19 ms·

Twitter: It is too late for it to become the giant people expected

222 points by noir-york 10y ago

talideon 10y ago
Any way to fix the title? The 'the' after 'for' looks like it ought to have come after 'become'.
- dlhavema 10y ago
  agreed, its very confusing trying to figure out what its trying to say..
- noir-york 10y ago
  Apologies for the oversight! Cannot find a way to edit the title. Pointers welcome
  - talideon 10y ago
    It appears to have been fixed, so hurray!
chollida1 10y ago
Twitter is a really strange company. I find so much value in it, mostly in the form of tweet deck with multiple columns giving me real time "news" on multiple different subjects/companies. Yet, I don't pay for it and I can't see why anyone would pay for it. Advertising doesn't seem like a viable business model as I have yet to see any add that is of any value what so ever from the main site. Can anyone make the case that within 2 years Twitter isn't owned by one of Google, Microsoft, or Facebook? With Steve Balmer's large investment Microsoft seems like the leader here. Or one of the big media companies, though I like this idea less as I can't see them wanting to subsidies the company forever. I mean what is Twitter's business model? Can they really make a go of advertising? I mean they've done prety well so far but IMHO I wouldn't be surprised that the ad money they've made so far is from people who feel like they need to advertise on Google and Facebook and Twitter. And once they get a few year of data to show which ads are actually helping, the twitter ad money is the first to be yanked. Do the go the financial markets model and sell their data/firehose? Does that generate anywhere near the amount they'd need? If/when the advertising dollars go away, what does Twitter do? Or is Twitter banking on being able to compete directly with Facebook and Google for ad dollars as an equal?
- Retric 10y ago
  Twitter can sell high speed access to all tweets, and their costs should be really low. Long term it could be a midsize, but profitable company as long as they don't get into debt.
  - niftich 10y ago
    They already do this [1]. They used to sell this access to 'value-add' data analytics resellers as well, but in 2015 they acquired one instead [2] and stopped reselling it [3]. [1] https://dev.twitter.com/streaming/firehose https://dev.twitter.com/streaming/firehose [2] https://blog.gnip.com/twitter-data-ecosystem/ https://blog.gnip.com/twitter-data-ecosystem/ [3] http://thenextweb.com/dd/2015/04/11/twitter-cuts-off-firehose-resellers-as-it-brings-data-access-fully-in-house/ http://thenextweb.com/dd/2015/04/11/twitter-cuts-off-firehos...
  - blowski 10y ago
    Seems sensible. They wouldn't need the gazillions of staff they have at the moment working on building and selling an advertising platform. If they were bought by a Google, there would be economies of scale on the hosting side. But it's become an almost toxic brand because as well as realtime news, it is a troll's paradise. I guess this is one reason why the big guys are hesitant to take it on. It seems like Facebook is eating up more and more of this market because they are better at keeping the trolls out.
- RodericDay 10y ago
  i always thought that the deal was that you should pay for more featureful tweets, on a per tweet basis you know when people do like 20 tweets in a row? they could pay 50c and post an essay. pictures and such could be capped at some freebies monthly and then cost if you're doing pics all the time. I like Twitter too. I don't use it too much, but I've used it to correspond with famous people and people like the pinboard guy make it fun.
- wpietri 10y ago
  Their revenue is over $2 billion/year, so I'd say they're making a decent go of advertising: https://www.google.com/finance?q=NYSE:TWTR&fstype=ii https://www.google.com/finance?q=NYSE:TWTR&fstype=ii My Twitter advertising experiences were pretty good. I was using it for hiring, and it provided much better value for dollar than the other things we tried. Its ability to micro-target was great for my use case. I imagine it's not very good for big-brand advertising, but if you're trying to reach niche audiences, I think it's great.
tangue 10y ago
Reading all this, I miss Jaiku. Google miss social in the same was MS miss the Internet.
overcast 10y ago
I believe the problem with Twitter, as it's always been, is that it's just too polarizing. Either people get it, or they don't. It's not general enough, the mechanics of hash tags, nonsensical short messages, retweeting, the signal to noise ratio is horrible, coupled with an often confusing interface, don't allow for the second half of the adoption curve to ever happen. For such a simple mechanic, they make it difficult for a lot of people to just "get it". I've got multiple accounts for various projects, my own personal account, and I still don't see the value in it for me personally.
- WalterSear 10y ago
  I acquired a masters degree in research psychology studying it, have a number of friends quite active on it, and I still don't see the value in it.
  - JonnieCache 10y ago
    What did you find out, if not the value?
    - WalterSear 10y ago
      I studied how people perceive each other over twitter, specifically how inferred gender changes our perceptions of personality. I tried to design the the study to make it's results inferable to any micropublishing platform, like this one, for example. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to run the study with enough participants to get significant results, I'm afraid. Academic politics and favouritism got in the way :(
  - nuex 10y ago
    I think it's fairly valuable for lowkey discourse, learning, awareness and inspiration. Especially cool to be able to follow anyone (friends, role models, favorite authors) and see what's on their mind and what interests them.
    - WalterSear 10y ago
macandcheese 10y ago
Streaming live events with partnerships can be big for them. They streamed the NFL Thursday Night Football game last night and quality was impeccable (aside from my Bills getting the L). Much better experience IMO than Facebook's attempts at streaming sports.
calinet6 10y ago
Ok, points for the Economist's title 'Twitter in retweet.' That's some fine pun-crafting right there. No comment on the service itself. I love it. It's one of the only methods of public one-to-many distributed communication that actually works well and stays relatively balanced (mainly due to the limitation on message length and size). I hope another service with a similar dynamic pops up in its place should it collapse.
electic 10y ago
The problem with Twitter is that the demolished their developer ecosystem. The attacked the very developers and companies that taught people how to use Twitter and developed solutions that made it a viable use case. Without those myriad of solutions built upon it, Twitter is a very basic SMS broadcast medium. It has a sloppy unsegmented home feed full of noise and its mechanics are horrible so it does a poor job of burying hate. With that in mind, the numbers show. The people that get it are on it. Most of the rest of us just see glimmers of it embedded in news articles. Sadly, it is too late to reverse this. Trust has been lost.
- rch 10y ago
  Maybe Twilio could buy Twitter, if the price was rational.
  - nols 10y ago
    Twitter is currently worth 3 times Twilio, that would be a dramatic deal.
    - rch 10y ago
      It would be dramatic tomorrow, but maybe not in a couple of years when Twilio's identity business is more mature.
  - debacle 10y ago
    Twilio could make Twitter for less than what it would cost just to negotiate the deal.
    - paulddraper 10y ago
      We could have made Twitter with the time sunk into this HN thread. But that's irrelevant.
- nateberkopec 10y ago
  Twitter had to kill their ecosystem in order to make any money on advertising. There was just no way to sell ads if so many users were going to be using 3rd party clients. You may be right that killing off the 3rd party ecosystem hurt their usage, but from a business perspective, there wasn't any point keeping it if it was damaging their business model.
agentgt 10y ago
I have always felt Twitter could do a better job doing recommendations. Sort of help me find things I like better. Not just content. I have really started to like Four Square automatically giving me tips when I walk into places. It seems like Twitter should know more about what I like/dislike perhaps even more than Facebook, Amazon, and Google considering I have actively told it so. Going back to Four Square... Twitter also really doesn't leverage geo. Why the hell doesn't it show me tweets near me in real time? That would be pretty damn useful. It could be the event engine. I can't tell you how many times some body says to me "I have this great idea for startup that shows you cool things happening right near you" ... and yet twitter could have this now.
- vidarh 10y ago
  I run a twitter feed with tweets about my local area, and gave up on using their geo stuff entirely to find relevant content... It's quite ridiculous.
dasil003 10y ago
There's something so sad to me about the general tech press attitude (let alone the Wall Street attitude) towards Twitter. Twitter is forever judged by Facebook's bar, using Facebook's KPIs. Nevermind that the average high profile tweet is much more culturally significant than the averge high profile Facebook post. Heck most of Facebook isn't even original content, it's just really slick distribution for content from elsewhere. Obviously Facebook has cracked engagement in a way that Twitter never has and never will. But, Twitter has cracked public discourse in a way that no other company has period. Think about it, all previous internet fora have imploded as they've grown large, or collapsed into micro-communities like sub-reddits. Twitter has definitely faced challenges with trolling and witch-hunts, etc, but by and large they've put together a super interesting product. The only problem is that it's not going to displace Facebook because it's a different thing that's not quite as big. This demand for growth is also why Twitter's management took their eye off the ball and failed to recognize and improve the core problems that hurt the product and community. It's just a really sad statement on modern business culture that Twitter isn't allowed to be considered a success as a medium-sized company that punches way above its weight among influencers.
- forgetsusername 10y ago
  >There's something so sad to me about the general tech press attitude (let alone the Wall Street attitude) towards Twitter. Those institutions are equally responsible for the historical hype Twitter has received. >This demand for growth is also why Twitter's management took their eye off the ball and failed to recognize and improve the core problems that hurt the product and community. This isn't the fault of anyone but Twitter management. No one forced them to take outside investment or go public. When you do that, investors want a return. If that isn't in your plan, and you want full creative control, don't take the money. >by and large they've put together a super interesting product. I loved it until they started manipulating my timeline, making it difficult to read streams chronologically. I haven't opened the app for months. It's too bad, because I agree, it was a great product and my goto aggregator.
  - krat0sprakhar 10y ago
sjg007 10y ago
You want the global conversation to take place on Twitter. Tweets can run on an event, at an event, and when live streaming or restreaming an event.
rrggrr 10y ago
