4 ms·

Twitter (the service, not the company's) secret sauce is: You can have a public platform, using an identity you choose for yourself, to broadcast snippets of i

by niftich 10y ago

Twitter (the service, not the company's) secret sauce is: You can have a public platform, using an identity you choose for yourself, to broadcast snippets of information. Where do you evolve this? Blogger, Blogspot, Livejournal, Tumblr, Medium, they're all in this same space, except they focus on traditional, long-form content. I don't see Twitter as a social network (although many do, that's okay). I see it as a broadcast medium, a soapbox, a blogging platform. But if you see Twitter as a social network, you're subject to a different set of pressures than a blogging platform. Also, Twitter holds no value to FB, Google, MS, or Yahoo. They all have subsumed parts of its core functionality into their offerings. If they ever get acquired, it's by some 'outsider' that wants to enter this space, like Verizon or Yandex.

kristianc 10y ago
They have value to anyone who has an interest in selling interest / location / cross-device based advertising, so that's exactly Facebook, Google, Microsoft. Yahoo would buy it for exactly the same reason they bought Tumblr - trying to stumble on a new business model via acquisition.
valgaze 10y ago
>> I don't see Twitter as a social network (although many do, that's okay). I see it as a broadcast medium, a soapbox, a blogging platform. A few years back Peter Kafka wrote an article [1] about how joe/joan-shmoe twitter user will probably never have their tweets read by anybody at all. It was astonishingly small number of folks who broke 500 followers (writing 3/4 years ago) ex. “The median Twitter account has a single follower. Among the much smaller subset of accounts that have posted in the last 30 days, the median account has just 61 followers.” It is from a few years ago, maybe things have changed but if that's the experience of the average person why invest time in it? [1] http://allthingsd.com/20131223/almost-no-one-is-reading-your-tweets/ http://allthingsd.com/20131223/almost-no-one-is-reading-your...
- Eutow 10y ago
  Because most people's tweets are read by their friends/relatives/social circle. Half of Facebook's users have fewer than 200 friends on it.
- warcher 10y ago
  This is such an important point, lost in the punditry. Twitter gets a lot of love from journalists and people with a profile, who write the articles about twitter and control public perception. They have an interest in maintaining a personal brand and have enough visibility that Twitter works for them. If you listened to those people, Twitter's biggest problem would be trolls writing mean (and often abusive) tweets about them. Most twitterers would be lucky to be threatened with the rape and murder of their families, frankly. Which is why Twitter is dying-- there are so, so, so many news curation and aggregation sources. Twitter isn't even all that good, frankly. Reddit does the job way better. (Still a lot of folks that want to fuck my mom though.) As a social network, it's crap, has been crap and likely will remain crap. The time-based feed tends towards livelock from professional content producers. Their curation mostly suggests people I can follow who would generally prefer I do not engage with them beyond promotion of their brands and gentle applause.
  - TorKlingberg 10y ago
    Reddit only appeals to a specific demographic though. Twitter seems to have broader appeal somehow. I think because Twitter conversation is less controlled by a majority.
    - intoverflow2 10y ago
      Would love to see stats on how often average reddit account owners comment and contribute vs average Twitter users. I think warcher has a very good point about vocal people from other platforms (e.g journalists) giving a massive misconception over Twitters actual appeal and reach. There is a huge difference between a platform where you shout in to the void and people have to choose to listen and a platform where you shout into the void and people can overhear you. One of those systems favours the popular, the other favours the average person.
  - fao_ 10y ago
    Twitter is better than Reddit because it is decentralizes the information from single, topic-related feeds people can post to, to one feed per person that you can subscribe to. This makes it much faster and more convenient than Reddit for getting status posts on things you like, i.e. an independent game developer's latest WIP. Some people have split accounts that you can choose to follow to receive different kind of status updates from them, so an example of this is a person with a 'oh look this interesting thing happened in my life' account, and a separate account for 'oh jeez I'm really angry and need to vent about this to a subset of people I know in relative privacy'. Because of the nature of twitter it feels easier to throw away or make lots of accounts than, say, facebok. The real connection comes not when you follow celebrities, but when you're a creator (Or a budding creator), and you interact with other people who are creating things for support or advice; or you have an interest in what your friends are posting and doing, and like viewing their traveling posts and their reactions to things. If you have those sorts of relationships twitter helps facilitate them extremely well, and if you don't, or the people you interact with in that way don't use twitter, then it won't have that value for you.
