10 ms·

Twitter Is Betting Everything on Jack Dorsey

68 points by pmcpinto 10y ago

blowski 10y ago
> And, by nearly every metric, he had achieved remarkable success. Under his tenure, the company had grown from 300 employees to around 4,100. Eurgh. I never understand how the number of employees you have can be a success metric. By that logic, becoming more efficient would be a bad thing.
- shin_lao 10y ago
  It would mean something in a profitable company as growing the workforce and keeping a company profitable is a considerable challenge.
  - rco8786 10y ago
    And Twitter has never turned a profit
  - beambot 10y ago
    To GP's comment... I'm not sure growing the workforce is the "considerable challenge" that matters most either. blowski's point about efficiency still stands -- all other things being equal, achieving the same result with fewer employees is more laudable.
- rwmj 10y ago
  What do 4,100 employees even do at Twitter? It's not that complicated.
  - blowski 10y ago
    To be fair, it must be pretty complicated to actually keep it running. Then you've got all the security, spam detection, designers, UX people, search engine, multi-lingual features. And then you've got the overhead of any medium-sized business - marketing, PR, sales, accounting, admin, HR (have I missed anything?). I guess it does add up. But (so as not to contradict myself) just having all those people doesn't count as an achievement. It's just a cost of doing business that you want to keep as low as possible.
    - virtualized 10y ago
      Ten percent of that number still sounds ridiculously high for such a site. They don't even have one competent UX designer. Why would they need dozens of them doing nothing?
  - paulsutter 10y ago
    They show each other powerpoint presentations.
  - mikeryan 10y ago
    The backend systems for Twitter - advertising, data analysis, spam prevention, infrastructure etc is vastly more complex what you see in a feed of 140 characters. Plus sales and marketing budgets are huge. Whether any of these systems or human resource needs are required to be running at that scale is probably the question hitting Jack directly in the face. I think the ballsiest move he could make would be to shrink it all down to core services. But Wall Street would shit itself with that sort of contraction.
    - jgalt212 10y ago
      > spam prevention Yes, plenty on spam prevention, but seemingly little on bot prevention. Without the bots, there'd be so many less MAUs.
  - SEJeff 10y ago
    Twitter has some legitimately hard tech problems. At MesosCon last week (which I was at in person), they stated that their largest Mesos cluster was over 30,000 physical nodes. Believe it or not, handling the hundreds of millions of tweets (or more!) per minute they handle at peak load is an unbelievably difficult technology and platform problem. This takes a team of really smart people to manage. That being said, I'd be shocked if a large number of that headcount weren't marketing and ad sales associates as that is what supposedly keeps the lights on.
- imron 10y ago
  How many employees did WhatsApp have when it was bought for $19 billion? Signficantly less than 4,100.
- askldfhjkasfhd 10y ago
  I think of it like a rough heuristic. It's a coarse-grained, single metric, but it does have some meaning if you don't use it as the end-all, be-all. Replying to your comment made me wonder: what would a better metric be? The requirements are that it has to be numeric, a single number, and represent the "success" of any company, in all lifecycles (before fit, growth, mature, yellowpages, etc.)
  - blowski 10y ago
    If Company A hires lots of juniors while Company B only hires seniors, Company A is going to need a lot more people to achieve the same level of 'success'. So using this as a 'rough heuristic' would suggest Company A is doing much better than Company B, even though their wage bills may be about the same. What's more, we know nothing about the performance of either company. In another scenario, Company C has outsourced most of its operations work, while Company D does it in-house, so Company D has more employees. Again, this tells us nothing about performance. What's wrong with using net income as a single number?
brakmic 10y ago
No.
- guptaneil 10y ago
  Perhaps HN should enforce a minimum comment length, like at least 3 words... One word comments clearly don't add value to a discussion.
  - harryh 10y ago
    Yes! ;-)
  - Jedd 10y ago