Maddening how incompetent Twitter is at strategic thought. They have arguably the most politically and civically important property on the internet but wish they were Facebook. Twitter is a Bentley in a market that wrongly thinks it should be Honda. The value of a network is as much the value of its participants as it is size. There is nothing wrong with Twitter, quite the opposite Twitter's key users are making, reporting and breaking news. The second and third order effects of this are enormous, far surpassing Facebook. The perceived monetization "problem" is painfully and frustratingly easy to rectify if Twitter would simply embrace their role and stop trying to compete in the social media gutter. Uuuuugh....
- lhnz 10y ago
  Completely agree. Unfortunately I think they're still chasing the wrong dollar. They should be monetising their publishers and not just their audience. Twitter should let publishers paywall their articles and then authorise and take micropayments via http://t.co http://t.co on their behalf. Almost everybody would benefit from this arrangement: - Users would no longer need to buy multiple newspaper subscriptions. - Journalists would be better positioned to ask for revenue share. - Publishers could gain a larger paying market without needing to coax user's through the account creation and subscription signup hoops. They'd finally be a viable business. And their incentives would be aligned with publishers.
  - cpeterso 10y ago
    Twitter could create a micro payment tip system as a button next to the heart. Give popular users a way to monetize their followers, creating a virtuous cycle attracting more content publishers.
    - lhnz 10y ago
      That's also true but I was also imagining a system which generated and sent on a micropayment authentication id via a redirect when paywalled links are clicked. Rather than users visiting publishers to find that they'd already read their 10 free articles, publishers would be able to use the id to grant them access to the article for a small fee that Twitter collected on their behalf at the end of the month. Zero-friction low price articles for users. And customer acquisition costs fall for publishers. It would also enable small time bloggers to also monetise their audiences.
ComputerGuru 10y ago
There is a typo in the title that completely fried my neural circuits for a full 5 seconds or so. > It is too late for the it to become giant people expected Should obviously be "It is too late for it to become the giant people expected" (Sidebar: I hope this isn't what it feels like to be dyslexic, it wasn't fun!)
- noir-york 10y ago
  Yep, sorry about that. Cannot find a way to fix the typo.
- userbinator 10y ago
  Apparently the typo has been fixed now, but I still find it confusing to parse --- I parsed it as "It is too late[something unclear], "(giant people) expected" and wondered what exactly giant people had to do with Twitter. Perhaps "It is too late for it to become the giant which/that people expected" can break the natural inclination to parse "giant people" as one noun.
JonnieCache 10y ago
I've still never encountered a single person who posts to twitter except as part of their job or to promote themselves or one of their projects. Supposedly these people exist in their millions but I've no idea where they're hiding. Are they mostly schoolchildren?
- Nav_Panel 10y ago
  I think they are mostly young adults (age groups 13-35 seems most common) and it's mostly loose networks based around geography and education. So, they sort of lie on top of existing real world networks. If you don't have an "in" to Twitter from a friend in real life, you'll find it hard to locate a Twitter network. But once you're in, you can pretty easily seek out new people to interact with, and you can grow your little network and make friends and share cultural capital or whatever.
- unfunco 10y ago
  I do (I won't post a link because this isn't self advertising, but my username is the same as it is here) – I work for a software company, I have my own company too (but I'm a procrastinator) – Twitter for me is to opine on political news or news I'm otherwise interested in (chemistry, psychedelics, etc) – none of which have anything to do with my job (and my employer would likely frown upon it too.)
niftich 10y ago
Twitter, deep down, has the exact same problem as Blogger or Reddit or Livejournal or Tumblr. It's ultimately a community where people post text posts. This is notoriously hard to monetize. But it has another big problem that doesn't manifest as strongly in those platforms: the pressure of virality. Twitter has managed to attract quite a number of VIPs, 'influencers' who draw followers to them and generate traffic and interest and engagement. These are your celebrities, your media personalities, industry and academia people who are very important in their fields -- people who either have a Wikipedia article, or a blog, or a Youtube channel. These are the people who buoy Twitter, so these are the people who were most likely to get a Verified mark. Being on Twitter allows you to feel close to them, like their posts, reblog them on your feed, so you can project to your friends that you like this person and feel an affinity to what they do. These influencers also provide a natural place for promoted content, which has so far been under-utilized. But somehow, Twitter has been saddled with the misconception that anyone can be famous with just a single tweet -- it's true that this can happen because it happened multiple times before, but when people join with the expectation that this may be the case, everyone loses. Maybe it's in analogue with Instagram, where if you post a Really Attractive selfie or take an incredible photograph, you may indeed accumulate a bunch of likes; but this aspiration doesn't translate nearly as well to quick-reply threads branching off of some influencer's post, which is the only way for an average person to attain enough eyeballs to have a shot at their post going viral. This creates an incentive structure where no one truly wins: - Influencers have attract a lot of traffic, but a lot of it is people trying to be clever - Low-activity people -- the long tail of Twitter -- are either unaware of what's going on, or are caught up in the post flurry - The leftover group is people aggressively looking for their 15 minutes of fame This also explains the myriad articles about people who "don't get Twitter" -- they join and expect to accumulate followers naturally, despite not being notable on their own right or offering exceptional content. Sorry, you've been misled. Twitter will amplify your social reach, but it won't create one for you.
randomsearch 10y ago
What is Twitter doing wrong? This is an interesting question. Answers posted so far: - it's polarizing... this may be true, but would simply mean a smaller market, not an existential risk. - they demolished the dev ecosystem. I totally agree with this, and think it was dumb. They thought they were Facebook. But I don't think this fully explains why their core product isn't a big success. - they don't have a strong enough business model. This is a bit of a tautology - we wouldn't be discussing it otherwise - but not having a strong business model does not explain why the core product doesn't _feel right_. And that's the thing, you look at Facebook or Instagram and everyone "gets it". They may not _like_ it, but they understand what it's about. But Twitter doesn't feel like that. It doesn't feel intuitive. It feels like a mess, like a lot of different use cases rolled into one big disorganised poorly designed app. I read a bit about Twitter's history and my theory is that the problem stems right back to the beginning, when there was an argument amongst the founders about whether Twitter was for "micro-blogging" or for "news" (for some definition of what is newsworthy). Both these seem like good ideas. We're all interested in our friends' opinions on various things, and what they're up to right now, and add to that the opinions and activities of people we choose to follow because we respect them and find what they say interesting, that sounds like a compelling product. Likewise, keeping track of all the news on a variety of topics from many sources, hearing the news unfiltered from the actors involved, that is another very compelling product. Put me in direct contact with Elon Musk about what's happening at SpaceX, let me tweet Sam Altman to ask him something about YC. Cool. It's interesting to consider that clearly selecting one of these use cases would solve many of Twitter's biggest problems. If you're following your friends and some famous people's microblogs, why not enforce real-world ID? If you're after the latest news, do you really need to be able to spam or message everyone? Both situations allow for a reduction in trolling and the negative behaviours that have made Twitter (as one unforgiving observer put it) "the cesspool of the internet". Problem is Twitter doesn't set out to do either of these things, because it can't decide what it wants to be. So it has compromised and floundered with no clear vision. How can the employees work effectively if they don't know which way to row? The solution for Twitter _would_ have been to split into multiple services/views/subsystems, or abandon the least interesting one to a sibling startup or a competitor. As Sam A puts it so brilliantly: "focus + intensity". Still time. Not much time.
johan_larson 10y ago
I don't get why the board OKed having a part-time CEO. It just seems like a bizarre thing to do. Was there really no credible candidate who was willing to run Twitter full time?
- redditmigrant 10y ago
  Twitter at its most basic has a product problem and not a revenue or sales problem. I think for product problems founders have a unique perspective and legitimacy to make tough decisions. My guess is that the need for this founder perspective coupled with the fact that Jack was the only founder who was even partially available led to the decision of having him on as part time CEO.
  - poshli 10y ago
    being the CEO of even a small firm is a 150 percent time job. I still find it hard to believe the Twitter board couldn't find anyone who didn't already have a job.
    - odbol_ 10y ago
      Yeah it's a pretty bad sign for your company when even the founder is like "this kinda sucks, I'm going to a better company that actually makes money."
- yuhong 10y ago
  As a side note, I have been thinking of Yishan-style CEOs for a while now, with board of directors tweeting often too. Twitter itself would probably be a good candidate for such a public company.
startupflix 10y ago
Twitter is loosing users because of lack of innovation. They aren't adding necessary new features. Even the existing investors aren't happy. What features should they introduce. any suggestion?
- sjilo 10y ago
  Nice try, Jack.
- adrenalinelol 10y ago
  Twitter is being told to be Facebook, when in-fact it needs to follow an entirely different paradigm, because it's intrinsically a different product. If Twitter is judge by what Facebook judges Facebook for success, it'll always fall short.
- netik 10y ago
  (ex-employee #13 over here.) They could start by incorporating every single feature that BlockTogether has as abuse mitigation. Encrypted end-to-end DMs (which were blocked numerous times by useless product managers) would have been another excellent feature to protect users.
Mendenhall 10y ago
It is interesting to me to hear how many say it doesnt have value to them. For me one aspect alone is worth it and that is real time news. It makes everything else look archiac.You can also scan a wide range of peoples opinions and find varied sources and angles fast.
noir-york 10y ago
Real-world friends are the basis for your FBK graph, work colleagues are the basis for Linkedin. But Twitter? What's the community? Regarding monetization: Twitter creates a lot of value - but its hard to monetize because the value is primarily positive externalities. News media benefits by publishing news on twitter, celebs reach their fans, politicians use it as a campaign tool. And Twitter makes very little from all this. The irony: while telcos are fighting hard to avoid becoming commoditized dumb pipes; Twitter by design are a dumb pipe ferrying tweets.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- huherto 10y ago