- VLM 10y ago
  Carefully note he's talking about accounts, and accounts are probably over 90% bots for "pay $50 for 10000 followers" marketing scams. In comparison you're talking about "average person" If most accounts aren't people, then what most people do on the service is likely to have nothing in common with what most accounts do on the service. There is also the orphan account situation. My twitter and facebook and linkedin accounts are unused but not deleted. I would theorize that's yet another problem, once you cross off the list of bots, if the majority of remaining accounts are unused, that means what the majority of accounts do has little to no relationship to what actual active users do. For marketing and PR purposes I'm sure my unused accounts are being monetized and proudly being counted as a "user", which is a whole nother problem. There is an even deeper reason the analysis is wrong. Inspired by writing this post I logged into facebook for the first time in months. My kids stopped using it years ago and now posting is very power law distribution where virtually all my timeline posts are now from exactly two people who post or repost something roughly every waking hour and nobody else can keep up with their meme-stream which floods everything else out. When a sample is power law skewed like facebook, words like average and median are irrelevant and meaningless. Power law distributions have other ways to analyze them like half life / doubling intervals and talking about the actual exponent of the distribution and stuff like that. The average post "on facebook" comes from precisely two meme-crazy shitposters I feel familial / workplace obligation or peer pressure to friend, but the average user's post is an entirely different phenomena and is a perhaps annual event at most. Oh look its been a year since my last summer vacation, here's my annual summer vacation post. There is a similar problem with email, yes 99.9% of email sent is spam no one reads. No that does not mean no one uses email or there are no important emails.
  - chejazi 10y ago
    > For marketing and PR purposes I'm sure my unused accounts are being monetized and proudly being counted as a "user", which is a whole nother problem. They usually apply basic criteria such as monthly active users (MAUs) here when promoting such stats. Your account likely wouldn't meet the criteria. In the case of bots, being "active" can be programmatically achieved, however.
freyir 10y ago
> Blogger, Blogspot, Livejournal, Tumblr, Medium, they're all in this same space So why does Twitter need 3,800 employees? Why does it need 1,500 technical employees? Sure, it gets more traffic than any of those other sites, but growth has slowed and the traffic is more or less stable. The core product hasn't changed significantly. Their most ambitious innovation in recent years (Periscope) was an acquisition. What do the bulk of these engineers work on, day to day? It seems like Twitter is optimally set up to burn money.
- intoverflow2 10y ago
  > What do the bulk of these engineers work on, day to day? Not the Mac app that's for sure.
- niftich 10y ago
  Twitter puts out a LOT of software, and open-sources a good portion. I don't know if this is smart in the sense of being overstaffed relative to their revenue, but they do it regardless. Some examples: [1] Fabric, an SDK for mobile apps - https://docs.fabric.io/android/fabric/overview.html https://docs.fabric.io/android/fabric/overview.html [2] Heron, a realtime, distributed, fault-tolerant stream processing engine - https://github.com/twitter/heron https://github.com/twitter/heron [3] Finagle, a fault tolerant, protocol-agnostic RPC system - https://github.com/twitter/finagle/ https://github.com/twitter/finagle/ [4] FlockDB, a distributed, fault-tolerant graph database - https://github.com/twitter/flockdb https://github.com/twitter/flockdb [5] Ruby implementation of the ICU (International Components for Unicode - https://github.com/twitter/twitter-cldr-rb https://github.com/twitter/twitter-cldr-rb [6] Clockwork Raven, Human-Powered Data Analysis with Mechanical Turk - https://github.com/twitter/clockworkraven https://github.com/twitter/clockworkraven [7] Gizzard, a flexible sharding framework for creating eventually-consistent distributed datastores - https://github.com/twitter/gizzard https://github.com/twitter/gizzard [8] Twemcache, a Twitter fork of Memcached - https://github.com/twitter/twemcache https://github.com/twitter/twemcache [9] Twemproxy, a fast, light-weight proxy for memcached and redis - https://github.com/twitter/twemproxy https://github.com/twitter/twemproxy [10] Iago, a webapp load tester - https://github.com/twitter/iago https://github.com/twitter/iago [11] Ospriet, a bestof/voting app - https://github.com/twitter/ospriet https://github.com/twitter/ospriet
coldtea 10y ago
>Twitter (the service, not the company's) secret sauce is: You can have a public platform, using an identity you choose for yourself, to broadcast snippets of information. Parent means their secret, money-making sauce. Not just what makes it appealing to some people. >Where do you evolve this? Blogger, Blogspot, Livejournal, Tumblr, Medium, they're all in this same space And 90% of them are almost dead.

