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Facebook fell out of favor after its IPO, so some of this seems like the periodicity for Twitter is similar, just stretched out much longer and more attenuated

Facebook fell out of favor after its IPO, so some of this seems like the periodicity for Twitter is similar, just stretched out much longer and more attenuated due to the lower market cap and lower rung on the ladder. Your comment that Twitter owns unique and compelling content: I view unique and compelling content as a scarce resource. Growth rate in the boring tail perhaps means less if they're cornering the market on the compelling blurb real estate. Twitter as a REIT, where the real estate is focused attention on compelling content? Are The Donald's FB posts featured on the networks nightly? The nightmare scenario for Twitter is that they've stumbled into a Craigslist-style niche of providing incredible, essential value that can't be monetized in proportion to the value it actually provides.

T2_t2 11y ago
The problem is simpler: the cost of disintermediating their service, e.g. to go ahead and build your own feed, is just too high. And maintenance is just a pain. It is far better to view tweets other's tell you to, than use your own feed. What Twitter needs is better intermediation - they need better tools to tune in and tune out of streams. The need, for want of a better analogy, a way to change the channel from Election heavy tweets to NBA tweets, when your team is on and you stop watching the debates. TL;DR Twitter makes it too hard to bother, most of the great tweet content is made available at some point, and you rarely regret missing anything.
- panabee 11y ago
  Precisely. One strategy for addressing this in the near term is to create more tools and products for partners/distributors like Yahoo and HuffPo to find and present interesting tweets for their audiences. Twitter can't curate everything in house in the near term. Algorithms aren't reliable enough, so they need a mix of algorithms and people. Some of those people can be in-house, but the faster, more scalable way to reach every nook and cranny of the world is to outsource a bunch of the curation through distributors who understand different audiences. Users have proven they won't curate on their own. As a bonus, Twitter can analyze these curation strategies to refine its own machine-learning algorithms.

T2_t2 11y ago

The problem is simpler: the cost of disintermediating their service, e.g. to go ahead and build your own feed, is just too high. And maintenance is just a pain. It is far better to view tweets other's tell you to, than use your own feed. What Twitter needs is better intermediation - they need better tools to tune in and tune out of streams. The need, for want of a better analogy, a way to change the channel from Election heavy tweets to NBA tweets, when your team is on and you stop watching the debates. TL;DR Twitter makes it too hard to bother, most of the great tweet content is made available at some point, and you rarely regret missing anything.

panabee 11y ago
Precisely. One strategy for addressing this in the near term is to create more tools and products for partners/distributors like Yahoo and HuffPo to find and present interesting tweets for their audiences. Twitter can't curate everything in house in the near term. Algorithms aren't reliable enough, so they need a mix of algorithms and people. Some of those people can be in-house, but the faster, more scalable way to reach every nook and cranny of the world is to outsource a bunch of the curation through distributors who understand different audiences. Users have proven they won't curate on their own. As a bonus, Twitter can analyze these curation strategies to refine its own machine-learning algorithms.