    I almost agree, but I suspect it's a reference to previous discussions around Betteridge's Law, for example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9232419 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9232419 I'm sure it's come up more than once, and it's a sensible response to clickbaitesque headlines like this one.
    - brakmic 10y ago
      Yes, I agree. The best response to a clickbaitesque headline is a short answer (and No Click!). That's why I wrote "No". Everything else would just feed the trolls. But of course, it's much easier to downvote such a comment than to think about the clickbait itself. Kind regards,
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - wslh 10y ago
    140 exactly... ;-)
- coldcode 10y ago
  Yes. I agree. Three words! Twitter is an amazing idea that is not a business. I don't think there is any way to make money with it (at public company scale) without destroying it. I wish him luck...
pi-err 10y ago
Twitter has an incredibly powerful brand and appeal. How many companies can say they triggered revolutions? Yet it's puzzling how much it fails to improve its basic product, 1 year in Dorsey's comeback. On mobile, the search/explore screens are mostly irrelevant. On desktop, they could position themselves as quasi TV channels with live content update. Yes, they lost the social wars and that's fine. They won the media war: Twitter's mindshare vs its actual engagement rates makes it an amazing opportunity. Really hope it doesn't fade into a glorified RSS feed and manages to build on the intensity of its content.
- saalweachter 10y ago
  > How many companies can say they triggered revolutions? United Fruit Company, British Petroleum?
  - chimeracoder 10y ago
    > > How many companies can say they triggered revolutions? > British Petroleum? For those not familiar with Iranian history: the first revolution that happened on Twitter was the Green Revolution in Iran (2009)[0][1]. If you trace British Petroleum (BP) all the way back to its roots, it began as the Anglo-Persian Oil Company in 1908. That company's formation was the basis for the series of political upheavals and revolutions that resulted in the current political leadership in Iran today[2], which in turn was the basis for the 2009 Green Revolution. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_Iranian_presidential_election_protests https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_Iranian_presidential_elec... [1] Named the 'Green Revolution' in the long Persian tradition of naming their revolutions after colors ('white', 'red', 'green', 'black') [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anglo-Persian_Oil_Company#Nationalisation_and_coup https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anglo-Persian_Oil_Company#Nati...
- noam87 10y ago
  > Yet it's puzzling how much it fails to improve its basic product. What's there to improve? As someone else said here on HN "Twitter should have been an RFC." The only thing that's broken here is not Twitter, it's the economic system that can't just let a useful invention be, but instead forces it into a fight-or-die, conquer-the-world-or-disappear nuclear arm's race. Facebook was just fine as a place to keep in touch with friends and invite them to events, Uber is just fine as a Taxi service, Candy Crush was just fine as a silly iPhone game... I wonder what we'll think of it all in a century, because there's no way this insanity can go on for much longer.
swingbridge 10y ago
The company is still far too bloated, contributing to the fact that it's financials don't remotely support its valuation.
bedhead 10y ago
Can't companies and products simply hit a natural limit? There are inherent limitations to any given "thing" and perhaps Twitter has found its own terminal velocity.
- rsync 10y ago
  "Can't companies and products simply hit a natural limit?" I think of craigslist when I read that. It's just a useful thing that works. Nothing else. I wish there were more things like that.
  - arcanus 10y ago
    > I wish there were more things like that. Perhaps not coincidentally, craigslist is not a public company.
    - a_small_island 10y ago
      Any idea on how much revenue they bring in? I tried a quick google search but couldn't find any recent numbers.
      - swehner 10y ago
        How is this? http://www.aimgroup.com/store/cirs/2015-craigslist-annual/ http://www.aimgroup.com/store/cirs/2015-craigslist-annual/
- harryh 10y ago
