9 ms·

Also Out at Twitter: Engineering Head Roetter (and More to Come)

144 points by argonaut 11y ago

JoshTriplett 11y ago
Trying to rework Twitter into a profitable company does not seem like an enviable position. How do folks see Twitter becoming sustainably profitable, without tactics that will alienate their userbase? They've tried ads (promoted tweets), which doesn't seem to have worked well. They've tried analytics targeted at high-end users/companies, which doesn't seem to have much traction (though it does seem both useful and unobtrusive). Paid accounts? What features would such an account have that free accounts wouldn't? Longer tweets? That'll certainly change the culture drastically, but not necessarily for the better. Richer content? Likewise. Twitter seems like the contemporary company with the most valuable yet least profitable product.
- deleted 11y ago
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- seanp2k2 11y ago
  I've always said / thought the same, but they're still around. I know some people on the ad sales team, and I know how hard they work. They might be struggling and not thriving, but they're not out just yet.
- MicroBerto 11y ago
  I'm of the camp that it's just not possible. Given their demographic and model, I don't see how this company ever makes enough money to justify any valuation. It's an electronic wasteland and not the kind that makes money. I don't see how that ever changes.
  - perseusprime11 11y ago
    Charge people with followers. $10 per month if you have > 10K followers, $100 for > 100K followers, and so on. You charge as you are allowing them to broadcast
    - MicroBerto 11y ago
      I have zero data to back this up, but I would say that this will damage you more than help. If even a smallish percentage of key athletes/celebs/whatevers move exclusively to Instagram or something else, it would seriously disrupt Twitter. IG would love that, in fact. Plus, how many people with over 10k actual followers are there really? Is $120/year times that number really going to make a difference for the business? Seems cheap and risky simultaneously.
      - perseusprime11 11y ago
        It will be interesting to pull out some numbers here to see how the model looks. Is there a way to find out how many people have more than 10k followers? Politicians and celebs are getting access to their fans and followers. I think that kind of access should not be free especially when celebs are promoting their apps, music, etc.
    - pjc50 11y ago
      Well, that might deal with "buying followers". But my personal pet idea for paying for twitter would be something like reddit gold: a slight premium tier, but not necessarily paid for by the account holder. Encourage people to pay for the accounts of people they like. Heck, provide a "micro" donation system alongside it (although this runs into problems, Twitch passim) Also, a lot of people would like a better anti-abuse system and some might be prepared to pay for it.
  - joshkpeterson 11y ago
    Electronic wasteland is too strong. There are lots of great communities there.
  - morgante 11y ago
    > any valuation Really? You actually think Twitter has negative value as a company? They have real revenue. Fire everyone except a few dozen employees to maintain the core services/ads. That'll let you collect at least $100 million in profit. At a valuation of <$1 billion, Twitter would be a bargain.
    - MicroBerto 11y ago
      Good point, I used the wrong word there. Meant any valuation remotely near where they are. $12B? LOL no way. $1B, sure. I agree with your plan and would likely run the company like that -- except "just maintaining" a social network sounds like a long-term recipe for disaster too. The share price would also tank with that plan, which of course won't fly being a public corporation. This is why they're in such a rough place.
- feverishaaron 11y ago
  I think they have a ton of opportunity with a distribution platform like that. Tweets are already headlines for other products. A few expansion areas come to mind off hand: 1. Media distribution 2. E-commerce (get the hottest, limited supply thing) 3. Events & ticketing 4. Financial market alerts 5. AMA-style Q & As 6. Chat/AI services and integrations
  - JoshTriplett 11y ago
    > 5. AMA-style Q & As > 6. Chat/AI services and integrations This actually makes me wonder: if you increase or remove the length limits, how well would Twitter work as a private chat platform? Because compared to the terrible internal "social platform" sites that some large companies run on their intranets, a company-wide private version of Twitter actually seems like a significant improvement. Use lists (including shared lists) as an equivalent to rooms or groups. That would give three different types of streams: your main feed (people you follow from across the company), the groups you watch or participate in (where most of the productive value comes from), and the firehose (to sample what's going on across the whole company). As a bonus, if you add in a form of federated accounts, this could allow businesses paying for such a service to have a family of verified accounts on the public Twitter, all tied to their domain (similar to email addresses).
    - randomsearch 11y ago
      Slack?
      - JoshTriplett 11y ago
        In a way, yes. But far more people know Twitter, including employees and purchase-decision-makers.
        cpeterso 11y ago
        Imagine "Enterprise Twitter", something like Yammer and Slack. I use Yammer at work and it is worse than Twitter in every way, except it has no post length limits and you can create groups. Without the annoyance of spammers, Enterprise Twitter could implement new features like following #hashtags. Twitter needs to fix their threading UI, though. Facebook has a "Facebook at Work" enterprise product and, from what I hear, the company dogfoods its own platform for work as an alternative to email and mailing lists.
- wslh 11y ago
  Something obvious: offer an easy way to pay (even $ 5) for increasing their API limits. Google did it with AdWords while Yahoo required you to pay many thousands upfront.
- jay_kyburz 11y ago
  I think making tweets more readable would help a lot. I think pulling @ addresses, hashtags, and URLS out of the body would give every tweet more breathing room and make more sense to an everyday user. Then I've read heaps of great ideas here on HN about how they should be leveraging the real-time stream to be the go to place for what is going on for any issue. What I don't understand is why nothing is changing, I've only been a twitter user for a few years but I've never seen anything change. I think they need to be pumping out lots of little experimental tools for finding, consuming and creating tweets.
  - walterbell 11y ago