  > Real-world friends are the basis for your FBK graph, work colleagues are the basis for Linkedin. But Twitter? What's the community? Your political network ? Fans network ? In which case, it is most useful for celebrities or wannabes but not for regular people.
  - noir-york 10y ago
    Indeed. If twitter is for news, then the people who create the "news" - politicians, celebs, artists, journos - are the foundation of the network. Most of us live mundane lives and while events in our lives may be news to friends (marriage/births/etc) there is already a network to share that kinda news: fbk.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
- hathawsh 10y ago
  I saw an article not long ago that clarified for me what Twitter is: it's the community for journalism. It's the perfect place for journalists to quickly pick up the current vibe on a given topic, then repackage what they learn as a news story. Here is what journalists are learning now about Twitter: https://multimedia.journalism.berkeley.edu/tutorials/twitter/ https://multimedia.journalism.berkeley.edu/tutorials/twitter... Lots of people fancy themselves as part-time journalists, so the community of journalists is much larger than people who have the job title. I am a Twitter community member because I see myself as a part-time journalist. As I see it, Facebook is trying to become your daily newspaper, but I think Twitter has a better chance of achieving that goal, because differences in the way Twitter and Facebook treat privacy mean that Twitter can theoretically draw upon a much larger body of content. Twitter ought to consider using a news feed prioritization algorithm similar to Facebook, since Facebook is turning out to be rather good at showing me what I care to see and pushing down the chaff. Twitter still makes me wade through it all. In short, I think Twitter should focus on being better at what it already is: the central gathering place for journalism.
seanca 10y ago
Twitter is really only useful for following influencers, famous public figures, popular people, however you'd like to describe them. There isn't that much of a reason for a more normal user with a few hundred followers (maybe) to engage on it other than interact with more prominent users. Everything people go to Twitter for therefore can be done without having an actual account yourself; everything is public, so why have an account other than to curate a list of things prominent users say. Which might not even be a bad model if you think about it. To have it be the premier "find out what they said" space, without the hoopla from idiots, trolls, etc. Would people pay to visit a site like that? I'm not sure. Would there be a way to monetize that sort of experience? I think so. Just my $0.02.
- Nav_Panel 10y ago
  > There isn't that much of a reason for a more normal user with a few hundred followers (maybe) to engage on it other than interact with more prominent users I think you've misjudged the value of Twitter for a normal user. In my experience as one of these "normal" users, Twitter's major use case is like Facebook before the "adults" (older people) and extended family showed up. You can type out whatever you want, and your Twitter buddies will see it (often a different circle than your Facebook friends). Because messages are so short, interaction is much easier. Discussions take place in 140 characters rather than paragraphs. Sure, it's less deep than Facebook, but it's also satisfyingly immediate. It's also a lot more possible to make new friends over Twitter than Facebook. It's relatively normal to interact with people you've never met before, whereas on FB that'd be a big faux pas outside of a post in a common-interest group. All the brand stuff? Powerful users and influence and news? Not super relevant for a pretty decent swath of users (although it is pretty funny when I subtweet a utilities company or something when I'm having an issue and they send me an official DM). I personally do not follow any major brands or celebrities, although occasionally I see them through retweets.
  - fernandotakai 10y ago
    > It's also a lot more possible to make new friends over Twitter than Facebook. anecdote: i met 95% of my current friends through twitter. i also met my wife through twitter.
evanjacobs 10y ago
I would have liked to see Twitter become the product that Slack is now for many people: great direct message and group message capabilities, fun interface, great API for enabling bot integration, etc.
zeveb 10y ago
I think the core problem is that Twitter should be a protocol, not a company. There's just no need for there to be any servers: users could send messages to one another, each running his own agents. Since the Twitter experience doesn't need the Twitter corporation, there's always going to be friction and centrifugal force.
- jbpetersen 10y ago
  Even as a protocol, there'd still need to be some means of governing the distribution, storage, and retrieval of tweets. A simple P2P network would make it much harder to gain a foothold when nobody is mirroring your content. I think Twitter the corporation could make a viable business of filling that role by selling access to infrastructure for the protocol to developers of end-user applications and various data hounds.
thr0waway1239 10y ago
I love the title. Economist article titles are an endless source of word puns. Someone should start a thread just to post the best Economist titles.
paulsutter 10y ago
Twitter is important, useful, and will never be as big a business as Facebook. The problem is that they can't admit this and are pushing to be something they cannot be. Thats why they have so many product managers showing each other powerpoints, each of whose responsibilities are so small that no forward progress can be made.
daxfohl 10y ago
Same for Apple two decades ago. Yeah they never went anywhere. Which spontaneously makes me think, maybe this CI stuff is the wrong way to go. Maybe a big-bang release every year where you can make a marketing statement "imagine if" "now you can" sort of thing. In fact, as part of the minority 40+ contingent on HN, I'd love if all services I used released updates only annually and I could know precisely what they are.
spectrum1234 10y ago
Twitter's huge value is the ability to follow without needing a follow back (friend relationship). However they need to find a way to offer both short and long form content while doing this. It's crazy they haven't tried anything else yet. Perhaps there is an opportunity for communities to form naturally as well but again they haven't given this any thought. So many things they should be trying, its too bad. The concept is amazing but they are butchering it.
- smacktoward 10y ago
  > Twitter's huge value is the ability to follow without needing a follow back (friend relationship). Facebook also allows this. (Didn't always, but they do now.)
  - sidlls 10y ago
    Doesn't that defeat the purpose of any privacy settings they have?
raverbashing 10y ago
OK, here goes. Twitter was Great. Yes, with a captial G. In 2008/9 up until, let's say, 2012 (or even 14)? It got a lot of early adopters, it got groups together on it (real groups, people that meet in real life), it was a medium of conversation. It still has some important aspects, some discussions work great there. But I think people moved onto other platforms and most (of the cool people) left. Twitter (company) needs to go beyond Twitter (the product). Fb knows this better (while moving the product forward, but it's visible they're reaching a limit there as well) Both Twitter products, Vine and Periscope offer an inferior experience to Instagram videos and Fb live. (Especially Vine. It seems as bad as a Java plugin)
- drops 10y ago
  >But I think people moved onto other platforms and most (of the cool people) left. Moved onto what platforms? Left where?
  - raverbashing 10y ago
    They moved the conversation with their closest connections to Instagram/Snapchat. (Which also allow you to follow celebrities and other popular people) Also a lot of group conversations went to Whatsapp and similar software
- jodrellblank 10y ago
  How much of this is a fundamental behaviour? Not people moving from Twitter because Twitter is bad and Snapchat is good, but because Twitter is old and Snapchat is new? Same drive to try newer programming languages and frameworks, same drive to join new startup companies, same drive to throw out and start afresh in lots of domains, same drive to leave this bar and try another. I see this presented along with "online communities die when they can't block trolls", and "eternal September", and "small communities are more close-knit". But maybe once it gets old, large, established, you have habits of interaction, same people you talk to, an established persona to keep up, a post history, it gets stale and it feels like work. If you're a service, you can keep customers long term by offering good service. If you're a brand, you can keep customers long term by staying out of their way and not messing up and giving them reason to reconsider. But if you're a meeting place, if you're a look and a feeling, if you're a venue for nothing in particular - well, fashions change and online, anywhere else is just as convenient to go to.
vegabook 10y ago
The Economist has a knack for getting on the case of sectors / companies whenever their price is at an extreme - and being wrong. It's actually a good contra-indicator, as we've seen with oil, shale, gold, more recently Deutsche bank, and now Twitter.
- PhantomGremlin 10y ago
  It's actually a good contra-indicator My all time favorite wrong call of theirs came in 1999. Oil had dropped to $11 and they were predicting that it could hit $5: a “normal” market price might now be in the $5-10 range. Factor in the current slow growth of the world economy and the normal price drops to the bottom of that range. Of course, oil did just the opposite, climbing to about $140 per barrel over the next decade. http://www.economist.com/node/188181 http://www.economist.com/node/188181
  - vegabook 10y ago
    totally agree. They're infamous for this front page call. Remember when they also were lauding Gordon Brown for selling half of Britain's gold for an average price of 270?
brian-armstrong 10y ago
Twitter makes me think of a public good on the internet. It's fun to imagine it being funded by tax dollars instead of investment money, with no ads whatsoever and 1/20th of its staff size. The priorities would have to be different entirely, but I think it would be for the better. Actually, I can imagine a few internet properties that might make more sense to be run like this. Some things just don't really make sense when you try to do them for profit.
- goatlover 10y ago
  If we pay taxes for these services, can we do away with ads and tracking?
- marssaxman 10y ago
  It should have been an open protocol all along, like email or netnews.
  - brian-armstrong 10y ago
    I'm curious, do the federated twitter clone protocols scale? Has anyone tested them at twitter peak loads?
tomkin 10y ago
Twitter lost me when they dumped on their ecosystem. The changes made to the platform in recent years are obvious grasp at straws rather than anything revolutionary. It's clear that investors have become Twitter's main concern – to a point where even something like a paywall or subscription wouldn't surprise me. Twitter does not need to have as many employees as it does, and has them solely to rise to some zero sum pissing match.
simbalion 10y ago