  Certainly they can. The issue is that the stockholders had previously believed that this limit was much much higher. They also, to some degree, still believe that (And maybe they are right. Maybe not. It's hard to say!). So if you are the management team at twitter and your stockholders think you could be doing better you are at constant risk of getting fired.
  - jhayward 10y ago
TazeTSchnitzel 10y ago
Twitter seem to serially fail in understanding their own product and the needs of their users. Jack isn't doing any better.
- whatever_dude 10y ago
  I think they understand the appeal they have, it's just that they're deciding it's not what they want. They're trying to pivot it to make it grow. That's what investors want to hear about, apparently; coverage, not depth. Unfortunately for them they're trying to widen their appeal by making it less appealing to their current user base. I think we all know how it ends. It's not a new tale.
wslh 10y ago
(Note to Jack Dorsey fans: if you want to downvote downvote with arguments) Obviously Jack Dorsey is not very capable and is bad at business execution. There is/was a simple way to increase Twitter revenue and profits: giving small and medium companies a way to pay for entry level access to their API in the same way Google AdWords, etc work. I think there is a lot of money there but they only know about wholeselling to companies/agencies with big budgets.
- rsync 10y ago
  "(Note to Jack Dorsey fans: if you want to downvote downvote with arguments)" Don't discuss your own votes. Don't interrupt the actual discussion to meta-discuss the scoring system.
  - wslh 10y ago
    I used parentheses that can be read in less than 1 second. Let me know if you are a HN moderator.
  - reitanqild 10y ago
    > Don't discuss your own votes. I don't think that is what OP meant, rather than please add a comment explaining why it is wrong (instead of downvoting and moving on.)
- prawn 10y ago
  You might be copping downvotes because people think your arguments that he's "not very capable" and "is bad at business execution" don't hold up?
  - wslh 10y ago
    Business capabilities are judged by $$$ even when chance plays a big role. There is no signal of turn around.
    - reitanqild 10y ago
Grue3 10y ago
>Twitter announced what it hoped would be the antidote for its user decline: “Moments” Yeah, I can't believe anyone thought that would work. It's like thinking that the recent "you can now type 10 more characters because URLs don't count" thing will save Twitter.
- ZanyProgrammer 10y ago
  I've always thought that overtime, gradually, they should've expanded their character limit to something reasonable like 200-300 chars. Are they that Microsoft like tied to being backwards compatible with SMS?
  - simonswords82 10y ago
    I'm not sure about that, but they definitely should have taken a move fast break things style approach a la Facebook. New features on Twitter seem to take forever to be decided upon and rolled out. I often wonder if their architecture is stifling them in some way. If I were Jack I'd want to set up a large opt in beta group to trial new features.
    - ZanyProgrammer 10y ago
      So why can't they integrate Periscope directly with Twitter? Instead of posting a Tweet, just press a button to live stream to my feed with Periscope.
      - mikeyouse 10y ago
        That feature actually launched recently for both Android and iOS (Maybe today on iOS?). http://techcrunch.com/2016/05/16/twitter-is-testing-a-periscope-live-streaming-button-inside-its-mobile-apps/ http://techcrunch.com/2016/05/16/twitter-is-testing-a-perisc...
simonswords82 10y ago
Twitter's product is broken in more ways than I care to recount. End users and developers are constantly complaining about it - and they're the power users who see the value in it! Everybody else is "meh" about Twitter despite the potential. Add Jack in to that mix, a guy who who has a lot of passion and intelligence but is split across Square and Walt Disney and I have to say the answer is 'no', betting on him to single handedly save Twitter is a bad bet. Twitter is doomed. I get that shareholders want to see the value they were promised but short of a miracle I don't see a resurgence. All the trendy people have already moved off of Twitter to FB, Insta or SnapChat (and I'm sure there are others I'm not cool enough to use). This Google Trend graph tells the story in pictures: https://www.google.co.uk/trends/explore#q=%2Fm%2F0b2334%2C%20%2Fm%2F0289n8t%2C%20%2Fm%2F0glpjll%2C%20%2Fm%2F0nbtf_n&cmpt=q&tz=Etc%2FGMT-1 https://www.google.co.uk/trends/explore#q=%2Fm%2F0b2334%2C%2... Note that I had to leave FB out because it has ridiculous numbers that make the other values in the chart almost meaningless. Edit: Square not Stripe