    > they need to be pumping out lots of little experimental tools for finding, consuming and creating tweets This existed as a thriving third-party ecosystem, before Twitter dismantled it, http://www.mathewingram.com/work/2015/04/30/twitters-multi-billion-dollar-mistake-happened-five-years-ago/ http://www.mathewingram.com/work/2015/04/30/twitters-multi-b... "Last year, Twitter effectively admitted that it needed third-party developers ... For anyone who had worked with Twitter in the past, however, this was a little bit like Fox Inc. asking for chicken volunteers to help it build a new hen-house. As far as I can tell, there’s little or no evidence that Twitter’s outreach program is working. What would Twitter be like today if it had embraced its ecosystem and tried to build on it instead of cutting it off at the knees? ... I think it would have a lot more goodwill to spend — both with developers and with users — than it does now, and I think many aspects of the service that it is now trying to build up, including smart recommendations and curation, would be a lot better off with outside input than they are now."
    - jay_kyburz 11y ago
      Fully agree, but I think they they could at least have some in house talent pumping out experiments. Would be a dream job for me to be on twitters payroll building experiments and functional prototypes.
  - newman314 11y ago
    What I have a hard time with is consuming conversations esp. when there are multiple branches. There is no easy overall thread view.
- eachro 11y ago
  A slightly different UI for digesting the firehose. With ads embedded directly into your twitter stream, it's so easy to just gloss over ads. Hell, it's so easy to skip past quality tweets as well since there is just so much coming through. I'm not sure what this new interface should be, just that there needs to be a different way to sift through tweets.
  - pteredactyl 11y ago
    One possibility may be to give users the option to sift through their feed in different ways. I know it's a novel concept in SV, but...
- morgante 11y ago
  Twitter has annual revenue of $1.4 billion. You really can't figure out how to be profitable on that? That seems to signal a lack of creativity. Twitter has nearly 4,000 employees—there is simply no way you need that many employees to run their core services. Twitter has already done some layoffs, but they could stand to do plenty more. They really don't need more than 1,000 employees. The company was built with the idea that it'd be the next Facebook but there doesn't seem to be any path to that happening. They need to accept their market position and optimize on profiting from it. Fortunately, unlike Facebook, their core user experience is much simpler and should require way fewer engineers.
  - mason55 11y ago
    There's only so much fat you can trim. Even if you managed to automate everything, fired everyone and just let Jack run it on his own, you're looking at a max of $1.5b profit/year. With no prospect for growth that $12B market cap is going to collapse very rapidly. Right now they are trying to find other niches to fill so they can continue to grow, they are just not doing it very successfully.
    - morgante 11y ago
      > $1.5b profit/year If they actually got to $1.5b annual earnings, they could definitely justify a $12b cap. A P/E of 8 would be ridiculously low for the technology industry—heck, for any industry. I'm not enthusiastic about Twitter and certainly wouldn't buy the stock, but the company also definitely isn't "worthless." There's certainly a path to profitability.
      - mason55 11y ago
        > A P/E of 8 would be ridiculously low for the technology industry—heck, for any industry. In this scenario they have fired everyone and given up trying to grow. A P/E of 8 would be way overvalued.
        khuey 11y ago
- acdha 11y ago
  Twitter would be profitable in the tens of millions per quarter range except for stock-based compensation: http://files.shareholder.com/downloads/AMDA-2F526X/840118979x0x841606/5C3F74A1-56C7-4CBE-A4C6-F1D677D5776B/2015_Q2_Earnings_press_release.pdf http://files.shareholder.com/downloads/AMDA-2F526X/840118979... I'm inclined to say the best thing they could do would be scaling down expectations of bubble-level returns and focusing on value rather than screwing with the core service trying for unrealistic returns. The problem is that this would require compensating executives less and we live in a era obsessed with short-term returns.
  - steven2012 11y ago
    More like 100s of millions of dollars per quarter. They are actually a healthy company with good positive cash flow if not for stock based comp.
  - deleted 11y ago
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- brandnewlow 11y ago
  It's totally possible... if they accept that they're a media company and therefore don't need to employ 2,000+ technical people.
- frostmatthew 11y ago
  > Longer tweets? That'll certainly change the culture drastically, but not necessarily for the better. Charging for longer tweets (either a flat amount or per char over 140) may be a good source of additional revenue. The majority of "normal" users wouldn't take advantage it, but many businesses probably would. This would have the advantage of removing the char limit when people want to (enough to pay for it) but without drastically changing the culture since the majority of tweets would presumably still be under 140.
  - prostoalex 11y ago
    People who'd use it just post a screenshot of typed text >140 chars.
- mmahemoff 11y ago
  I'm surprised with the amount of gloom around Twitter, as I feel like there are some fairly obvious ways they can improve the core product, and with the recent management overhauls, a distinct chance it will happen. Would these future innovations alienate their userbase? Well do we have evidence they alienated the userbase previously. I doubt it. While we can point to scores of #ragetweets about how Twitter is finished, finished, because they have replaced hearts with favorites, those complaints last about 2 days. Another example would be how embedded images would destroy Twitter (people said the same when Mosaic introduced images to the web in around 1994, as far as they were concerned, the internet had jumped the shark). The fact is, Twitter has managed to slowly add features like hashtags and images without changing the essence of the product, engaged users will stick around if they keep doing so. I'd acknowledge that the one last negative sentiment was one close to HN's heart - the developer/API issues - and they still have to iron that out (so far, @Jack's #HelloWorld initiative from three months ago hasn't yielded). But I'm thinking more about features they can add to the core product. Fairly obvious, and I think impactful, innovations we will see are: * Long-form tweets - The 140 limit is confusing to Twitter newcomers. Meanwhile, Medium shows the power of a clean publishing platform where anyone can say something important without having to setup a blog and feel the obligation to keep posting. It helps them find an audience. Twitter has a giant ready population of people with interesting things to say and many of them are already using Twitter to say it, in less than ideal ways (too-long Tweetstorms, screenshots, linking to