First, the article is dumb, twitter is already a giant. Twitter is bigger in social media than facebook because it is open to the public, while facebook is a gated community. Second, "the problem with twitter" as commentors have been saying, is that Twitter is a glorified instant messenger, and they have done everything wrong. They're a giant corporation with too many employees. They have a huge overhead cost for servers and offices and electricity and so on. And their only product is social media, for free. This is the era of ad-filtering. Substaining a company on advertising is a dead model, it will never work again. It's dying slower in some areas than in others, but rest assured it is dead. Furthermore, nobody using twitter wants to see ads. Users will aggressively persue means to eliminate ads from the "social" experience. Twitter is the digital equivalent of opening a number of sports arenas and inviting everyone to come in to mingle, without ever charging admission fees. Eventually, the power bill and lease is going to shut them down. This is a reality check. You cannot make money by giving things away for free. You can make money from free products, but you have to do things to monetize it, for example selling expert support for free software. Commentors keep comparing Twitter to Facebook. Twitter and Facebook are exactly the same in one way, neither one makes any money from social media. Facebook is profitable because Facebook is not a social media product, it is a portal product that offers social media. Facebook makes money from selling "microtransaction" games, which are a huge ripoff, and using their enormous size to convince business owners that investing in advertising is somehow worthwhile. Again, nobody wants to see ads during their "social" time. Social Media is not a business. Social media is a chat room with a slightly re-defined UX. You cannot make a profit from social media without charging admission. It is impossible. In the post-advertising era the only way businesses will be successful is if they produce products or services of actual real-world value to their customers. Parasitic businesses, middle-men, advertisers, they are all going to die. And good riddance. Money should be earned by the creation of value, and nothing else.
- adotjdotr 10y ago
  "Substaining a company on advertising is a dead model" A Deloitte report explained FB has created $40bn of economic value across the world. Let me explain to you how: - People are selling shit on social all day everyday - Every organisation markets themselves using social - social media is where most attention on mobile is - All social media platforms make ads - Ads are charged on CPM (Cost per 1000) - Trillions of impressions are served, therefore billions of ad dollars flow to the platform, billions with a b - All these businesses have 100s of millions if not billions in cash on their balance sheets For the record these ad products have kept 1000s of people in advertising jobs around the world and helped around 3 million advertisers spending billions collectively sell shit online.
rsp1984 10y ago
This is probably an unpopular opinion and for certain I lack the qualification to run a public company of about 4000 people and hence to make snarky comments on the internet. However it's my common sense that tells me there's something going very wrong with Twitter: let's be honest, their product is a message server with a fancy website wrapped around it and an attached ad-business. There's absolutely NO WAY it takes 4000 employees to run this thing! For comparison Whatsapp had ~ 60 employees when it was bought by FB and Instagram had 13. And I'd venture to say that both of these companies had more data to manage than Twitter has now. Because he is often working at Square, many managers arrive late, depart early and generally show up just to “punch the time card”, says one former senior executive who has sold all of his shares. And my common sense tells me it's probably not just the managers but also about 90% of the engineers. I don't mean to be derogatory towards Twitter employees but I truly wonder what everybody at this company is doing all day. The product is not improving in any meaningful way. The few innovations that they launched were all acquired businesses. Twitters quarterly expenses are now around 700 million. Let me make a very conservative estimate: It would probably not take more than 100 million per quarter to run the business (including their ad business). Likely much less. Their revenue is 600 million per quarter. If Twitter were a properly run company they could be making half a billion per quarter in profit which they could use to explore new business opportunities, products, or if there's a total lack of ideas, pay out to shareholders. I'd argue that any of these options would be a whole lot better than the status right now.
- btreesOfSpring 10y ago
  > I truly wonder what everybody at this company is doing all day. when a business lacks proper product focus there are an infinite amount of issues to work on each day. it is in this kind of environment that everything seems important and all prioritization is treated as urgent. people burn out in this kind of workplace and this is what it looks like is happening over at twitter.
- nateberkopec 10y ago
  When Snapchat (a pretty good comparable for Twitter) raised in 2014, they said they had 100 million monthly active users [1]. According to leaked financials [2] they were doing it on about 10 million a month, or just 30 million per quarter. Twitter supposedly has 300 million MAUs, so your estimate of 100 million/quarter may be right on the money. [1] http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2014/08/26/snapchat-said-to-have-more-than-100-million-monthly-active-users/ http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2014/08/26/snapchat-said-to-have... [2] http://gawker.com/snapchat-lost-a-ton-of-money-last-year-1706957414 http://gawker.com/snapchat-lost-a-ton-of-money-last-year-170...
animex 10y ago
...And they destroyed their 3rd party app/developer ecosystem which would have helped their growth.
conistonwater 10y ago
This reminds of something Aswath Damodaran pointed out a while back, that software companies that rely on advertising are collectively overvalued, in that they would need to altogether capture more than 100% of the market in order to justify each individual valuation. So any failure to "exceed expectations" results in a seemingly unreasonable drop in market value. [1] [1] http://aswathdamodaran.blogspot.ca/2013/10/when-pieces-dont-add-up-micro-dreams.html http://aswathdamodaran.blogspot.ca/2013/10/when-pieces-dont-...
throw2016 10y ago
Twitter is a great service for broadcasting information. Celebrities connecting with their fans bypassing press and other middlemen, that's huge value for them and they love it. Public officials making emergency and other announcements, custom tags for large events. The average celeb promotion, public dept or event budget can easily afford to pay twitter for engagement and value adds like analytics or any other value adds they can come up with for these profiles. They just need an excuse to pay. Forget ads, focus on this.
swiftisthebest 10y ago
Twitter should've been a protocol.
- xj9 10y ago
  NNTP 2.0
shmerl 10y ago
Diaspora* on the other hand continues growing, even if not rapidly.
twsted 10y ago
Twitter _is_ a giant. Facebook is an anomaly. It is matter of perspective.
andreygrehov 10y ago
The submission has 140 points at this very moment. I find it ironic :)
andriesm 10y ago
I wonder if their deplatforming of several well known but controversial public figures played any role in the fall of twitter. If you say something unpopular or un-pc we'll ban you. Note how reddit almost went into a similar death spiral around the time they upped their standards of what is deemed "acceptable" speech. Note I'm not expressing my opinion here that hate speech is a good (or bad) thing, merely noting a correlation. May not be causation, but an interesting data point nontheless.
icc97 10y ago
The one thing that surprises me is that twitter isn't doing better given how unrelevant the facebook adverts are compared to the twitter adverts. I find twitter adverts to be on a similar level to Google ads. I might not be interested in the adverts right now, but often the promoted tweets are at least relevant. Facebook on the other hand gives me adverts about adopting a pony to celebrate my dead father.
is_this_tinder 10y ago
Surprise asshole, Twitter is already a giant. Sorry you haven't monetized.
fairpx 10y ago
Twitter should do what Odeo did. Odeo was failing, they started working on other ideas. One of those sideprojects was... Twitter. In the same spirit of experimentation and discovery, Twitter should work on tiny sideprojects and make more small bets.
adotjdotr 10y ago
All sorts of very mis guided comments below. Here are some points: 1/ Im an advertiser I can tell you that big brands still love the platform (and spend heavily) 2/ Revenue is $2bn+ a year, how is this not successful? 3/ Balance sheet has $1bn+ 4/ NFL deal is huge, ditto bloomberg streaming 5/ Product needs to ship much quicker than Facebook does to stay relevant 6/ It is the only place that has nailed real time properly, if there is a bomb in a major city you will hear it first on twitter no where else has this edge, nowhere 7/ The worlds most important people are on this platform and readily accessible in most cases, not true on FB in terms of accessibility 8/ 80% Gross Margin business 9/ Needs to stay independent and ramp up advertising spend once logged out tweets ad product rolls out 10/ True reach of Twitter is almost 1bn users when we consider tweets appearing on TV, off the platform, in newspapers etc. This is comparable to FB Some of the ignorant stuff people are saying about all the employees is disrespectful. WhatsApp and IG when they were acquired were making very little money, if they had stayed independent and no one acquired them they would not be running today (they would exhaust the capital chain). WhatsApp maybe was making £10ml a year but was losing money; IG was making £0. I can tell you with certainty if they were independent and around today the growth would be stalling and there is a high chance they would not be able to continue raising venture money, it is very easy to grow products to 1bn users when you add FB growth's team which is best in class to an already solid product. Twitter has been generating solid revenue from around 2009/10 (someone correct me if im off here) and big brands love it and there is lots of data I have seen to support the value to advertisers around the world. Twitter does however need to tell its story a lot better afterall a Tweet means many different things to many people, its just not as easy to communicate as Facebook to an outside but this doesn't mean it is not valuable or should not exist independently.
- jasode 10y ago
  > 2/ Revenue is $2bn+ a year, how is this not successful? It's not successful because their expenses are $2.6 billion a year which exceeds the revenue of $2.2 billion collected.[1] This means they lost $450 million. They have no profits. They've never had a profitable year. In short, if you spend more than you make, you're not financially successful. Why do many people think companies like Twitter and Spotify (also $2 billion revenue and still losing money) are "successful" ?!? I'm guessing the confusion happens because observers don't understand the difference between revenue and profit. [1]https://www.google.com/finance?q=NYSE:TWTR&fstype=ii https://www.google.com/finance?q=NYSE:TWTR&fstype=ii
personjerry 10y ago
Time for someone to build the Facebook to Twitter's MySpace
freewizard 10y ago
It's a pity this article didn't but I assume it'll be interesting to compare Twitter with its copy cat Weibo in China, who went public Q2 2014, 6 months after Twitter, and started to see profit quarters since Q4 of the same year.