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- imron 10y ago
  Interestingly, when you do put Facebook in as a term, it also starts to trend downwards at about the same time Twitter does.
- wslh 10y ago
  In my microcosmos I am also being followed by a lot of bots and cyborgs (those ones who have ten of thousands of followers and are following other ten of thousands). This makes me think this ecosystem is not working properly, more, because I post original content. On the other hand, I am followed by a top VC who only follows a few people but is followed by 1/2 million and this "karma" doesn't make any noticeable effect on my twitter account.
  - simonswords82 10y ago
    Totally agree, the weightings on follower/following ratios are non-existent. Would be nice if quality of following/followers could be valued over quantity. There's also far too many bots on Twitter now. Feels like Twitter is going to be a shit load of bots talking to one another when all the real humans leave.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
akud 10y ago
> what the company is best at, which is being the platform where people weigh in on live events. This is odd to me, since from what I see, the people who are most engaged with twitter don't use it for live events at all. They use it for jokes.
- pjc50 10y ago
  Why not both! :) I know quite a few people who use it for making jokes about live events. The other day my wife's mocking of the new BBC drama got quoted by the Mail's TV reviewer.
thomasthomas 10y ago
betting everything on the guy that wanted to 'disrupt receipts?' http://www.recode.net/2014/1/15/11622364/jack-dorseys-advice-to-dying-retailers-disrupt-receipts http://www.recode.net/2014/1/15/11622364/jack-dorseys-advice...
toldyouso 10y ago
Let me quickly summarize every thread about twitter: 1) "Twitter in the old days was great. They are ruining everything now!" 2) "Twitter has 0 revenue! How can they be worth so much? It deserves to die." "Actually, they have 0 <i>profit</i>" "Oops! Point still stands!" 3) "But what do all the employees even DO all day?" 4) "I stopped caring about Twitter when they closed off their API" 5) "The world needs Twitter!" "No it doesn't!"
- eric_h 10y ago
  Amusingly, each of those fits in a tweet ;)
mathattack 10y ago
Is the issue the product itself, or the perceived relevance? Very hard for fading social networks to regain their former glory. Look at AOL as the best case.
sbardle 10y ago
Twitter has been mismanaged over the years. With FB, the buck stops with Zuck, but at Twitter, the politics between the cofounders has meant there has been no long-term strategic leadership. Twitter has got away with a lot of stuff over the years because it was perceived to be cool, but these days, it's more Henry Wrinkler than The Fonz.
mikeryan 10y ago
If you replace "Twitter" with "Yahoo" and "Jack" with "Marissa" these stories can be from 3 years ago. Along those lines you can start taking current stories about "Yahoo" and make them "Twitter" and see the future....
funkyy 10y ago
Twitter should grow horizontally now, not vertically. Company keeps a blind eye on its brand strength. Why not open up new services closely connected to Twitter: -Video Hosting site - YT and LiveLeak competitor, but without all the noise -Social Network where Twitter is a core, but social network by itself would be separate product - "wall" could use Twitter feed, this would work perfectly... -Image hosting company - Imgur competitor -News distribution and news curation company - its almost already that, worth investing in it -Social tools company - thats easy... As long as Twitter would stick to minimalistic design and rule "less is better" it would work and Twitter could become worthy rival to ABC...
waddabadoo 10y ago
I wish they would do something about the expensive Gnip situation. I understand they need to make money, but just getting to know the prices takes 4 phonecalls, interviews etc. Also, I noticed from few people who worked there that this company is internally a total unstructured chaos. Nobody knows whats going on.
jgalt212 10y ago
The best thing Twitter can say about Jack is that they pay him much less than Yahoo pays Marissa. Of course, he's only a part-time worker so they should pay him less.