pastebins and 3rd party long tweet services). Designed right, I think they can introduce this with minimal impact on the normal experience and suddenly become a giant source of substantial content. * Video - Similar argument to long-form tweets. They have a ready population of potential video makers and can easily find videos an audience. I imagine a lot of people discover YouTube videos from Twitter now; those could be directly served by Twitter in the future. * Curation - Twitter's model of showing every tweet from every friend is archaic and doesn't serve the needs of most users. If I haven't logged in for 2 days, do I really need to see a blast of trivial tweets from 5 minutes ago? They have made some attempts to improve this (e.g. "While you were away" highlights, which so far are mediocre), but can do a lot more, e.g. showing most relevant/popular tweets from friends (see: Nuzzel) and going beyond just friends' tweets/retweets if something is relevant enough. I know moving to a Facebook-like filtered stream will enrage some hardcore users, so they would need to do so carefully and maybe with settings to keep it the old way, etc. ... but I think it will be a big quality boost for most users and also make native ads more effective. * Apps - The official apps aren't exactly loved and lack consistency (e.g. Tweetdeck and several other official apps still can't render polls, an important mainline feature for a while now). A savvy product team could improve these across the board. There are a lot more possibilities, and those are just features related to the core product, leaving aside monetisation opportunities such as buy buttons. Twitter has already moved in some of these directions and the signs are @Jack is intent on accelerating that effort.
- codingdave 11y ago
  I doubt they need to increase revenue. They have billions. What they need to do is reduce costs. I have no idea what they look like internally, but I have never seen a company of their size that cannot be streamlined.
- steven2012 11y ago
  Twitter is actually cash flow positive. The main reason they show an GAAP loss is because of stock based comp. Take that out of the equation and they are cash flow positive and pretty profitable.
perseusprime11 11y ago
1. Lack of clear product vision 2. Bad execution. Look at Facebook's execution in the last 3 years. Messenger, Sports Stadium, etc. 3. Potentially another re-architecture?
- chucky_z 11y ago
  Actually, the insane amount of advertising and media groups on Facebook have pushed me to Twitter, and it's very refreshing. I'll be moving away from everything but FB Messenger (imo their best product).
- pteredactyl 11y ago
  BINGO: Lack of clear product vision
deleted 11y ago
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firasd 11y ago
Twitter's problem is not really revenue; the ads and other sources are working (they'll probably announce over $2 billion in 2015 revenue). Their problem is that Facebook has trained Wall Street to look at Monthly Active Users as a core metric and Twitter's user growth and retention doesn't match up well compared to FB. Twitter execs have been trying to underscore their "logged-out users", as in views on embedded tweets and other pageviews, and are adding ads in those places.
- brandnewlow 11y ago
  If they retrain Wall Street to value logged out users, then they will have to accept a much lower valuation as the new norm. Twitter's IPO valuation was based on persuading the market that they were another Facebook, i.e. a sticky platform that would extend out to solve problems in varied industries. I agree that their media business is really solid. They acquired TellApart, Mopub, and a bunch of smart ad tech people. The problem is that a solid media business is not what investors were hoping for. If that's Twitter's new story then they're a well-equipped media/ad tech company -- another AOL, Yahoo, or even Criteo. Those are real companies that generate revenue but they're not the sorts of companies able to recruit top-level talent, retain and empower their acquired talent or garner 10x valuations.
  - username223 11y ago
    > Those are real companies that generate revenue but they're not the sorts of companies able to recruit top-level talent, retain and empower their acquired talent or garner 10x valuations. That kind of sums up the current bubble, doesn't it?
- prostoalex 11y ago
  The problem with logged-out users is that the only advertisers vying for those page views are of "punch the monkey" type. There's no premium ad inventory chasing logged-out randos.
  - ffumarola 11y ago
frik 11y ago
It seems it's Jan 2000 all over now. Reading old comments from that time, it seemed obvious in late 1999 yet not everyone got it. For example check out the one and two star review comments (1999-2001) on this page: http://www.amazon.com/Internet-Bubble-The-Anthony-Perkins/product-reviews/0066640008/ http://www.amazon.com/Internet-Bubble-The-Anthony-Perkins/pr...
- hueving 11y ago
  The bad reviews on that book seem legitimate (e.g. Doomsdaying without specifics so it's difficult to pin down their point). Anyone can constantly publish that the market is in a bubble and then just wait until it goes down and claim they were right. It's completely worthless in that regard because early doomsdaying are worse for investors than getting into the market.
  - frik 11y ago
    In hindsight it's always easy. You know what, the book authors wrote the book in 1999 for the general public, the average joe who bought tech stock without much knowledge. Many insiders from the valley knew about the bubble, yet your grandma in Texas never heard about it in 1999 or Jan/Feb2000. That's why that book helped lot's of people to get out of it, right before the crash - it doesn't matter when the crash happen, a few months before is better than a months too late, isn't it? Well the one amd two star reviewers thought they were clever or were heavily invested insiders (like you/other downvoter now?). Petty for them that those probably lost their money. It's always good to learn from history.
- eggie 11y ago
  I enjoy this one: http://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/R1FS0OYG08O1UD/ref=cm_cr_pr_rvw_ttl?ie=UTF8&ASIN=0066640008 http://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/R1FS0OYG08O1UD/ref... > This book was a huge disappointment. The authors try to draw parallels between the current high-tech/Internet phenomenon and previous "manias." However, their rational is very poor. As an example, they say the Internet Bubble will burst just like biotechnology did. What they fail to mention is that Internet usage and penetration has grown faster than anything in the history of mankind. Furthermore, Internet companies are posting revenues and mainly losing money because it is a market share game right now. Biotech companies, on the other hand, never had any revenue until they had a drug on the market. They only focus on the negatives and don't provide both sides of the story. This type of faulty reasoning is why I believe your money would be better spent on other Internet books. We are right back to the "share game". Although profits are in a better place, and there do appear to be strong winners today, the companies making money (Google and Facebook) are doing so at the expense of companies who are losing money ta make market share, which makes the whole thing feel like a giant house of cards.
