage of Twitter.
It's largely replaced press releases. While people used to send out releases to outlets, now they tweet it and outlets follow you and report if they think it's news worthy.
I've found twitter works okay for discussing small scale events. Local journos tweet the goings on of city council and citizens and councillors and journos pile into the conversation. Muni politics is my hobby, but it does shine for this so I assume it extends to similar fields of small-scale news.
This type of statement reminds me of being in the music business (for the short period of time I was in it). Everyone would always hype their artist as the best thing since sliced bread. "You gotta hear this guy" "She's got an amazing voice" "They are so powerful". While I heard a lot of amazing talent — the fact of the matter was that they weren't "It". No matter how much marketing and promotion went behind them, they never grew beyond a decent sized market segment.
I do agree with you saying that Twitter has powerful impact. It's the primary social media network I use to get information from the development community I follow and I don't even use Facebook anymore. That being said, I'm starting to wonder if I'm in the same boat as the people promoting artists that were just never destined to be mega-stars.
I don't use twitter so if I'm wrong about this, I stand by to be corrected, but with twitter, I thought you can only reach people who have already chosen to listen to you.
It's powerful in that it's fast and can reach your followers quickly, and hope that they pass it on to non-followers, but it's fundamentally restricted in that you can't twitter to people who don't already follow you; the very people you need to reach most, given that followers are self-selectingly already on-message.
Twitter lets you mention anybody. Unless they've blocked you, they will be notified that you mentioned them. It's like /u/username on Reddit, but on Twitter it's the standard way to address people.
Anyone have any thoughts on turning Twitter into a publicly funded utility? It's fraught with difficulties, and maybe unconstitutional, but as you say Twitter is an extremely powerful tool and it would be a tragedy to lose it just because it can't find a way to extract money from its users.
Are you really asking to get money from the taxes that everyone pays for a dubious utility service as twitter?
If you really enjoy it finance it with your money.
I already finance organisations that are much more worth my money than a glorified newsletter.
It's a sad world in which we are living.
If I had a twitter account probably I should have tweeted my really deep analysis in 140 chars.
Wait for it.
Public funding would be massively problematic (especially in this political climate), but I agree about wanting to conserve the utility even if it's not a good way to make money. I'm surprised that a distributed open alternative hasn't appeared by now.
I've never seen a company in such an advantageous market position as Twitter, do so little with so many employees. They benefit from so much free advertising through self-promotion where people proudly display their twitter handle on TV or at the end of news stories and articles yet they're still unable to achieve any growth or noticeably improve their product.
From the outside it looks like they're at a virtual feature freeze and stand-still meanwhile all other Tech giants are firing on all cylinders with a continuous stream of new features and products.
Meanwhile Twitter struggles at implementing the most requested feature for many years - to edit Tweets. They're also in a prime position to benefit from Live video which they still can't capitalize on, there's no discovery and you can't even subscribe or get any notifications to the shows you're interested in, instead all you see is a tiny animated gif in the corner that's easily ignored as an Ad to show you what's playing.
I don't see how Twitter can continue as an independent company, the best thing that can happen to them is to get acquired and get some new blood in charge of product development, unfortunately there's so many trolls and hate speech on Twitter that no-one wants to touch them - another area they continue to flounder on.
it is. if you give people the ability to edit tweets they could switch them out to something obscene when they get embedded in a news article, for instance. the whole point of twitter is to have small, public, immutable statements tied to someone's name.
2) Charge developers for API access based on usage.
3) Incorporate some sort of single payment solution to facilitate ease of charging users for payment without users needing to give credit card details to developers (e.g. like Apple does with the AppStore).
4) Let third party developers worry about how to get users to pay by providing things of value (for various definitions of value).
I think this could actually work in a few years. Developers will have long forgotten about the last time Twitter crushed everyone relying on their API. Then, once their revenue is up the power will go to their heads and they can repeat the cycle all over again.
Twitter's operating expenses are on par with Tesla's. Not to diminish how hard it is to manage Twitter's load but their spending is way out of proportion. And their revenue is on the order of 2 bn/year; there's no fundamental reason they can't be profitable.