68 points by pmcpinto 10y ago

> And, by nearly every metric, he had achieved remarkable success. Under his tenure, the company had grown from 300 employees to around 4,100. Eurgh. I never understand how the number of employees you have can be a success metric. By that logic, becoming more efficient would be a bad thing.

shin_lao 10y ago
It would mean something in a profitable company as growing the workforce and keeping a company profitable is a considerable challenge.
- rco8786 10y ago
  And Twitter has never turned a profit
- beambot 10y ago
  To GP's comment... I'm not sure growing the workforce is the "considerable challenge" that matters most either. blowski's point about efficiency still stands -- all other things being equal, achieving the same result with fewer employees is more laudable.
rwmj 10y ago
What do 4,100 employees even do at Twitter? It's not that complicated.
- blowski 10y ago
  To be fair, it must be pretty complicated to actually keep it running. Then you've got all the security, spam detection, designers, UX people, search engine, multi-lingual features. And then you've got the overhead of any medium-sized business - marketing, PR, sales, accounting, admin, HR (have I missed anything?). I guess it does add up. But (so as not to contradict myself) just having all those people doesn't count as an achievement. It's just a cost of doing business that you want to keep as low as possible.
  - virtualized 10y ago
    Ten percent of that number still sounds ridiculously high for such a site. They don't even have one competent UX designer. Why would they need dozens of them doing nothing?
- paulsutter 10y ago
  They show each other powerpoint presentations.
- mikeryan 10y ago
  The backend systems for Twitter - advertising, data analysis, spam prevention, infrastructure etc is vastly more complex what you see in a feed of 140 characters. Plus sales and marketing budgets are huge. Whether any of these systems or human resource needs are required to be running at that scale is probably the question hitting Jack directly in the face. I think the ballsiest move he could make would be to shrink it all down to core services. But Wall Street would shit itself with that sort of contraction.
  - jgalt212 10y ago
    > spam prevention Yes, plenty on spam prevention, but seemingly little on bot prevention. Without the bots, there'd be so many less MAUs.
- SEJeff 10y ago
  Twitter has some legitimately hard tech problems. At MesosCon last week (which I was at in person), they stated that their largest Mesos cluster was over 30,000 physical nodes. Believe it or not, handling the hundreds of millions of tweets (or more!) per minute they handle at peak load is an unbelievably difficult technology and platform problem. This takes a team of really smart people to manage. That being said, I'd be shocked if a large number of that headcount weren't marketing and ad sales associates as that is what supposedly keeps the lights on.
imron 10y ago
How many employees did WhatsApp have when it was bought for $19 billion? Signficantly less than 4,100.
askldfhjkasfhd 10y ago
I think of it like a rough heuristic. It's a coarse-grained, single metric, but it does have some meaning if you don't use it as the end-all, be-all. Replying to your comment made me wonder: what would a better metric be? The requirements are that it has to be numeric, a single number, and represent the "success" of any company, in all lifecycles (before fit, growth, mature, yellowpages, etc.)
- blowski 10y ago
  If Company A hires lots of juniors while Company B only hires seniors, Company A is going to need a lot more people to achieve the same level of 'success'. So using this as a 'rough heuristic' would suggest Company A is doing much better than Company B, even though their wage bills may be about the same. What's more, we know nothing about the performance of either company. In another scenario, Company C has outsourced most of its operations work, while Company D does it in-house, so Company D has more employees. Again, this tells us nothing about performance. What's wrong with using net income as a single number?

brakmic 10y ago

No.