222 points by noir-york 10y ago

talideon 10y ago

Any way to fix the title? The 'the' after 'for' looks like it ought to have come after 'become'.

dlhavema 10y ago
agreed, its very confusing trying to figure out what its trying to say..
noir-york 10y ago
Apologies for the oversight! Cannot find a way to edit the title. Pointers welcome
- talideon 10y ago
  It appears to have been fixed, so hurray!

chollida1 10y ago

Twitter is a really strange company. I find so much value in it, mostly in the form of tweet deck with multiple columns giving me real time "news" on multiple different subjects/companies. Yet, I don't pay for it and I can't see why anyone would pay for it. Advertising doesn't seem like a viable business model as I have yet to see any add that is of any value what so ever from the main site. Can anyone make the case that within 2 years Twitter isn't owned by one of Google, Microsoft, or Facebook? With Steve Balmer's large investment Microsoft seems like the leader here. Or one of the big media companies, though I like this idea less as I can't see them wanting to subsidies the company forever. I mean what is Twitter's business model? Can they really make a go of advertising? I mean they've done prety well so far but IMHO I wouldn't be surprised that the ad money they've made so far is from people who feel like they need to advertise on Google and Facebook and Twitter. And once they get a few year of data to show which ads are actually helping, the twitter ad money is the first to be yanked. Do the go the financial markets model and sell their data/firehose? Does that generate anywhere near the amount they'd need? If/when the advertising dollars go away, what does Twitter do? Or is Twitter banking on being able to compete directly with Facebook and Google for ad dollars as an equal?

Retric 10y ago
Twitter can sell high speed access to all tweets, and their costs should be really low. Long term it could be a midsize, but profitable company as long as they don't get into debt.
- niftich 10y ago
  They already do this [1]. They used to sell this access to 'value-add' data analytics resellers as well, but in 2015 they acquired one instead [2] and stopped reselling it [3]. [1] https://dev.twitter.com/streaming/firehose https://dev.twitter.com/streaming/firehose [2] https://blog.gnip.com/twitter-data-ecosystem/ https://blog.gnip.com/twitter-data-ecosystem/ [3] http://thenextweb.com/dd/2015/04/11/twitter-cuts-off-firehose-resellers-as-it-brings-data-access-fully-in-house/ http://thenextweb.com/dd/2015/04/11/twitter-cuts-off-firehos...
- blowski 10y ago
  Seems sensible. They wouldn't need the gazillions of staff they have at the moment working on building and selling an advertising platform. If they were bought by a Google, there would be economies of scale on the hosting side. But it's become an almost toxic brand because as well as realtime news, it is a troll's paradise. I guess this is one reason why the big guys are hesitant to take it on. It seems like Facebook is eating up more and more of this market because they are better at keeping the trolls out.
RodericDay 10y ago
i always thought that the deal was that you should pay for more featureful tweets, on a per tweet basis you know when people do like 20 tweets in a row? they could pay 50c and post an essay. pictures and such could be capped at some freebies monthly and then cost if you're doing pics all the time. I like Twitter too. I don't use it too much, but I've used it to correspond with famous people and people like the pinboard guy make it fun.
wpietri 10y ago
Their revenue is over $2 billion/year, so I'd say they're making a decent go of advertising: https://www.google.com/finance?q=NYSE:TWTR&fstype=ii https://www.google.com/finance?q=NYSE:TWTR&fstype=ii My Twitter advertising experiences were pretty good. I was using it for hiring, and it provided much better value for dollar than the other things we tried. Its ability to micro-target was great for my use case. I imagine it's not very good for big-brand advertising, but if you're trying to reach niche audiences, I think it's great.

tangue 10y ago

Reading all this, I miss Jaiku. Google miss social in the same was MS miss the Internet.

overcast 10y ago

I believe the problem with Twitter, as it's always been, is that it's just too polarizing. Either people get it, or they don't. It's not general enough, the mechanics of hash tags, nonsensical short messages, retweeting, the signal to noise ratio is horrible, coupled with an often confusing interface, don't allow for the second half of the adoption curve to ever happen. For such a simple mechanic, they make it difficult for a lot of people to just "get it". I've got multiple accounts for various projects, my own personal account, and I still don't see the value in it for me personally.

WalterSear 10y ago
I acquired a masters degree in research psychology studying it, have a number of friends quite active on it, and I still don't see the value in it.
- JonnieCache 10y ago
  What did you find out, if not the value?
  - WalterSear 10y ago
    I studied how people perceive each other over twitter, specifically how inferred gender changes our perceptions of personality. I tried to design the the study to make it's results inferable to any micropublishing platform, like this one, for example. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to run the study with enough participants to get significant results, I'm afraid. Academic politics and favouritism got in the way :(
- nuex 10y ago
  I think it's fairly valuable for lowkey discourse, learning, awareness and inspiration. Especially cool to be able to follow anyone (friends, role models, favorite authors) and see what's on their mind and what interests them.
  - WalterSear 10y ago

macandcheese 10y ago

Streaming live events with partnerships can be big for them. They streamed the NFL Thursday Night Football game last night and quality was impeccable (aside from my Bills getting the L). Much better experience IMO than Facebook's attempts at streaming sports.

calinet6 10y ago

Ok, points for the Economist's title 'Twitter in retweet.' That's some fine pun-crafting right there. No comment on the service itself. I love it. It's one of the only methods of public one-to-many distributed communication that actually works well and stays relatively balanced (mainly due to the limitation on message length and size). I hope another service with a similar dynamic pops up in its place should it collapse.

electic 10y ago

The problem with Twitter is that the demolished their developer ecosystem. The attacked the very developers and companies that taught people how to use Twitter and developed solutions that made it a viable use case. Without those myriad of solutions built upon it, Twitter is a very basic SMS broadcast medium. It has a sloppy unsegmented home feed full of noise and its mechanics are horrible so it does a poor job of burying hate. With that in mind, the numbers show. The people that get it are on it. Most of the rest of us just see glimmers of it embedded in news articles. Sadly, it is too late to reverse this. Trust has been lost.

rch 10y ago
Maybe Twilio could buy Twitter, if the price was rational.
- nols 10y ago
  Twitter is currently worth 3 times Twilio, that would be a dramatic deal.
  - rch 10y ago
    It would be dramatic tomorrow, but maybe not in a couple of years when Twilio's identity business is more mature.
- debacle 10y ago
  Twilio could make Twitter for less than what it would cost just to negotiate the deal.
  - paulddraper 10y ago
    We could have made Twitter with the time sunk into this HN thread. But that's irrelevant.
nateberkopec 10y ago
Twitter had to kill their ecosystem in order to make any money on advertising. There was just no way to sell ads if so many users were going to be using 3rd party clients. You may be right that killing off the 3rd party ecosystem hurt their usage, but from a business perspective, there wasn't any point keeping it if it was damaging their business model.

agentgt 10y ago

I have always felt Twitter could do a better job doing recommendations. Sort of help me find things I like better. Not just content. I have really started to like Four Square automatically giving me tips when I walk into places. It seems like Twitter should know more about what I like/dislike perhaps even more than Facebook, Amazon, and Google considering I have actively told it so. Going back to Four Square... Twitter also really doesn't leverage geo. Why the hell doesn't it show me tweets near me in real time? That would be pretty damn useful. It could be the event engine. I can't tell you how many times some body says to me "I have this great idea for startup that shows you cool things happening right near you" ... and yet twitter could have this now.

vidarh 10y ago
I run a twitter feed with tweets about my local area, and gave up on using their geo stuff entirely to find relevant content... It's quite ridiculous.

dasil003 10y ago

There's something so sad to me about the general tech press attitude (let alone the Wall Street attitude) towards Twitter. Twitter is forever judged by Facebook's bar, using Facebook's KPIs. Nevermind that the average high profile tweet is much more culturally significant than the averge high profile Facebook post. Heck most of Facebook isn't even original content, it's just really slick distribution for content from elsewhere. Obviously Facebook has cracked engagement in a way that Twitter never has and never will. But, Twitter has cracked public discourse in a way that no other company has period. Think about it, all previous internet fora have imploded as they've grown large, or collapsed into micro-communities like sub-reddits. Twitter has definitely faced challenges with trolling and witch-hunts, etc, but by and large they've put together a super interesting product. The only problem is that it's not going to displace Facebook because it's a different thing that's not quite as big. This demand for growth is also why Twitter's management took their eye off the ball and failed to recognize and improve the core problems that hurt the product and community. It's just a really sad statement on modern business culture that Twitter isn't allowed to be considered a success as a medium-sized company that punches way above its weight among influencers.

forgetsusername 10y ago
>There's something so sad to me about the general tech press attitude (let alone the Wall Street attitude) towards Twitter. Those institutions are equally responsible for the historical hype Twitter has received. >This demand for growth is also why Twitter's management took their eye off the ball and failed to recognize and improve the core problems that hurt the product and community. This isn't the fault of anyone but Twitter management. No one forced them to take outside investment or go public. When you do that, investors want a return. If that isn't in your plan, and you want full creative control, don't take the money. >by and large they've put together a super interesting product. I loved it until they started manipulating my timeline, making it difficult to read streams chronologically. I haven't opened the app for months. It's too bad, because I agree, it was a great product and my goto aggregator.
- krat0sprakhar 10y ago

sjg007 10y ago

You want the global conversation to take place on Twitter. Tweets can run on an event, at an event, and when live streaming or restreaming an event.