I really like(d) Twitter. I feel it has played a huge role in democratizing public opinion, so that I don't just create my opinion based on what media houses throw at me. For me, it narrowed the gap between so called "celebrities" and normal people. It made possible for me to interact with and get insights from people whose work I care about.
I feel so bad about the poor execution on their product side. They get free marketing - they are all over the tv, news websites etc. So many popular people use Twitter to share information. What more can they ask for?
There are so many things that Twitter could've done first just because it was in a position to like no-one else:
1. Media sharing: absolutely ridiculous experience to the point that people share images/video on some other platform and end up posting the links in tweets. Even then, for an consuming user, the browsing experience is shit. WTF twitter?
2. Content sharing: twitter as a platform has way more relevant content (URI's, first person messages etc) than any other news/media platform. What do they do with it? They do nothing. Twitter can learn so much about my interests from so many signals that I (used to!) give them - they do nothing to help me read content that interests me.
3. Live: there is no better place than twitter to potentially learn about what's happening right now. How do they facilitate live content sharing? By having a completely different app for video (periscope) which creates a fragmented user experience.
4. Fun: they had vine - they kept it as a separate app (again creating fragmentation) and eventually killed it. How are you going to attract young users if you don't keep on trying new, fun, cool stuff?
5. Spam: for all the attention that fake news is getting right now, Twitter has been in a unique position to innovate in this area. Unfortunately, afaik, it has done nothing.
> How are you going to attract young users if you don't keep on trying new, fun, cool stuff?
This is definitely true. They don't at all try to get the young demographic while FB always makes small changes to keep it fun(video profile pics, reactions etc).
| Om Malik is the most recent of many people to ask why Twitter is such a big deal.
| The reason is that it's a new messaging protocol, where you don't specify the recipients. New protocols are rare. Or more precisely, new protocols that take off are. There are only a handful of commonly used ones: TCP/IP (the Internet), SMTP (email), HTTP (the web), and so on. So any new protocol is a big deal. But Twitter is a protocol owned by a private company. That's even rarer.
| Curiously, the fact that the founders of Twitter have been slow to monetize it may in the long run prove to be an advantage. Because they haven't tried to control it too much, Twitter feels to everyone like previous protocols. One forgets it's owned by a private company. That must have made it easier for Twitter to spread.
Has anyone explored the design space that Twitter is a member of? It seems like it's just a cut-down version of publish-subscribe with a couple of eponymous channels (write, read) per user (and then the complexities of message threading).
The invention of hashtags was an attempt to add adhoc pub-sub channel support (not, as they are seemingly sometimes assumed to be, a metadata/folksonomy thing or an opportunity for a pithy closing phrase.)
All this is easy to duplicate. Is any of it even patented by Twitter?
What Twitter should do is extraordinarily obvious.
They should get very lean. Their platform has real value, which is why they're not disappearing in terms of use. There is also no replacement for what they provide and how they provide it, as of now.
At $2.4 - $2.6 billion in annual sales, they should be generating $600 to $800 million in net income. It's an absurdity of mismanagement that they're not. Their margins should be extremely high. At that level of net income, they can sustain a ~$20 billion market valuation and remain fully self-sustaining while they focus on growth + product.
They built Twitter as if it was going to be a juggernaut with high perpetual growth. They've been scaling back that structure very slowly, which is a mistake. They need to pull the band-aid off a lot faster, the crazy growth days are over.
If Wall Street doesn't give them a reasonable multiple on their new highly profitable structure, they should then work with perhaps a Ballmer + private equity + other insiders, to take Twitter private, where it can get out from under the Wall Street quarterly rat race.
I keep wondering about their part-time CEO. That has got to have some impact on the company culture. Just imagine how you would feel if your CEO couldn't be bothered to commit to the company full-time; would you in turn make suboptimal decisions through apathy? And then multiply that by everyone in the command chain.
I was going to type something like this and gladly found another person with similar thoughts. I firmly believe this is the right direction to go.
Of course, it's easy to suggest. I have to wonder though - what could really be the need for so many expenses? Is it impractical to cut down significantly and ride the success of the tech itself and sustain it with a much smaller set of teams?
Given the choice between believing stock analysts and stock prices, I err on the side of believing the price.