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Sir_Cmpwn 11y ago
I think Twitter needs to learn to be okay with its current size, or perhaps even smaller. The core idea is very compelling - a curated feed of short, simple content. The nonsense Twitter has added lately substantially detracts from its core values, and it feels like desperate pleas for unnecessary growth to somehow support the massive payroll they convinced themselves to take on. The Silicon Valley obsession with endless growth is harmful sometimes.
- JonFish85 11y ago
  While I see this as true, man does it suck to be an employee who was hoping for stock options to be worth anything. Especially for those who became Twitter employees via an acquisition, since I imagine a big part of their compensation from that event was stock.
  - acchow 11y ago
    Twitter IPO'd a while ago. Employees with option grants had plenty of time to realize gains...
    - morgante 11y ago
      I'm sure that like most big tech companies Twitter continues to provide a large portion of compensation in company stock.
      - kevinpet 11y ago
        But RSUs do not become worthless like options do when the price declines.
  - rhizome 11y ago
    When a company I worked for was acquired by a public company, my options were converted 8:1 to actual shares in the acquiring company.
  - ryandetzel 11y ago
newman314 11y ago
Twitter might have looked like a place to go to but it sure seems to have been a continuous revolving door of exec mgmt for many years now.
- newman314 11y ago
  Just saw a tweet that stated only 5 out of the 13 execs that presented at the last analyst day are left.
- BinaryIdiot 11y ago
  > Twitter might have looked like a place to go Which, while slightly off topic, reminds me: does Twitter do automated resume checking? I applied some time back at 3am for a job I was more than qualified for and got a rejection almost instantly. I thought maybe it was an automated system so I tweaked my resume and resubmitted and it was rejected again almost instantly. Really put me off from ever trying again considering that I met the requirements listed and it declined me saying I did not. I had an indirect way to send a resume through some friends but decided not to bother after that.
  - newman314 11y ago
    Given the revolving door of people coming and going frequently, personally that's offputting. So unless there's a burning reason that compels you to work there, maybe it's not a bad thing to look elsewhere. Disclaimer: I have never applied to Twitter. PS. Twitter apparently uses Jobvite [1] [1] https://www.quora.com/Why-do-companies-pass-on-using-Jobvite https://www.quora.com/Why-do-companies-pass-on-using-Jobvite
curiousDog 11y ago
Feel bad for a colleague of mine who joined the company when the stock was $60 and got his stock bonus at that price
ryandetzel 11y ago
Since this is a leak and not official (yet) we're not sure whose choice this is. If it's Twitters (Jack) then it's probably a good move to get fresh product/engineering talent in to change things up.
vikas5678 11y ago
A potential acquisition of Slack and cutting number of employees to < 1000 are 2 things that come to mind. Owning slack opens up other potential streams of revenue in the enterprise space. Or allow twitter users to form groups/rooms on twitter ala Slack.
- harryh 11y ago
  Twitter can't afford Slack. Twitter's market cap is ~12B. There is no way in hell that Slack would sell for less than 10B. They probably wouldn't even sell for that much.
  - vikas5678 11y ago
    Probably. Allowing people to create chat rooms/channels is another possibility, and allows them to enter the enterprise collaboration space. Competes easily with HipChat and Slack. Most people already have twitter accounts, so groups of people can collaborate on the fly.
  - jay_kyburz 11y ago
    10B for slack! OMG I'm in the wrong business.
    - imrehg 11y ago
      If you just look at the numbers, pretty much everyone always is.
  - bentlegen 11y ago
    Is Slack, unprofitable w/ $30MM yearly revenue[1], really worth almost as much as Twitter, unprofitable w/ almost $2BN yearly revenue? That's a lot of growth to account for. [1] http://www.businessinsider.com/slack-expects-30-million-revenue-2015-7 http://www.businessinsider.com/slack-expects-30-million-reve...
- cpeterso 11y ago
  Or Slack should acquire Twitter.
lancewiggs 11y ago
Just make us pay Free: current access $25/Year: Access using any 3rd party product $200/Year: Name verified $20,000/year: Corporate account etc
yeukhon 11y ago
I see some comments talking about Twitter employee population is too big, is there any statistics about what the percentage is for each department? Despite the fact I agree the population is quite large, but I can guess at least 30% are marketing folks, 20% are HR and process people, and then the rest are developers. Twitter has done a number of acquisitions. I don't know how many people are running Vine in production today, but my understanding is their NY core team is still quite small. However, given Twitter has launched so many products (including all of the background projects they did to support their production), I won't be surprise if they have at least 10% of their entire engineering force doing infrastructure and operation, and then 40% divided into core product like Twitter, internal application developers, security, solution engineers, etc. When a new CEO is in charge, some layoff and some re-org usually happen. Some projects have to be closed, some have to be sunset, and some have to be merged. Let see how much they can trim down. It usually take a year to complete the evaluations and projecting new positions.
- josephmx 11y ago
  Their website puts 44% into "technical" staff, https://about.twitter.com/company https://about.twitter.com/company
rockcoder 11y ago
Twitter is actually the only "social network" that I use daily and find real value in so I really hope they can get their act together somehow. Just a few more random thoughts... Twitter's biggest asset is its core product and they should not meddle too much with it. And I think they should be able to make a company profitable with just that. Even though the product itself is really simple, there are many use cases of it that are not all easily transformed into revenue and probably not so easy to communicate to investors. Its basically a platform that enables a new form of communication. Different people use it for different purposes. Companies use it for different purposes. Traditional media gets lots of their content from Twitter nowadays. Mimicking Facebook in any way would be a mistake because I think it's a fundamentally different product.