guptaneil 10y ago
Perhaps HN should enforce a minimum comment length, like at least 3 words... One word comments clearly don't add value to a discussion.
- harryh 10y ago
  Yes! ;-)
- Jedd 10y ago
  I almost agree, but I suspect it's a reference to previous discussions around Betteridge's Law, for example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9232419 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9232419 I'm sure it's come up more than once, and it's a sensible response to clickbaitesque headlines like this one.
  - brakmic 10y ago
    Yes, I agree. The best response to a clickbaitesque headline is a short answer (and No Click!). That's why I wrote "No". Everything else would just feed the trolls. But of course, it's much easier to downvote such a comment than to think about the clickbait itself. Kind regards,
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- wslh 10y ago
  140 exactly... ;-)
coldcode 10y ago
Yes. I agree. Three words! Twitter is an amazing idea that is not a business. I don't think there is any way to make money with it (at public company scale) without destroying it. I wish him luck...

pi-err 10y ago

Twitter has an incredibly powerful brand and appeal. How many companies can say they triggered revolutions? Yet it's puzzling how much it fails to improve its basic product, 1 year in Dorsey's comeback. On mobile, the search/explore screens are mostly irrelevant. On desktop, they could position themselves as quasi TV channels with live content update. Yes, they lost the social wars and that's fine. They won the media war: Twitter's mindshare vs its actual engagement rates makes it an amazing opportunity. Really hope it doesn't fade into a glorified RSS feed and manages to build on the intensity of its content.

saalweachter 10y ago
> How many companies can say they triggered revolutions? United Fruit Company, British Petroleum?
- chimeracoder 10y ago
  > > How many companies can say they triggered revolutions? > British Petroleum? For those not familiar with Iranian history: the first revolution that happened on Twitter was the Green Revolution in Iran (2009)[0][1]. If you trace British Petroleum (BP) all the way back to its roots, it began as the Anglo-Persian Oil Company in 1908. That company's formation was the basis for the series of political upheavals and revolutions that resulted in the current political leadership in Iran today[2], which in turn was the basis for the 2009 Green Revolution. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_Iranian_presidential_election_protests https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_Iranian_presidential_elec... [1] Named the 'Green Revolution' in the long Persian tradition of naming their revolutions after colors ('white', 'red', 'green', 'black') [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anglo-Persian_Oil_Company#Nationalisation_and_coup https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anglo-Persian_Oil_Company#Nati...
noam87 10y ago
> Yet it's puzzling how much it fails to improve its basic product. What's there to improve? As someone else said here on HN "Twitter should have been an RFC." The only thing that's broken here is not Twitter, it's the economic system that can't just let a useful invention be, but instead forces it into a fight-or-die, conquer-the-world-or-disappear nuclear arm's race. Facebook was just fine as a place to keep in touch with friends and invite them to events, Uber is just fine as a Taxi service, Candy Crush was just fine as a silly iPhone game... I wonder what we'll think of it all in a century, because there's no way this insanity can go on for much longer.

swingbridge 10y ago

The company is still far too bloated, contributing to the fact that it's financials don't remotely support its valuation.

bedhead 10y ago

Can't companies and products simply hit a natural limit? There are inherent limitations to any given "thing" and perhaps Twitter has found its own terminal velocity.

rsync 10y ago
"Can't companies and products simply hit a natural limit?" I think of craigslist when I read that. It's just a useful thing that works. Nothing else. I wish there were more things like that.
- arcanus 10y ago
  > I wish there were more things like that. Perhaps not coincidentally, craigslist is not a public company.
  - a_small_island 10y ago
    Any idea on how much revenue they bring in? I tried a quick google search but couldn't find any recent numbers.
    - swehner 10y ago
      How is this? http://www.aimgroup.com/store/cirs/2015-craigslist-annual/ http://www.aimgroup.com/store/cirs/2015-craigslist-annual/
harryh 10y ago
Certainly they can. The issue is that the stockholders had previously believed that this limit was much much higher. They also, to some degree, still believe that (And maybe they are right. Maybe not. It's hard to say!). So if you are the management team at twitter and your stockholders think you could be doing better you are at constant risk of getting fired.
- jhayward 10y ago