The price is set by people betting their money based on all available information INCLUDING stock analyst opinions. Any stock analyst's opinions are ALREADY factored in the price. Unless you have a reason to believe either that the market is irrational or that you have a more informed opinion, there is no more reliable prediction that you can make of future stock prices than current ones.
And remember, there are many, many, many billions of dollars looking for any market irrationality or lack of information so that investors can profit off of mistakes in current stock prices.
Readit News
The same goes for many of the most influential people in the world.
Twitter has incredible utility for powerful people but very limited utility for average people. Maybe the exact opposite of facebook. On Facebook, my friends interact with me. On twitter, I speak into the void.
I decided to make a concerted effort to participate more on Twitter a few months back, but if you have a low number of followers hardly anyone interacts with you, it's like being in a big crowd where a few people have megaphones and everyone else is whispering. I suppose I could buy a bunch of followers for $ in order to seem more worth talking to but that's a bullshit tactic and I don't respect platforms where bullshit is rewarded. Twitter seems to function best as an adjunct to other media than as a self-sustaining ecosystem.
Frankly I feel Twitter has made the internet (and by extension, society) worse in numerous ways - the dumb 140 character limit (notwithstanding this being inherited from SMS), its appalling user interface, and the overuse of simplistic metrics to score everyone and everything they say, promoting the crudest sort of lowest-common-denominator social proof.
As far as I can see the best way to be popular on Twitter (other than already being famous to start with) is to be an ass, which will get social approval from people who feel the same way but are inhibited from expressing that for whatever reason. The good things about Twitter (speed and flatness) persist despite the other factors rather than as a result of them. If it shut down tomorrow I think people would get over the loss within a week.
I've found that twitter has gotten close to replacing email for sending a message to a "stranger" (software dev, journo).
I post stuff more for myself. I get sad when my clever tweets don't get looked at, but just writing is fun too.
I don't have this problem, but the only people that follow me are typically my friends who may be interested in the things I have to say.
Twitter could front run wall street on Donald Trump tweets.
News orgs were never in themselves meant to be profitable, yet they were at the heart of the big three network's identities (and had enormous reach).
Twitter is a great platform to keep your name in the public consciousness. So... indispensable if you're a Kardashian. Other than that, though, it's not clear. A lot of people are wasting a lot of time building up a subscriber account that ends up being meaningless.
Facebook makes money because people give it a lot more information than they give twitter. Too much, IMO.
Look at all the articles written when Beyonce posts her pregnant body on Instagram as an example. we only think twitter has so much influence because thats where a lot of techies hang out.
I don't think you're giving the distribution mechanisms enough credit. The only reason that the POTUS's tweets hold so much weight is because every 24 hour news company reports on them endlessly. It gets power from magnification.
Only people who know Paul Graham will know about his blog, but his tweets can be re-broadcast to a much wider audience through re-tweeting, who can be exposed to him without having sought him out or known about him in the first place.
I've discovered, and subsequently followed, probably half of my twitter feed through re-tweets from my existing feed.
I have to imagine that's the same for a lot of others.
Which means that different people in different communities choose different communication tools for reasons that are not obvious.
Plus garnered a bit of a "tech"/thinker corner. I don't know whether it has any remaining vibrancy/growth, at this point, or whether its mostly a matter of inertia combined with the crapitude of other platforms for the particular communicating they are doing.
Too bad Plus was so thoroughly hosed from the start by political agendas.
OT: At Christmas, I stopped accessing Facebook. I thought it would be for a few days or a week. Coming up on two months, soon, and I haven't been able to make myself go back. Even with a relatively small set of FB friends whom I actually, personally know, and who are nice and not rabid and actually respond meaningfully to some of my own contributions, there.
In some ways, the impersonal, more technical content on Plus (and here, and etc.) is easier. There is no "missing aspect" as there is with FB engagement with friends.
Twitter? Gave up on that years ago. Tim O'Reilly had an interesting post or two about some of its positive, community aspects, in its early days. But now, it just mostly seems a megaphone for the loud and discontent.
And then, too, anywhere Trump et al. are and that seems to aid his lying megalomania. I'm not inclined to lend it the (incremental) support of my participation.
If he's a particular indication of their future, well, then, welcome to the gutter, Twitter.