by niftich 10y ago

kristianc 10y ago

They have value to anyone who has an interest in selling interest / location / cross-device based advertising, so that's exactly Facebook, Google, Microsoft. Yahoo would buy it for exactly the same reason they bought Tumblr - trying to stumble on a new business model via acquisition.

valgaze 10y ago

>> I don't see Twitter as a social network (although many do, that's okay). I see it as a broadcast medium, a soapbox, a blogging platform. A few years back Peter Kafka wrote an article [1] about how joe/joan-shmoe twitter user will probably never have their tweets read by anybody at all. It was astonishingly small number of folks who broke 500 followers (writing 3/4 years ago) ex. “The median Twitter account has a single follower. Among the much smaller subset of accounts that have posted in the last 30 days, the median account has just 61 followers.” It is from a few years ago, maybe things have changed but if that's the experience of the average person why invest time in it? [1] http://allthingsd.com/20131223/almost-no-one-is-reading-your-tweets/ http://allthingsd.com/20131223/almost-no-one-is-reading-your...

Eutow 10y ago
Because most people's tweets are read by their friends/relatives/social circle. Half of Facebook's users have fewer than 200 friends on it.
warcher 10y ago
This is such an important point, lost in the punditry. Twitter gets a lot of love from journalists and people with a profile, who write the articles about twitter and control public perception. They have an interest in maintaining a personal brand and have enough visibility that Twitter works for them. If you listened to those people, Twitter's biggest problem would be trolls writing mean (and often abusive) tweets about them. Most twitterers would be lucky to be threatened with the rape and murder of their families, frankly. Which is why Twitter is dying-- there are so, so, so many news curation and aggregation sources. Twitter isn't even all that good, frankly. Reddit does the job way better. (Still a lot of folks that want to fuck my mom though.) As a social network, it's crap, has been crap and likely will remain crap. The time-based feed tends towards livelock from professional content producers. Their curation mostly suggests people I can follow who would generally prefer I do not engage with them beyond promotion of their brands and gentle applause.
- TorKlingberg 10y ago
  Reddit only appeals to a specific demographic though. Twitter seems to have broader appeal somehow. I think because Twitter conversation is less controlled by a majority.
  - intoverflow2 10y ago
    Would love to see stats on how often average reddit account owners comment and contribute vs average Twitter users. I think warcher has a very good point about vocal people from other platforms (e.g journalists) giving a massive misconception over Twitters actual appeal and reach. There is a huge difference between a platform where you shout in to the void and people have to choose to listen and a platform where you shout into the void and people can overhear you. One of those systems favours the popular, the other favours the average person.
- fao_ 10y ago
  Twitter is better than Reddit because it is decentralizes the information from single, topic-related feeds people can post to, to one feed per person that you can subscribe to. This makes it much faster and more convenient than Reddit for getting status posts on things you like, i.e. an independent game developer's latest WIP. Some people have split accounts that you can choose to follow to receive different kind of status updates from them, so an example of this is a person with a 'oh look this interesting thing happened in my life' account, and a separate account for 'oh jeez I'm really angry and need to vent about this to a subset of people I know in relative privacy'. Because of the nature of twitter it feels easier to throw away or make lots of accounts than, say, facebok. The real connection comes not when you follow celebrities, but when you're a creator (Or a budding creator), and you interact with other people who are creating things for support or advice; or you have an interest in what your friends are posting and doing, and like viewing their traveling posts and their reactions to things. If you have those sorts of relationships twitter helps facilitate them extremely well, and if you don't, or the people you interact with in that way don't use twitter, then it won't have that value for you.
VLM 10y ago
Carefully note he's talking about accounts, and accounts are probably over 90% bots for "pay $50 for 10000 followers" marketing scams. In comparison you're talking about "average person" If most accounts aren't people, then what most people do on the service is likely to have nothing in common with what most accounts do on the service. There is also the orphan account situation. My twitter and facebook and linkedin accounts are unused but not deleted. I would theorize that's yet another problem, once you cross off the list of bots, if the majority of remaining accounts are unused, that means what the majority of accounts do has little to no relationship to what actual active users do. For marketing and PR purposes I'm sure my unused accounts are being monetized and proudly being counted as a "user", which is a whole nother problem. There is an even deeper reason the analysis is wrong. Inspired by writing this post I logged into facebook for the first time in months. My kids stopped using it years ago and now posting is very power law distribution where virtually all my timeline posts are now from exactly two people who post or repost something roughly every waking hour and nobody else can keep up with their meme-stream which floods everything else out. When a sample is power law skewed like facebook, words like average and median are irrelevant and meaningless. Power law distributions have other ways to analyze them like half life / doubling intervals and talking about the actual exponent of the distribution and stuff like that. The average post "on facebook" comes from precisely two meme-crazy shitposters I feel familial / workplace obligation or peer pressure to friend, but the average user's post is an entirely different phenomena and is a perhaps annual event at most. Oh look its been a year since my last summer vacation, here's my annual summer vacation post. There is a similar problem with email, yes 99.9% of email sent is spam no one reads. No that does not mean no one uses email or there are no important emails.
- chejazi 10y ago
  > For marketing and PR purposes I'm sure my unused accounts are being monetized and proudly being counted as a "user", which is a whole nother problem. They usually apply basic criteria such as monthly active users (MAUs) here when promoting such stats. Your account likely wouldn't meet the criteria. In the case of bots, being "active" can be programmatically achieved, however.