144 points by argonaut 11y ago

Trying to rework Twitter into a profitable company does not seem like an enviable position. How do folks see Twitter becoming sustainably profitable, without tactics that will alienate their userbase? They've tried ads (promoted tweets), which doesn't seem to have worked well. They've tried analytics targeted at high-end users/companies, which doesn't seem to have much traction (though it does seem both useful and unobtrusive). Paid accounts? What features would such an account have that free accounts wouldn't? Longer tweets? That'll certainly change the culture drastically, but not necessarily for the better. Richer content? Likewise. Twitter seems like the contemporary company with the most valuable yet least profitable product.

deleted 11y ago
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seanp2k2 11y ago
I've always said / thought the same, but they're still around. I know some people on the ad sales team, and I know how hard they work. They might be struggling and not thriving, but they're not out just yet.
MicroBerto 11y ago
I'm of the camp that it's just not possible. Given their demographic and model, I don't see how this company ever makes enough money to justify any valuation. It's an electronic wasteland and not the kind that makes money. I don't see how that ever changes.
- perseusprime11 11y ago
  Charge people with followers. $10 per month if you have > 10K followers, $100 for > 100K followers, and so on. You charge as you are allowing them to broadcast
  - MicroBerto 11y ago
    I have zero data to back this up, but I would say that this will damage you more than help. If even a smallish percentage of key athletes/celebs/whatevers move exclusively to Instagram or something else, it would seriously disrupt Twitter. IG would love that, in fact. Plus, how many people with over 10k actual followers are there really? Is $120/year times that number really going to make a difference for the business? Seems cheap and risky simultaneously.
    - perseusprime11 11y ago
      It will be interesting to pull out some numbers here to see how the model looks. Is there a way to find out how many people have more than 10k followers? Politicians and celebs are getting access to their fans and followers. I think that kind of access should not be free especially when celebs are promoting their apps, music, etc.
  - pjc50 11y ago
    Well, that might deal with "buying followers". But my personal pet idea for paying for twitter would be something like reddit gold: a slight premium tier, but not necessarily paid for by the account holder. Encourage people to pay for the accounts of people they like. Heck, provide a "micro" donation system alongside it (although this runs into problems, Twitch passim) Also, a lot of people would like a better anti-abuse system and some might be prepared to pay for it.
- joshkpeterson 11y ago
  Electronic wasteland is too strong. There are lots of great communities there.
- morgante 11y ago
  > any valuation Really? You actually think Twitter has negative value as a company? They have real revenue. Fire everyone except a few dozen employees to maintain the core services/ads. That'll let you collect at least $100 million in profit. At a valuation of <$1 billion, Twitter would be a bargain.
  - MicroBerto 11y ago
    Good point, I used the wrong word there. Meant any valuation remotely near where they are. $12B? LOL no way. $1B, sure. I agree with your plan and would likely run the company like that -- except "just maintaining" a social network sounds like a long-term recipe for disaster too. The share price would also tank with that plan, which of course won't fly being a public corporation. This is why they're in such a rough place.
feverishaaron 11y ago
I think they have a ton of opportunity with a distribution platform like that. Tweets are already headlines for other products. A few expansion areas come to mind off hand: 1. Media distribution 2. E-commerce (get the hottest, limited supply thing) 3. Events & ticketing 4. Financial market alerts 5. AMA-style Q & As 6. Chat/AI services and integrations
- JoshTriplett 11y ago
  > 5. AMA-style Q & As > 6. Chat/AI services and integrations This actually makes me wonder: if you increase or remove the length limits, how well would Twitter work as a private chat platform? Because compared to the terrible internal "social platform" sites that some large companies run on their intranets, a company-wide private version of Twitter actually seems like a significant improvement. Use lists (including shared lists) as an equivalent to rooms or groups. That would give three different types of streams: your main feed (people you follow from across the company), the groups you watch or participate in (where most of the productive value comes from), and the firehose (to sample what's going on across the whole company). As a bonus, if you add in a form of federated accounts, this could allow businesses paying for such a service to have a family of verified accounts on the public Twitter, all tied to their domain (similar to email addresses).
  - randomsearch 11y ago
    Slack?
    - JoshTriplett 11y ago
      In a way, yes. But far more people know Twitter, including employees and purchase-decision-makers.
      - cpeterso 11y ago
        Imagine "Enterprise Twitter", something like Yammer and Slack. I use Yammer at work and it is worse than Twitter in every way, except it has no post length limits and you can create groups. Without the annoyance of spammers, Enterprise Twitter could implement new features like following #hashtags. Twitter needs to fix their threading UI, though. Facebook has a "Facebook at Work" enterprise product and, from what I hear, the company dogfoods its own platform for work as an alternative to email and mailing lists.
wslh 11y ago
Something obvious: offer an easy way to pay (even $ 5) for increasing their API limits. Google did it with AdWords while Yahoo required you to pay many thousands upfront.
jay_kyburz 11y ago
I think making tweets more readable would help a lot. I think pulling @ addresses, hashtags, and URLS out of the body would give every tweet more breathing room and make more sense to an everyday user. Then I've read heaps of great ideas here on HN about how they should be leveraging the real-time stream to be the go to place for what is going on for any issue. What I don't understand is why nothing is changing, I've only been a twitter user for a few years but I've never seen anything change. I think they need to be pumping out lots of little experimental tools for finding, consuming and creating tweets.
- walterbell 11y ago
  > they need to be pumping out lots of little experimental tools for finding, consuming and creating tweets This existed as a thriving third-party ecosystem, before Twitter dismantled it, http://www.mathewingram.com/work/2015/04/30/twitters-multi-billion-dollar-mistake-happened-five-years-ago/ http://www.mathewingram.com/work/2015/04/30/twitters-multi-b... "Last year, Twitter effectively admitted that it needed third-party developers ... For anyone who had worked with Twitter in the past, however, this was a little bit like Fox Inc. asking for chicken volunteers to help it build a new hen-house. As far as I can tell, there’s little or no evidence that Twitter’s outreach program is working. What would Twitter be like today if it had embraced its ecosystem and tried to build on it instead of cutting it off at the knees? ... I think it would have a lot more goodwill to spend — both with developers and with users — than it does now, and I think many aspects of the service that it is now trying to build up, including smart recommendations and curation, would be a lot better off with outside input than they are now."
  - jay_kyburz 11y ago
    Fully agree, but I think they they could at least have some in house talent pumping out experiments. Would be a dream job for me to be on twitters payroll building experiments and functional prototypes.
- newman314 11y ago