rrggrr 10y ago

Maddening how incompetent Twitter is at strategic thought. They have arguably the most politically and civically important property on the internet but wish they were Facebook. Twitter is a Bentley in a market that wrongly thinks it should be Honda. The value of a network is as much the value of its participants as it is size. There is nothing wrong with Twitter, quite the opposite Twitter's key users are making, reporting and breaking news. The second and third order effects of this are enormous, far surpassing Facebook. The perceived monetization "problem" is painfully and frustratingly easy to rectify if Twitter would simply embrace their role and stop trying to compete in the social media gutter. Uuuuugh....

lhnz 10y ago
Completely agree. Unfortunately I think they're still chasing the wrong dollar. They should be monetising their publishers and not just their audience. Twitter should let publishers paywall their articles and then authorise and take micropayments via http://t.co http://t.co on their behalf. Almost everybody would benefit from this arrangement: - Users would no longer need to buy multiple newspaper subscriptions. - Journalists would be better positioned to ask for revenue share. - Publishers could gain a larger paying market without needing to coax user's through the account creation and subscription signup hoops. They'd finally be a viable business. And their incentives would be aligned with publishers.
- cpeterso 10y ago
  Twitter could create a micro payment tip system as a button next to the heart. Give popular users a way to monetize their followers, creating a virtuous cycle attracting more content publishers.
  - lhnz 10y ago
    That's also true but I was also imagining a system which generated and sent on a micropayment authentication id via a redirect when paywalled links are clicked. Rather than users visiting publishers to find that they'd already read their 10 free articles, publishers would be able to use the id to grant them access to the article for a small fee that Twitter collected on their behalf at the end of the month. Zero-friction low price articles for users. And customer acquisition costs fall for publishers. It would also enable small time bloggers to also monetise their audiences.

ComputerGuru 10y ago

There is a typo in the title that completely fried my neural circuits for a full 5 seconds or so. > It is too late for the it to become giant people expected Should obviously be "It is too late for it to become the giant people expected" (Sidebar: I hope this isn't what it feels like to be dyslexic, it wasn't fun!)

noir-york 10y ago
Yep, sorry about that. Cannot find a way to fix the typo.
userbinator 10y ago
Apparently the typo has been fixed now, but I still find it confusing to parse --- I parsed it as "It is too late[something unclear], "(giant people) expected" and wondered what exactly giant people had to do with Twitter. Perhaps "It is too late for it to become the giant which/that people expected" can break the natural inclination to parse "giant people" as one noun.

JonnieCache 10y ago

I've still never encountered a single person who posts to twitter except as part of their job or to promote themselves or one of their projects. Supposedly these people exist in their millions but I've no idea where they're hiding. Are they mostly schoolchildren?

Nav_Panel 10y ago
I think they are mostly young adults (age groups 13-35 seems most common) and it's mostly loose networks based around geography and education. So, they sort of lie on top of existing real world networks. If you don't have an "in" to Twitter from a friend in real life, you'll find it hard to locate a Twitter network. But once you're in, you can pretty easily seek out new people to interact with, and you can grow your little network and make friends and share cultural capital or whatever.
unfunco 10y ago
I do (I won't post a link because this isn't self advertising, but my username is the same as it is here) – I work for a software company, I have my own company too (but I'm a procrastinator) – Twitter for me is to opine on political news or news I'm otherwise interested in (chemistry, psychedelics, etc) – none of which have anything to do with my job (and my employer would likely frown upon it too.)

niftich 10y ago

Twitter, deep down, has the exact same problem as Blogger or Reddit or Livejournal or Tumblr. It's ultimately a community where people post text posts. This is notoriously hard to monetize. But it has another big problem that doesn't manifest as strongly in those platforms: the pressure of virality. Twitter has managed to attract quite a number of VIPs, 'influencers' who draw followers to them and generate traffic and interest and engagement. These are your celebrities, your media personalities, industry and academia people who are very important in their fields -- people who either have a Wikipedia article, or a blog, or a Youtube channel. These are the people who buoy Twitter, so these are the people who were most likely to get a Verified mark. Being on Twitter allows you to feel close to them, like their posts, reblog them on your feed, so you can project to your friends that you like this person and feel an affinity to what they do. These influencers also provide a natural place for promoted content, which has so far been under-utilized. But somehow, Twitter has been saddled with the misconception that anyone can be famous with just a single tweet -- it's true that this can happen because it happened multiple times before, but when people join with the expectation that this may be the case, everyone loses. Maybe it's in analogue with Instagram, where if you post a Really Attractive selfie or take an incredible photograph, you may indeed accumulate a bunch of likes; but this aspiration doesn't translate nearly as well to quick-reply threads branching off of some influencer's post, which is the only way for an average person to attain enough eyeballs to have a shot at their post going viral. This creates an incentive structure where no one truly wins: - Influencers have attract a lot of traffic, but a lot of it is people trying to be clever - Low-activity people -- the long tail of Twitter -- are either unaware of what's going on, or are caught up in the post flurry - The leftover group is people aggressively looking for their 15 minutes of fame This also explains the myriad articles about people who "don't get Twitter" -- they join and expect to accumulate followers naturally, despite not being notable on their own right or offering exceptional content. Sorry, you've been misled. Twitter will amplify your social reach, but it won't create one for you.

randomsearch 10y ago

What is Twitter doing wrong? This is an interesting question. Answers posted so far: - it's polarizing... this may be true, but would simply mean a smaller market, not an existential risk. - they demolished the dev ecosystem. I totally agree with this, and think it was dumb. They thought they were Facebook. But I don't think this fully explains why their core product isn't a big success. - they don't have a strong enough business model. This is a bit of a tautology - we wouldn't be discussing it otherwise - but not having a strong business model does not explain why the core product doesn't _feel right_. And that's the thing, you look at Facebook or Instagram and everyone "gets it". They may not _like_ it, but they understand what it's about. But Twitter doesn't feel like that. It doesn't feel intuitive. It feels like a mess, like a lot of different use cases rolled into one big disorganised poorly designed app. I read a bit about Twitter's history and my theory is that the problem stems right back to the beginning, when there was an argument amongst the founders about whether Twitter was for "micro-blogging" or for "news" (for some definition of what is newsworthy). Both these seem like good ideas. We're all interested in our friends' opinions on various things, and what they're up to right now, and add to that the opinions and activities of people we choose to follow because we respect them and find what they say interesting, that sounds like a compelling product. Likewise, keeping track of all the news on a variety of topics from many sources, hearing the news unfiltered from the actors involved, that is another very compelling product. Put me in direct contact with Elon Musk about what's happening at SpaceX, let me tweet Sam Altman to ask him something about YC. Cool. It's interesting to consider that clearly selecting one of these use cases would solve many of Twitter's biggest problems. If you're following your friends and some famous people's microblogs, why not enforce real-world ID? If you're after the latest news, do you really need to be able to spam or message everyone? Both situations allow for a reduction in trolling and the negative behaviours that have made Twitter (as one unforgiving observer put it) "the cesspool of the internet". Problem is Twitter doesn't set out to do either of these things, because it can't decide what it wants to be. So it has compromised and floundered with no clear vision. How can the employees work effectively if they don't know which way to row? The solution for Twitter _would_ have been to split into multiple services/views/subsystems, or abandon the least interesting one to a sibling startup or a competitor. As Sam A puts it so brilliantly: "focus + intensity". Still time. Not much time.

johan_larson 10y ago

I don't get why the board OKed having a part-time CEO. It just seems like a bizarre thing to do. Was there really no credible candidate who was willing to run Twitter full time?

redditmigrant 10y ago
Twitter at its most basic has a product problem and not a revenue or sales problem. I think for product problems founders have a unique perspective and legitimacy to make tough decisions. My guess is that the need for this founder perspective coupled with the fact that Jack was the only founder who was even partially available led to the decision of having him on as part time CEO.
- poshli 10y ago
  being the CEO of even a small firm is a 150 percent time job. I still find it hard to believe the Twitter board couldn't find anyone who didn't already have a job.
  - odbol_ 10y ago
    Yeah it's a pretty bad sign for your company when even the founder is like "this kinda sucks, I'm going to a better company that actually makes money."
yuhong 10y ago
As a side note, I have been thinking of Yishan-style CEOs for a while now, with board of directors tweeting often too. Twitter itself would probably be a good candidate for such a public company.

startupflix 10y ago

Twitter is loosing users because of lack of innovation. They aren't adding necessary new features. Even the existing investors aren't happy. What features should they introduce. any suggestion?

sjilo 10y ago
Nice try, Jack.
adrenalinelol 10y ago
Twitter is being told to be Facebook, when in-fact it needs to follow an entirely different paradigm, because it's intrinsically a different product. If Twitter is judge by what Facebook judges Facebook for success, it'll always fall short.
netik 10y ago
(ex-employee #13 over here.) They could start by incorporating every single feature that BlockTogether has as abuse mitigation. Encrypted end-to-end DMs (which were blocked numerous times by useless product managers) would have been another excellent feature to protect users.