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/RobertScoble Twitter: https://twitter.com/Scobleizer
Of note for Scoble is that there's much more room to talk on Facebook than twitter. I wonder if that's a similar reason that Torvalds uses G+
More like broadcast to their fans.
Which is something of a strength and weakness of Twitter. It can be used for conversations but the 140 character limit makes it tough. As a result, Twitter is generally best used for people who are broadcasting things to a group of interested followers. If that doesn't describe you (either as a follower or a followee) then you're probably not going to find Twitter very useful.
Twitter might have value, but no route to profitability.
Edit: Y'all are super salty about Twitter falling apart. Sad!
> I know a lot of creators of nerd culture. Game designers, writers, comic artists. Old, gnarled, crabby, battle-hardened pros with decades of experience. You'd have heard of a bunch of them.
> They all have something in common. It never fails to amaze me, but a single mean email or bad review can send them into a spiral. Like, they'll still be obsessing over it days later. I think, "Wow. After all these years, they still won't let this stuff roll off of them?" And then it happens to me.
> So we filter our inputs.
> ...
> Some people are mean. Some people are crazy. Some people are both. I do not let people in these categories pour poison directly into my ear.
> ...
> Twitter was designed, from Day 1, to enable any random person to send messages directly to any public figure. In other words, from Day 1, it was designed to be an abuse and harassment engine. It's not a bug. It's a feature. All that abuse and controversy is how it gets clicks and money.
http://jeff-vogel.blogspot.com/2016/04/how-i-deal-with-haras...
Trump doesn't do Snapchat videos. He does 3AM tweets.
It's always been the fluff which drew the ads; the lifestyle and sports content.
My sentiment as well, why I never got into Twitter at all.
There is a sense that you can connect with influential people on Twitter, but the truth is your voice just gets lost in a sea of noise.
Wow. I didn't even know he tweeted.
There's even an app in the Mac App store that a friend of mine wrote called Wren that is just a simple little "store and tweet" system. Doesn't attempt to read anything, just lets you keep it on your desktop to tweet stuff periodically. That sums up my usage of Twitter.
It's largely replaced press releases. While people used to send out releases to outlets, now they tweet it and outlets follow you and report if they think it's news worthy.
There is no discussion possible on Twitter, as the "threads" quickly devolve into an unintelligible mess.
You say something to the public, then you're done. It's purely a channel for viral marketing (also called "push", that word says it all).
Last I heard numbers, it was something like 80% of the population checked Facebook at least once a week.
Here most politicians and other "influential people" will take to Facebook when they want to be heard.
The President of the United States, for instance.
I do agree with you saying that Twitter has powerful impact. It's the primary social media network I use to get information from the development community I follow and I don't even use Facebook anymore. That being said, I'm starting to wonder if I'm in the same boat as the people promoting artists that were just never destined to be mega-stars.
It's an amazing way to connect, but ultimately it's a loudspeaker for loudmouths. It needs to die.
It's powerful in that it's fast and can reach your followers quickly, and hope that they pass it on to non-followers, but it's fundamentally restricted in that you can't twitter to people who don't already follow you; the very people you need to reach most, given that followers are self-selectingly already on-message.
Dead Comment
https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=pg
Dead Comment
From the outside it looks like they're at a virtual feature freeze and stand-still meanwhile all other Tech giants are firing on all cylinders with a continuous stream of new features and products.
Meanwhile Twitter struggles at implementing the most requested feature for many years - to edit Tweets. They're also in a prime position to benefit from Live video which they still can't capitalize on, there's no discovery and you can't even subscribe or get any notifications to the shows you're interested in, instead all you see is a tiny animated gif in the corner that's easily ignored as an Ad to show you what's playing.
I don't see how Twitter can continue as an independent company, the best thing that can happen to them is to get acquired and get some new blood in charge of product development, unfortunately there's so many trolls and hate speech on Twitter that no-one wants to touch them - another area they continue to flounder on.
I thought that the immutability of tweets is a feature, to be honest.
personally i find the editing almost as important as the content(o)
seeing what people change and when can illuminate context that would be hidden from a first thought best thought adherence
(o) http://whitmanarchive.org/manuscripts/figures/yal.00049.001_...
2) Charge developers for API access based on usage.