  What I have a hard time with is consuming conversations esp. when there are multiple branches. There is no easy overall thread view.
eachro 11y ago
A slightly different UI for digesting the firehose. With ads embedded directly into your twitter stream, it's so easy to just gloss over ads. Hell, it's so easy to skip past quality tweets as well since there is just so much coming through. I'm not sure what this new interface should be, just that there needs to be a different way to sift through tweets.
- pteredactyl 11y ago
  One possibility may be to give users the option to sift through their feed in different ways. I know it's a novel concept in SV, but...
morgante 11y ago
Twitter has annual revenue of $1.4 billion. You really can't figure out how to be profitable on that? That seems to signal a lack of creativity. Twitter has nearly 4,000 employees—there is simply no way you need that many employees to run their core services. Twitter has already done some layoffs, but they could stand to do plenty more. They really don't need more than 1,000 employees. The company was built with the idea that it'd be the next Facebook but there doesn't seem to be any path to that happening. They need to accept their market position and optimize on profiting from it. Fortunately, unlike Facebook, their core user experience is much simpler and should require way fewer engineers.
- mason55 11y ago
  There's only so much fat you can trim. Even if you managed to automate everything, fired everyone and just let Jack run it on his own, you're looking at a max of $1.5b profit/year. With no prospect for growth that $12B market cap is going to collapse very rapidly. Right now they are trying to find other niches to fill so they can continue to grow, they are just not doing it very successfully.
  - morgante 11y ago
    > $1.5b profit/year If they actually got to $1.5b annual earnings, they could definitely justify a $12b cap. A P/E of 8 would be ridiculously low for the technology industry—heck, for any industry. I'm not enthusiastic about Twitter and certainly wouldn't buy the stock, but the company also definitely isn't "worthless." There's certainly a path to profitability.
    - mason55 11y ago
      > A P/E of 8 would be ridiculously low for the technology industry—heck, for any industry. In this scenario they have fired everyone and given up trying to grow. A P/E of 8 would be way overvalued.
      - khuey 11y ago
acdha 11y ago
Twitter would be profitable in the tens of millions per quarter range except for stock-based compensation: http://files.shareholder.com/downloads/AMDA-2F526X/840118979x0x841606/5C3F74A1-56C7-4CBE-A4C6-F1D677D5776B/2015_Q2_Earnings_press_release.pdf http://files.shareholder.com/downloads/AMDA-2F526X/840118979... I'm inclined to say the best thing they could do would be scaling down expectations of bubble-level returns and focusing on value rather than screwing with the core service trying for unrealistic returns. The problem is that this would require compensating executives less and we live in a era obsessed with short-term returns.
- steven2012 11y ago
  More like 100s of millions of dollars per quarter. They are actually a healthy company with good positive cash flow if not for stock based comp.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
brandnewlow 11y ago
It's totally possible... if they accept that they're a media company and therefore don't need to employ 2,000+ technical people.
frostmatthew 11y ago
> Longer tweets? That'll certainly change the culture drastically, but not necessarily for the better. Charging for longer tweets (either a flat amount or per char over 140) may be a good source of additional revenue. The majority of "normal" users wouldn't take advantage it, but many businesses probably would. This would have the advantage of removing the char limit when people want to (enough to pay for it) but without drastically changing the culture since the majority of tweets would presumably still be under 140.
- prostoalex 11y ago
  People who'd use it just post a screenshot of typed text >140 chars.
mmahemoff 11y ago
I'm surprised with the amount of gloom around Twitter, as I feel like there are some fairly obvious ways they can improve the core product, and with the recent management overhauls, a distinct chance it will happen. Would these future innovations alienate their userbase? Well do we have evidence they alienated the userbase previously. I doubt it. While we can point to scores of #ragetweets about how Twitter is finished, finished, because they have replaced hearts with favorites, those complaints last about 2 days. Another example would be how embedded images would destroy Twitter (people said the same when Mosaic introduced images to the web in around 1994, as far as they were concerned, the internet had jumped the shark). The fact is, Twitter has managed to slowly add features like hashtags and images without changing the essence of the product, engaged users will stick around if they keep doing so. I'd acknowledge that the one last negative sentiment was one close to HN's heart - the developer/API issues - and they still have to iron that out (so far, @Jack's #HelloWorld initiative from three months ago hasn't yielded). But I'm thinking more about features they can add to the core product. Fairly obvious, and I think impactful, innovations we will see are: * Long-form tweets - The 140 limit is confusing to Twitter newcomers. Meanwhile, Medium shows the power of a clean publishing platform where anyone can say something important without having to setup a blog and feel the obligation to keep posting. It helps them find an audience. Twitter has a giant ready population of people with interesting things to say and many of them are already using Twitter to say it, in less than ideal ways (too-long Tweetstorms, screenshots, linking to pastebins and 3rd party long tweet services). Designed right, I think they can introduce this with minimal impact on the normal experience and suddenly become a giant source of substantial content. * Video - Similar argument to long-form tweets. They have a ready population of potential video makers and can easily find videos an audience. I imagine a lot of people discover YouTube videos from Twitter now; those could be directly served by Twitter in the future. * Curation - Twitter's model of showing every tweet from every friend is archaic and doesn't serve the needs of most users. If I haven't logged in for 2 days, do I really need to see a blast of trivial tweets from 5 minutes ago? They have made some attempts to improve this (e.g. "While you were away" highlights, which so far are mediocre), but can do a lot more, e.g. showing most relevant/popular tweets from friends (see: Nuzzel) and going beyond just friends' tweets/retweets if something is relevant enough. I know moving to a Facebook-like filtered stream will enrage some hardcore users, so they would need to do so carefully and maybe with settings to keep it the old way, etc. ... but I think it will be a big quality boost for most users and also make native ads more effective. * Apps - The official apps aren't exactly loved and lack consistency (e.g. Tweetdeck and several other official apps still can't render polls, an important mainline feature for a while now). A savvy product team could improve these across the board. There are a lot more possibilities, and those are just features related to the core product, leaving aside monetisation opportunities such as buy buttons. Twitter has already moved in some of these directions and the signs are @Jack is intent on accelerating that effort.
codingdave 11y ago
I doubt they need to increase revenue. They have billions. What they need to do is reduce costs. I have no idea what they look like internally, but I have never seen a company of their size that cannot be streamlined.
steven2012 11y ago
Twitter is actually cash flow positive. The main reason they show an GAAP loss is because of stock based comp. Take that out of the equation and they are cash flow positive and pretty profitable.