TazeTSchnitzel 10y ago

Twitter seem to serially fail in understanding their own product and the needs of their users. Jack isn't doing any better.

whatever_dude 10y ago
I think they understand the appeal they have, it's just that they're deciding it's not what they want. They're trying to pivot it to make it grow. That's what investors want to hear about, apparently; coverage, not depth. Unfortunately for them they're trying to widen their appeal by making it less appealing to their current user base. I think we all know how it ends. It's not a new tale.

wslh 10y ago

(Note to Jack Dorsey fans: if you want to downvote downvote with arguments) Obviously Jack Dorsey is not very capable and is bad at business execution. There is/was a simple way to increase Twitter revenue and profits: giving small and medium companies a way to pay for entry level access to their API in the same way Google AdWords, etc work. I think there is a lot of money there but they only know about wholeselling to companies/agencies with big budgets.

rsync 10y ago
"(Note to Jack Dorsey fans: if you want to downvote downvote with arguments)" Don't discuss your own votes. Don't interrupt the actual discussion to meta-discuss the scoring system.
- wslh 10y ago
  I used parentheses that can be read in less than 1 second. Let me know if you are a HN moderator.
- reitanqild 10y ago
  > Don't discuss your own votes. I don't think that is what OP meant, rather than please add a comment explaining why it is wrong (instead of downvoting and moving on.)
prawn 10y ago
You might be copping downvotes because people think your arguments that he's "not very capable" and "is bad at business execution" don't hold up?
- wslh 10y ago
  Business capabilities are judged by $$$ even when chance plays a big role. There is no signal of turn around.
  - reitanqild 10y ago

Grue3 10y ago

>Twitter announced what it hoped would be the antidote for its user decline: “Moments” Yeah, I can't believe anyone thought that would work. It's like thinking that the recent "you can now type 10 more characters because URLs don't count" thing will save Twitter.

ZanyProgrammer 10y ago
I've always thought that overtime, gradually, they should've expanded their character limit to something reasonable like 200-300 chars. Are they that Microsoft like tied to being backwards compatible with SMS?
- simonswords82 10y ago
  I'm not sure about that, but they definitely should have taken a move fast break things style approach a la Facebook. New features on Twitter seem to take forever to be decided upon and rolled out. I often wonder if their architecture is stifling them in some way. If I were Jack I'd want to set up a large opt in beta group to trial new features.
  - ZanyProgrammer 10y ago
    So why can't they integrate Periscope directly with Twitter? Instead of posting a Tweet, just press a button to live stream to my feed with Periscope.
    - mikeyouse 10y ago
      That feature actually launched recently for both Android and iOS (Maybe today on iOS?). http://techcrunch.com/2016/05/16/twitter-is-testing-a-periscope-live-streaming-button-inside-its-mobile-apps/ http://techcrunch.com/2016/05/16/twitter-is-testing-a-perisc...

simonswords82 10y ago

Twitter's product is broken in more ways than I care to recount. End users and developers are constantly complaining about it - and they're the power users who see the value in it! Everybody else is "meh" about Twitter despite the potential. Add Jack in to that mix, a guy who who has a lot of passion and intelligence but is split across Square and Walt Disney and I have to say the answer is 'no', betting on him to single handedly save Twitter is a bad bet. Twitter is doomed. I get that shareholders want to see the value they were promised but short of a miracle I don't see a resurgence. All the trendy people have already moved off of Twitter to FB, Insta or SnapChat (and I'm sure there are others I'm not cool enough to use). This Google Trend graph tells the story in pictures: https://www.google.co.uk/trends/explore#q=%2Fm%2F0b2334%2C%20%2Fm%2F0289n8t%2C%20%2Fm%2F0glpjll%2C%20%2Fm%2F0nbtf_n&cmpt=q&tz=Etc%2FGMT-1 https://www.google.co.uk/trends/explore#q=%2Fm%2F0b2334%2C%2... Note that I had to leave FB out because it has ridiculous numbers that make the other values in the chart almost meaningless. Edit: Square not Stripe