freyir 10y ago

> Blogger, Blogspot, Livejournal, Tumblr, Medium, they're all in this same space So why does Twitter need 3,800 employees? Why does it need 1,500 technical employees? Sure, it gets more traffic than any of those other sites, but growth has slowed and the traffic is more or less stable. The core product hasn't changed significantly. Their most ambitious innovation in recent years (Periscope) was an acquisition. What do the bulk of these engineers work on, day to day? It seems like Twitter is optimally set up to burn money.

intoverflow2 10y ago
> What do the bulk of these engineers work on, day to day? Not the Mac app that's for sure.
niftich 10y ago
Twitter puts out a LOT of software, and open-sources a good portion. I don't know if this is smart in the sense of being overstaffed relative to their revenue, but they do it regardless. Some examples: [1] Fabric, an SDK for mobile apps - https://docs.fabric.io/android/fabric/overview.html https://docs.fabric.io/android/fabric/overview.html [2] Heron, a realtime, distributed, fault-tolerant stream processing engine - https://github.com/twitter/heron https://github.com/twitter/heron [3] Finagle, a fault tolerant, protocol-agnostic RPC system - https://github.com/twitter/finagle/ https://github.com/twitter/finagle/ [4] FlockDB, a distributed, fault-tolerant graph database - https://github.com/twitter/flockdb https://github.com/twitter/flockdb [5] Ruby implementation of the ICU (International Components for Unicode - https://github.com/twitter/twitter-cldr-rb https://github.com/twitter/twitter-cldr-rb [6] Clockwork Raven, Human-Powered Data Analysis with Mechanical Turk - https://github.com/twitter/clockworkraven https://github.com/twitter/clockworkraven [7] Gizzard, a flexible sharding framework for creating eventually-consistent distributed datastores - https://github.com/twitter/gizzard https://github.com/twitter/gizzard [8] Twemcache, a Twitter fork of Memcached - https://github.com/twitter/twemcache https://github.com/twitter/twemcache [9] Twemproxy, a fast, light-weight proxy for memcached and redis - https://github.com/twitter/twemproxy https://github.com/twitter/twemproxy [10] Iago, a webapp load tester - https://github.com/twitter/iago https://github.com/twitter/iago [11] Ospriet, a bestof/voting app - https://github.com/twitter/ospriet https://github.com/twitter/ospriet

coldtea 10y ago

>Twitter (the service, not the company's) secret sauce is: You can have a public platform, using an identity you choose for yourself, to broadcast snippets of information. Parent means their secret, money-making sauce. Not just what makes it appealing to some people. >Where do you evolve this? Blogger, Blogspot, Livejournal, Tumblr, Medium, they're all in this same space And 90% of them are almost dead.