perseusprime11 11y ago

1. Lack of clear product vision 2. Bad execution. Look at Facebook's execution in the last 3 years. Messenger, Sports Stadium, etc. 3. Potentially another re-architecture?

chucky_z 11y ago
Actually, the insane amount of advertising and media groups on Facebook have pushed me to Twitter, and it's very refreshing. I'll be moving away from everything but FB Messenger (imo their best product).
pteredactyl 11y ago
BINGO: Lack of clear product vision

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

firasd 11y ago

Twitter's problem is not really revenue; the ads and other sources are working (they'll probably announce over $2 billion in 2015 revenue). Their problem is that Facebook has trained Wall Street to look at Monthly Active Users as a core metric and Twitter's user growth and retention doesn't match up well compared to FB. Twitter execs have been trying to underscore their "logged-out users", as in views on embedded tweets and other pageviews, and are adding ads in those places.

brandnewlow 11y ago
If they retrain Wall Street to value logged out users, then they will have to accept a much lower valuation as the new norm. Twitter's IPO valuation was based on persuading the market that they were another Facebook, i.e. a sticky platform that would extend out to solve problems in varied industries. I agree that their media business is really solid. They acquired TellApart, Mopub, and a bunch of smart ad tech people. The problem is that a solid media business is not what investors were hoping for. If that's Twitter's new story then they're a well-equipped media/ad tech company -- another AOL, Yahoo, or even Criteo. Those are real companies that generate revenue but they're not the sorts of companies able to recruit top-level talent, retain and empower their acquired talent or garner 10x valuations.
- username223 11y ago
  > Those are real companies that generate revenue but they're not the sorts of companies able to recruit top-level talent, retain and empower their acquired talent or garner 10x valuations. That kind of sums up the current bubble, doesn't it?
prostoalex 11y ago
The problem with logged-out users is that the only advertisers vying for those page views are of "punch the monkey" type. There's no premium ad inventory chasing logged-out randos.
- ffumarola 11y ago

frik 11y ago

It seems it's Jan 2000 all over now. Reading old comments from that time, it seemed obvious in late 1999 yet not everyone got it. For example check out the one and two star review comments (1999-2001) on this page: http://www.amazon.com/Internet-Bubble-The-Anthony-Perkins/product-reviews/0066640008/ http://www.amazon.com/Internet-Bubble-The-Anthony-Perkins/pr...

hueving 11y ago
The bad reviews on that book seem legitimate (e.g. Doomsdaying without specifics so it's difficult to pin down their point). Anyone can constantly publish that the market is in a bubble and then just wait until it goes down and claim they were right. It's completely worthless in that regard because early doomsdaying are worse for investors than getting into the market.
- frik 11y ago
  In hindsight it's always easy. You know what, the book authors wrote the book in 1999 for the general public, the average joe who bought tech stock without much knowledge. Many insiders from the valley knew about the bubble, yet your grandma in Texas never heard about it in 1999 or Jan/Feb2000. That's why that book helped lot's of people to get out of it, right before the crash - it doesn't matter when the crash happen, a few months before is better than a months too late, isn't it? Well the one amd two star reviewers thought they were clever or were heavily invested insiders (like you/other downvoter now?). Petty for them that those probably lost their money. It's always good to learn from history.
eggie 11y ago
I enjoy this one: http://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/R1FS0OYG08O1UD/ref=cm_cr_pr_rvw_ttl?ie=UTF8&ASIN=0066640008 http://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/R1FS0OYG08O1UD/ref... > This book was a huge disappointment. The authors try to draw parallels between the current high-tech/Internet phenomenon and previous "manias." However, their rational is very poor. As an example, they say the Internet Bubble will burst just like biotechnology did. What they fail to mention is that Internet usage and penetration has grown faster than anything in the history of mankind. Furthermore, Internet companies are posting revenues and mainly losing money because it is a market share game right now. Biotech companies, on the other hand, never had any revenue until they had a drug on the market. They only focus on the negatives and don't provide both sides of the story. This type of faulty reasoning is why I believe your money would be better spent on other Internet books. We are right back to the "share game". Although profits are in a better place, and there do appear to be strong winners today, the companies making money (Google and Facebook) are doing so at the expense of companies who are losing money ta make market share, which makes the whole thing feel like a giant house of cards.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

Sir_Cmpwn 11y ago

I think Twitter needs to learn to be okay with its current size, or perhaps even smaller. The core idea is very compelling - a curated feed of short, simple content. The nonsense Twitter has added lately substantially detracts from its core values, and it feels like desperate pleas for unnecessary growth to somehow support the massive payroll they convinced themselves to take on. The Silicon Valley obsession with endless growth is harmful sometimes.