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
imron 10y ago
Interestingly, when you do put Facebook in as a term, it also starts to trend downwards at about the same time Twitter does.
wslh 10y ago
In my microcosmos I am also being followed by a lot of bots and cyborgs (those ones who have ten of thousands of followers and are following other ten of thousands). This makes me think this ecosystem is not working properly, more, because I post original content. On the other hand, I am followed by a top VC who only follows a few people but is followed by 1/2 million and this "karma" doesn't make any noticeable effect on my twitter account.
- simonswords82 10y ago
  Totally agree, the weightings on follower/following ratios are non-existent. Would be nice if quality of following/followers could be valued over quantity. There's also far too many bots on Twitter now. Feels like Twitter is going to be a shit load of bots talking to one another when all the real humans leave.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

akud 10y ago

> what the company is best at, which is being the platform where people weigh in on live events. This is odd to me, since from what I see, the people who are most engaged with twitter don't use it for live events at all. They use it for jokes.

pjc50 10y ago
Why not both! :) I know quite a few people who use it for making jokes about live events. The other day my wife's mocking of the new BBC drama got quoted by the Mail's TV reviewer.

thomasthomas 10y ago

betting everything on the guy that wanted to 'disrupt receipts?' http://www.recode.net/2014/1/15/11622364/jack-dorseys-advice-to-dying-retailers-disrupt-receipts http://www.recode.net/2014/1/15/11622364/jack-dorseys-advice...

toldyouso 10y ago

Let me quickly summarize every thread about twitter: 1) "Twitter in the old days was great. They are ruining everything now!" 2) "Twitter has 0 revenue! How can they be worth so much? It deserves to die." "Actually, they have 0 <i>profit</i>" "Oops! Point still stands!" 3) "But what do all the employees even DO all day?" 4) "I stopped caring about Twitter when they closed off their API" 5) "The world needs Twitter!" "No it doesn't!"

eric_h 10y ago
Amusingly, each of those fits in a tweet ;)

mathattack 10y ago

Is the issue the product itself, or the perceived relevance? Very hard for fading social networks to regain their former glory. Look at AOL as the best case.

sbardle 10y ago

Twitter has been mismanaged over the years. With FB, the buck stops with Zuck, but at Twitter, the politics between the cofounders has meant there has been no long-term strategic leadership. Twitter has got away with a lot of stuff over the years because it was perceived to be cool, but these days, it's more Henry Wrinkler than The Fonz.

mikeryan 10y ago

If you replace "Twitter" with "Yahoo" and "Jack" with "Marissa" these stories can be from 3 years ago. Along those lines you can start taking current stories about "Yahoo" and make them "Twitter" and see the future....

funkyy 10y ago

Twitter should grow horizontally now, not vertically. Company keeps a blind eye on its brand strength. Why not open up new services closely connected to Twitter: -Video Hosting site - YT and LiveLeak competitor, but without all the noise -Social Network where Twitter is a core, but social network by itself would be separate product - "wall" could use Twitter feed, this would work perfectly... -Image hosting company - Imgur competitor -News distribution and news curation company - its almost already that, worth investing in it -Social tools company - thats easy... As long as Twitter would stick to minimalistic design and rule "less is better" it would work and Twitter could become worthy rival to ABC...

waddabadoo 10y ago

I wish they would do something about the expensive Gnip situation. I understand they need to make money, but just getting to know the prices takes 4 phonecalls, interviews etc. Also, I noticed from few people who worked there that this company is internally a total unstructured chaos. Nobody knows whats going on.

jgalt212 10y ago

The best thing Twitter can say about Jack is that they pay him much less than Yahoo pays Marissa. Of course, he's only a part-time worker so they should pay him less.