Mendenhall 10y ago

It is interesting to me to hear how many say it doesnt have value to them. For me one aspect alone is worth it and that is real time news. It makes everything else look archiac.You can also scan a wide range of peoples opinions and find varied sources and angles fast.

noir-york 10y ago

Real-world friends are the basis for your FBK graph, work colleagues are the basis for Linkedin. But Twitter? What's the community? Regarding monetization: Twitter creates a lot of value - but its hard to monetize because the value is primarily positive externalities. News media benefits by publishing news on twitter, celebs reach their fans, politicians use it as a campaign tool. And Twitter makes very little from all this. The irony: while telcos are fighting hard to avoid becoming commoditized dumb pipes; Twitter by design are a dumb pipe ferrying tweets.

deleted 10y ago
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huherto 10y ago
> Real-world friends are the basis for your FBK graph, work colleagues are the basis for Linkedin. But Twitter? What's the community? Your political network ? Fans network ? In which case, it is most useful for celebrities or wannabes but not for regular people.
- noir-york 10y ago
  Indeed. If twitter is for news, then the people who create the "news" - politicians, celebs, artists, journos - are the foundation of the network. Most of us live mundane lives and while events in our lives may be news to friends (marriage/births/etc) there is already a network to share that kinda news: fbk.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
hathawsh 10y ago
I saw an article not long ago that clarified for me what Twitter is: it's the community for journalism. It's the perfect place for journalists to quickly pick up the current vibe on a given topic, then repackage what they learn as a news story. Here is what journalists are learning now about Twitter: https://multimedia.journalism.berkeley.edu/tutorials/twitter/ https://multimedia.journalism.berkeley.edu/tutorials/twitter... Lots of people fancy themselves as part-time journalists, so the community of journalists is much larger than people who have the job title. I am a Twitter community member because I see myself as a part-time journalist. As I see it, Facebook is trying to become your daily newspaper, but I think Twitter has a better chance of achieving that goal, because differences in the way Twitter and Facebook treat privacy mean that Twitter can theoretically draw upon a much larger body of content. Twitter ought to consider using a news feed prioritization algorithm similar to Facebook, since Facebook is turning out to be rather good at showing me what I care to see and pushing down the chaff. Twitter still makes me wade through it all. In short, I think Twitter should focus on being better at what it already is: the central gathering place for journalism.

seanca 10y ago

Twitter is really only useful for following influencers, famous public figures, popular people, however you'd like to describe them. There isn't that much of a reason for a more normal user with a few hundred followers (maybe) to engage on it other than interact with more prominent users. Everything people go to Twitter for therefore can be done without having an actual account yourself; everything is public, so why have an account other than to curate a list of things prominent users say. Which might not even be a bad model if you think about it. To have it be the premier "find out what they said" space, without the hoopla from idiots, trolls, etc. Would people pay to visit a site like that? I'm not sure. Would there be a way to monetize that sort of experience? I think so. Just my $0.02.

Nav_Panel 10y ago
> There isn't that much of a reason for a more normal user with a few hundred followers (maybe) to engage on it other than interact with more prominent users I think you've misjudged the value of Twitter for a normal user. In my experience as one of these "normal" users, Twitter's major use case is like Facebook before the "adults" (older people) and extended family showed up. You can type out whatever you want, and your Twitter buddies will see it (often a different circle than your Facebook friends). Because messages are so short, interaction is much easier. Discussions take place in 140 characters rather than paragraphs. Sure, it's less deep than Facebook, but it's also satisfyingly immediate. It's also a lot more possible to make new friends over Twitter than Facebook. It's relatively normal to interact with people you've never met before, whereas on FB that'd be a big faux pas outside of a post in a common-interest group. All the brand stuff? Powerful users and influence and news? Not super relevant for a pretty decent swath of users (although it is pretty funny when I subtweet a utilities company or something when I'm having an issue and they send me an official DM). I personally do not follow any major brands or celebrities, although occasionally I see them through retweets.
- fernandotakai 10y ago
  > It's also a lot more possible to make new friends over Twitter than Facebook. anecdote: i met 95% of my current friends through twitter. i also met my wife through twitter.

evanjacobs 10y ago

I would have liked to see Twitter become the product that Slack is now for many people: great direct message and group message capabilities, fun interface, great API for enabling bot integration, etc.

zeveb 10y ago

I think the core problem is that Twitter should be a protocol, not a company. There's just no need for there to be any servers: users could send messages to one another, each running his own agents. Since the Twitter experience doesn't need the Twitter corporation, there's always going to be friction and centrifugal force.

jbpetersen 10y ago
Even as a protocol, there'd still need to be some means of governing the distribution, storage, and retrieval of tweets. A simple P2P network would make it much harder to gain a foothold when nobody is mirroring your content. I think Twitter the corporation could make a viable business of filling that role by selling access to infrastructure for the protocol to developers of end-user applications and various data hounds.

thr0waway1239 10y ago

I love the title. Economist article titles are an endless source of word puns. Someone should start a thread just to post the best Economist titles.

paulsutter 10y ago

Twitter is important, useful, and will never be as big a business as Facebook. The problem is that they can't admit this and are pushing to be something they cannot be. Thats why they have so many product managers showing each other powerpoints, each of whose responsibilities are so small that no forward progress can be made.

daxfohl 10y ago

Same for Apple two decades ago. Yeah they never went anywhere. Which spontaneously makes me think, maybe this CI stuff is the wrong way to go. Maybe a big-bang release every year where you can make a marketing statement "imagine if" "now you can" sort of thing. In fact, as part of the minority 40+ contingent on HN, I'd love if all services I used released updates only annually and I could know precisely what they are.

spectrum1234 10y ago

Twitter's huge value is the ability to follow without needing a follow back (friend relationship). However they need to find a way to offer both short and long form content while doing this. It's crazy they haven't tried anything else yet. Perhaps there is an opportunity for communities to form naturally as well but again they haven't given this any thought. So many things they should be trying, its too bad. The concept is amazing but they are butchering it.

smacktoward 10y ago
> Twitter's huge value is the ability to follow without needing a follow back (friend relationship). Facebook also allows this. (Didn't always, but they do now.)
- sidlls 10y ago
  Doesn't that defeat the purpose of any privacy settings they have?

raverbashing 10y ago

OK, here goes. Twitter was Great. Yes, with a captial G. In 2008/9 up until, let's say, 2012 (or even 14)? It got a lot of early adopters, it got groups together on it (real groups, people that meet in real life), it was a medium of conversation. It still has some important aspects, some discussions work great there. But I think people moved onto other platforms and most (of the cool people) left. Twitter (company) needs to go beyond Twitter (the product). Fb knows this better (while moving the product forward, but it's visible they're reaching a limit there as well) Both Twitter products, Vine and Periscope offer an inferior experience to Instagram videos and Fb live. (Especially Vine. It seems as bad as a Java plugin)

drops 10y ago
>But I think people moved onto other platforms and most (of the cool people) left. Moved onto what platforms? Left where?
- raverbashing 10y ago
  They moved the conversation with their closest connections to Instagram/Snapchat. (Which also allow you to follow celebrities and other popular people) Also a lot of group conversations went to Whatsapp and similar software
jodrellblank 10y ago
How much of this is a fundamental behaviour? Not people moving from Twitter because Twitter is bad and Snapchat is good, but because Twitter is old and Snapchat is new? Same drive to try newer programming languages and frameworks, same drive to join new startup companies, same drive to throw out and start afresh in lots of domains, same drive to leave this bar and try another. I see this presented along with "online communities die when they can't block trolls", and "eternal September", and "small communities are more close-knit". But maybe once it gets old, large, established, you have habits of interaction, same people you talk to, an established persona to keep up, a post history, it gets stale and it feels like work. If you're a service, you can keep customers long term by offering good service. If you're a brand, you can keep customers long term by staying out of their way and not messing up and giving them reason to reconsider. But if you're a meeting place, if you're a look and a feeling, if you're a venue for nothing in particular - well, fashions change and online, anywhere else is just as convenient to go to.

vegabook 10y ago

The Economist has a knack for getting on the case of sectors / companies whenever their price is at an extreme - and being wrong. It's actually a good contra-indicator, as we've seen with oil, shale, gold, more recently Deutsche bank, and now Twitter.

PhantomGremlin 10y ago
It's actually a good contra-indicator My all time favorite wrong call of theirs came in 1999. Oil had dropped to $11 and they were predicting that it could hit $5: a “normal” market price might now be in the $5-10 range. Factor in the current slow growth of the world economy and the normal price drops to the bottom of that range. Of course, oil did just the opposite, climbing to about $140 per barrel over the next decade. http://www.economist.com/node/188181 http://www.economist.com/node/188181
- vegabook 10y ago
  totally agree. They're infamous for this front page call. Remember when they also were lauding Gordon Brown for selling half of Britain's gold for an average price of 270?

brian-armstrong 10y ago

Twitter makes me think of a public good on the internet. It's fun to imagine it being funded by tax dollars instead of investment money, with no ads whatsoever and 1/20th of its staff size. The priorities would have to be different entirely, but I think it would be for the better. Actually, I can imagine a few internet properties that might make more sense to be run like this. Some things just don't really make sense when you try to do them for profit.

goatlover 10y ago
If we pay taxes for these services, can we do away with ads and tracking?
marssaxman 10y ago
It should have been an open protocol all along, like email or netnews.
- brian-armstrong 10y ago
  I'm curious, do the federated twitter clone protocols scale? Has anyone tested them at twitter peak loads?

tomkin 10y ago

Twitter lost me when they dumped on their ecosystem. The changes made to the platform in recent years are obvious grasp at straws rather than anything revolutionary. It's clear that investors have become Twitter's main concern – to a point where even something like a paywall or subscription wouldn't surprise me. Twitter does not need to have as many employees as it does, and has them solely to rise to some zero sum pissing match.