JonFish85 11y ago
While I see this as true, man does it suck to be an employee who was hoping for stock options to be worth anything. Especially for those who became Twitter employees via an acquisition, since I imagine a big part of their compensation from that event was stock.
- acchow 11y ago
  Twitter IPO'd a while ago. Employees with option grants had plenty of time to realize gains...
  - morgante 11y ago
    I'm sure that like most big tech companies Twitter continues to provide a large portion of compensation in company stock.
    - kevinpet 11y ago
      But RSUs do not become worthless like options do when the price declines.
- rhizome 11y ago
  When a company I worked for was acquired by a public company, my options were converted 8:1 to actual shares in the acquiring company.
- ryandetzel 11y ago

newman314 11y ago

Twitter might have looked like a place to go to but it sure seems to have been a continuous revolving door of exec mgmt for many years now.

newman314 11y ago
Just saw a tweet that stated only 5 out of the 13 execs that presented at the last analyst day are left.
BinaryIdiot 11y ago
> Twitter might have looked like a place to go Which, while slightly off topic, reminds me: does Twitter do automated resume checking? I applied some time back at 3am for a job I was more than qualified for and got a rejection almost instantly. I thought maybe it was an automated system so I tweaked my resume and resubmitted and it was rejected again almost instantly. Really put me off from ever trying again considering that I met the requirements listed and it declined me saying I did not. I had an indirect way to send a resume through some friends but decided not to bother after that.
- newman314 11y ago
  Given the revolving door of people coming and going frequently, personally that's offputting. So unless there's a burning reason that compels you to work there, maybe it's not a bad thing to look elsewhere. Disclaimer: I have never applied to Twitter. PS. Twitter apparently uses Jobvite [1] [1] https://www.quora.com/Why-do-companies-pass-on-using-Jobvite https://www.quora.com/Why-do-companies-pass-on-using-Jobvite

curiousDog 11y ago

Feel bad for a colleague of mine who joined the company when the stock was $60 and got his stock bonus at that price

ryandetzel 11y ago

Since this is a leak and not official (yet) we're not sure whose choice this is. If it's Twitters (Jack) then it's probably a good move to get fresh product/engineering talent in to change things up.

vikas5678 11y ago

A potential acquisition of Slack and cutting number of employees to < 1000 are 2 things that come to mind. Owning slack opens up other potential streams of revenue in the enterprise space. Or allow twitter users to form groups/rooms on twitter ala Slack.

harryh 11y ago
Twitter can't afford Slack. Twitter's market cap is ~12B. There is no way in hell that Slack would sell for less than 10B. They probably wouldn't even sell for that much.
- vikas5678 11y ago
  Probably. Allowing people to create chat rooms/channels is another possibility, and allows them to enter the enterprise collaboration space. Competes easily with HipChat and Slack. Most people already have twitter accounts, so groups of people can collaborate on the fly.
- jay_kyburz 11y ago
  10B for slack! OMG I'm in the wrong business.
  - imrehg 11y ago
    If you just look at the numbers, pretty much everyone always is.
- bentlegen 11y ago
  Is Slack, unprofitable w/ $30MM yearly revenue[1], really worth almost as much as Twitter, unprofitable w/ almost $2BN yearly revenue? That's a lot of growth to account for. [1] http://www.businessinsider.com/slack-expects-30-million-revenue-2015-7 http://www.businessinsider.com/slack-expects-30-million-reve...
cpeterso 11y ago
Or Slack should acquire Twitter.

lancewiggs 11y ago

Just make us pay Free: current access $25/Year: Access using any 3rd party product $200/Year: Name verified $20,000/year: Corporate account etc

yeukhon 11y ago

I see some comments talking about Twitter employee population is too big, is there any statistics about what the percentage is for each department? Despite the fact I agree the population is quite large, but I can guess at least 30% are marketing folks, 20% are HR and process people, and then the rest are developers. Twitter has done a number of acquisitions. I don't know how many people are running Vine in production today, but my understanding is their NY core team is still quite small. However, given Twitter has launched so many products (including all of the background projects they did to support their production), I won't be surprise if they have at least 10% of their entire engineering force doing infrastructure and operation, and then 40% divided into core product like Twitter, internal application developers, security, solution engineers, etc. When a new CEO is in charge, some layoff and some re-org usually happen. Some projects have to be closed, some have to be sunset, and some have to be merged. Let see how much they can trim down. It usually take a year to complete the evaluations and projecting new positions.

josephmx 11y ago
Their website puts 44% into "technical" staff, https://about.twitter.com/company https://about.twitter.com/company

rockcoder 11y ago

Twitter is actually the only "social network" that I use daily and find real value in so I really hope they can get their act together somehow. Just a few more random thoughts... Twitter's biggest asset is its core product and they should not meddle too much with it. And I think they should be able to make a company profitable with just that. Even though the product itself is really simple, there are many use cases of it that are not all easily transformed into revenue and probably not so easy to communicate to investors. Its basically a platform that enables a new form of communication. Different people use it for different purposes. Companies use it for different purposes. Traditional media gets lots of their content from Twitter nowadays. Mimicking Facebook in any way would be a mistake because I think it's a fundamentally different product.