3) Incorporate some sort of single payment solution to facilitate ease of charging users for payment without users needing to give credit card details to developers (e.g. like Apple does with the AppStore).
4) Let third party developers worry about how to get users to pay by providing things of value (for various definitions of value).
You're welcome.
I really like(d) Twitter. I feel it has played a huge role in democratizing public opinion, so that I don't just create my opinion based on what media houses throw at me. For me, it narrowed the gap between so called "celebrities" and normal people. It made possible for me to interact with and get insights from people whose work I care about.
I feel so bad about the poor execution on their product side. They get free marketing - they are all over the tv, news websites etc. So many popular people use Twitter to share information. What more can they ask for?
There are so many things that Twitter could've done first just because it was in a position to like no-one else:
1. Media sharing: absolutely ridiculous experience to the point that people share images/video on some other platform and end up posting the links in tweets. Even then, for an consuming user, the browsing experience is shit. WTF twitter?
2. Content sharing: twitter as a platform has way more relevant content (URI's, first person messages etc) than any other news/media platform. What do they do with it? They do nothing. Twitter can learn so much about my interests from so many signals that I (used to!) give them - they do nothing to help me read content that interests me.
3. Live: there is no better place than twitter to potentially learn about what's happening right now. How do they facilitate live content sharing? By having a completely different app for video (periscope) which creates a fragmented user experience.
4. Fun: they had vine - they kept it as a separate app (again creating fragmentation) and eventually killed it. How are you going to attract young users if you don't keep on trying new, fun, cool stuff?
5. Spam: for all the attention that fake news is getting right now, Twitter has been in a unique position to innovate in this area. Unfortunately, afaik, it has done nothing.
</rant>
This is definitely true. They don't at all try to get the young demographic while FB always makes small changes to keep it fun(video profile pics, reactions etc).
| The reason is that it's a new messaging protocol, where you don't specify the recipients. New protocols are rare. Or more precisely, new protocols that take off are. There are only a handful of commonly used ones: TCP/IP (the Internet), SMTP (email), HTTP (the web), and so on. So any new protocol is a big deal. But Twitter is a protocol owned by a private company. That's even rarer.
| Curiously, the fact that the founders of Twitter have been slow to monetize it may in the long run prove to be an advantage. Because they haven't tried to control it too much, Twitter feels to everyone like previous protocols. One forgets it's owned by a private company. That must have made it easier for Twitter to spread.
- paul graham 09'
Was this true in '09? It doesn't seem like it has been true in a long time.
The invention of hashtags was an attempt to add adhoc pub-sub channel support (not, as they are seemingly sometimes assumed to be, a metadata/folksonomy thing or an opportunity for a pithy closing phrase.)
All this is easy to duplicate. Is any of it even patented by Twitter?
They should get very lean. Their platform has real value, which is why they're not disappearing in terms of use. There is also no replacement for what they provide and how they provide it, as of now.
At $2.4 - $2.6 billion in annual sales, they should be generating $600 to $800 million in net income. It's an absurdity of mismanagement that they're not. Their margins should be extremely high. At that level of net income, they can sustain a ~$20 billion market valuation and remain fully self-sustaining while they focus on growth + product.
They built Twitter as if it was going to be a juggernaut with high perpetual growth. They've been scaling back that structure very slowly, which is a mistake. They need to pull the band-aid off a lot faster, the crazy growth days are over.
If Wall Street doesn't give them a reasonable multiple on their new highly profitable structure, they should then work with perhaps a Ballmer + private equity + other insiders, to take Twitter private, where it can get out from under the Wall Street quarterly rat race.
Of course, it's easy to suggest. I have to wonder though - what could really be the need for so many expenses? Is it impractical to cut down significantly and ride the success of the tech itself and sustain it with a much smaller set of teams?
The price is set by people betting their money based on all available information INCLUDING stock analyst opinions. Any stock analyst's opinions are ALREADY factored in the price. Unless you have a reason to believe either that the market is irrational or that you have a more informed opinion, there is no more reliable prediction that you can make of future stock prices than current ones.
And remember, there are many, many, many billions of dollars looking for any market irrationality or lack of information so that investors can profit off of mistakes in current stock prices.