simbalion 10y ago

First, the article is dumb, twitter is already a giant. Twitter is bigger in social media than facebook because it is open to the public, while facebook is a gated community. Second, "the problem with twitter" as commentors have been saying, is that Twitter is a glorified instant messenger, and they have done everything wrong. They're a giant corporation with too many employees. They have a huge overhead cost for servers and offices and electricity and so on. And their only product is social media, for free. This is the era of ad-filtering. Substaining a company on advertising is a dead model, it will never work again. It's dying slower in some areas than in others, but rest assured it is dead. Furthermore, nobody using twitter wants to see ads. Users will aggressively persue means to eliminate ads from the "social" experience. Twitter is the digital equivalent of opening a number of sports arenas and inviting everyone to come in to mingle, without ever charging admission fees. Eventually, the power bill and lease is going to shut them down. This is a reality check. You cannot make money by giving things away for free. You can make money from free products, but you have to do things to monetize it, for example selling expert support for free software. Commentors keep comparing Twitter to Facebook. Twitter and Facebook are exactly the same in one way, neither one makes any money from social media. Facebook is profitable because Facebook is not a social media product, it is a portal product that offers social media. Facebook makes money from selling "microtransaction" games, which are a huge ripoff, and using their enormous size to convince business owners that investing in advertising is somehow worthwhile. Again, nobody wants to see ads during their "social" time. Social Media is not a business. Social media is a chat room with a slightly re-defined UX. You cannot make a profit from social media without charging admission. It is impossible. In the post-advertising era the only way businesses will be successful is if they produce products or services of actual real-world value to their customers. Parasitic businesses, middle-men, advertisers, they are all going to die. And good riddance. Money should be earned by the creation of value, and nothing else.

adotjdotr 10y ago
"Substaining a company on advertising is a dead model" A Deloitte report explained FB has created $40bn of economic value across the world. Let me explain to you how: - People are selling shit on social all day everyday - Every organisation markets themselves using social - social media is where most attention on mobile is - All social media platforms make ads - Ads are charged on CPM (Cost per 1000) - Trillions of impressions are served, therefore billions of ad dollars flow to the platform, billions with a b - All these businesses have 100s of millions if not billions in cash on their balance sheets For the record these ad products have kept 1000s of people in advertising jobs around the world and helped around 3 million advertisers spending billions collectively sell shit online.

rsp1984 10y ago

This is probably an unpopular opinion and for certain I lack the qualification to run a public company of about 4000 people and hence to make snarky comments on the internet. However it's my common sense that tells me there's something going very wrong with Twitter: let's be honest, their product is a message server with a fancy website wrapped around it and an attached ad-business. There's absolutely NO WAY it takes 4000 employees to run this thing! For comparison Whatsapp had ~ 60 employees when it was bought by FB and Instagram had 13. And I'd venture to say that both of these companies had more data to manage than Twitter has now. Because he is often working at Square, many managers arrive late, depart early and generally show up just to “punch the time card”, says one former senior executive who has sold all of his shares. And my common sense tells me it's probably not just the managers but also about 90% of the engineers. I don't mean to be derogatory towards Twitter employees but I truly wonder what everybody at this company is doing all day. The product is not improving in any meaningful way. The few innovations that they launched were all acquired businesses. Twitters quarterly expenses are now around 700 million. Let me make a very conservative estimate: It would probably not take more than 100 million per quarter to run the business (including their ad business). Likely much less. Their revenue is 600 million per quarter. If Twitter were a properly run company they could be making half a billion per quarter in profit which they could use to explore new business opportunities, products, or if there's a total lack of ideas, pay out to shareholders. I'd argue that any of these options would be a whole lot better than the status right now.

btreesOfSpring 10y ago
> I truly wonder what everybody at this company is doing all day. when a business lacks proper product focus there are an infinite amount of issues to work on each day. it is in this kind of environment that everything seems important and all prioritization is treated as urgent. people burn out in this kind of workplace and this is what it looks like is happening over at twitter.
nateberkopec 10y ago
When Snapchat (a pretty good comparable for Twitter) raised in 2014, they said they had 100 million monthly active users [1]. According to leaked financials [2] they were doing it on about 10 million a month, or just 30 million per quarter. Twitter supposedly has 300 million MAUs, so your estimate of 100 million/quarter may be right on the money. [1] http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2014/08/26/snapchat-said-to-have-more-than-100-million-monthly-active-users/ http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2014/08/26/snapchat-said-to-have... [2] http://gawker.com/snapchat-lost-a-ton-of-money-last-year-1706957414 http://gawker.com/snapchat-lost-a-ton-of-money-last-year-170...

animex 10y ago

...And they destroyed their 3rd party app/developer ecosystem which would have helped their growth.

conistonwater 10y ago

This reminds of something Aswath Damodaran pointed out a while back, that software companies that rely on advertising are collectively overvalued, in that they would need to altogether capture more than 100% of the market in order to justify each individual valuation. So any failure to "exceed expectations" results in a seemingly unreasonable drop in market value. [1] [1] http://aswathdamodaran.blogspot.ca/2013/10/when-pieces-dont-add-up-micro-dreams.html http://aswathdamodaran.blogspot.ca/2013/10/when-pieces-dont-...

throw2016 10y ago

Twitter is a great service for broadcasting information. Celebrities connecting with their fans bypassing press and other middlemen, that's huge value for them and they love it. Public officials making emergency and other announcements, custom tags for large events. The average celeb promotion, public dept or event budget can easily afford to pay twitter for engagement and value adds like analytics or any other value adds they can come up with for these profiles. They just need an excuse to pay. Forget ads, focus on this.

swiftisthebest 10y ago

Twitter should've been a protocol.

xj9 10y ago
NNTP 2.0

shmerl 10y ago

Diaspora* on the other hand continues growing, even if not rapidly.

twsted 10y ago

Twitter _is_ a giant. Facebook is an anomaly. It is matter of perspective.

andreygrehov 10y ago

The submission has 140 points at this very moment. I find it ironic :)

andriesm 10y ago

I wonder if their deplatforming of several well known but controversial public figures played any role in the fall of twitter. If you say something unpopular or un-pc we'll ban you. Note how reddit almost went into a similar death spiral around the time they upped their standards of what is deemed "acceptable" speech. Note I'm not expressing my opinion here that hate speech is a good (or bad) thing, merely noting a correlation. May not be causation, but an interesting data point nontheless.

icc97 10y ago

The one thing that surprises me is that twitter isn't doing better given how unrelevant the facebook adverts are compared to the twitter adverts. I find twitter adverts to be on a similar level to Google ads. I might not be interested in the adverts right now, but often the promoted tweets are at least relevant. Facebook on the other hand gives me adverts about adopting a pony to celebrate my dead father.

is_this_tinder 10y ago

Surprise asshole, Twitter is already a giant. Sorry you haven't monetized.

fairpx 10y ago

Twitter should do what Odeo did. Odeo was failing, they started working on other ideas. One of those sideprojects was... Twitter. In the same spirit of experimentation and discovery, Twitter should work on tiny sideprojects and make more small bets.

adotjdotr 10y ago

All sorts of very mis guided comments below. Here are some points: 1/ Im an advertiser I can tell you that big brands still love the platform (and spend heavily) 2/ Revenue is $2bn+ a year, how is this not successful? 3/ Balance sheet has $1bn+ 4/ NFL deal is huge, ditto bloomberg streaming 5/ Product needs to ship much quicker than Facebook does to stay relevant 6/ It is the only place that has nailed real time properly, if there is a bomb in a major city you will hear it first on twitter no where else has this edge, nowhere 7/ The worlds most important people are on this platform and readily accessible in most cases, not true on FB in terms of accessibility 8/ 80% Gross Margin business 9/ Needs to stay independent and ramp up advertising spend once logged out tweets ad product rolls out 10/ True reach of Twitter is almost 1bn users when we consider tweets appearing on TV, off the platform, in newspapers etc. This is comparable to FB Some of the ignorant stuff people are saying about all the employees is disrespectful. WhatsApp and IG when they were acquired were making very little money, if they had stayed independent and no one acquired them they would not be running today (they would exhaust the capital chain). WhatsApp maybe was making £10ml a year but was losing money; IG was making £0. I can tell you with certainty if they were independent and around today the growth would be stalling and there is a high chance they would not be able to continue raising venture money, it is very easy to grow products to 1bn users when you add FB growth's team which is best in class to an already solid product. Twitter has been generating solid revenue from around 2009/10 (someone correct me if im off here) and big brands love it and there is lots of data I have seen to support the value to advertisers around the world. Twitter does however need to tell its story a lot better afterall a Tweet means many different things to many people, its just not as easy to communicate as Facebook to an outside but this doesn't mean it is not valuable or should not exist independently.

jasode 10y ago
> 2/ Revenue is $2bn+ a year, how is this not successful? It's not successful because their expenses are $2.6 billion a year which exceeds the revenue of $2.2 billion collected.[1] This means they lost $450 million. They have no profits. They've never had a profitable year. In short, if you spend more than you make, you're not financially successful. Why do many people think companies like Twitter and Spotify (also $2 billion revenue and still losing money) are "successful" ?!? I'm guessing the confusion happens because observers don't understand the difference between revenue and profit. [1]https://www.google.com/finance?q=NYSE:TWTR&fstype=ii https://www.google.com/finance?q=NYSE:TWTR&fstype=ii

personjerry 10y ago

Time for someone to build the Facebook to Twitter's MySpace

freewizard 10y ago

It's a pity this article didn't but I assume it'll be interesting to compare Twitter with its copy cat Weibo in China, who went public Q2 2014, 6 months after Twitter, and started to see profit quarters since Q4 of the same year.