Its going to take a lot of people to crack the ad supported service problem. Juno email in the 90s tried to provide free email to dialup users with ads, that f

Its going to take a lot of people to crack the ad supported service problem. Juno email in the 90s tried to provide free email to dialup users with ads, that failed. Ad supported cell phone service is stillborn and someone tries it every couple years. The fundamental problem is people who want status updates as a service see facebook as doing a better job and its paid for by selling your private stuff you don't care about and NSA access which is behind the scenes and "OK" but not in your face. Facebook could charge money and it would still crush twitter simply by not having as much spam. So if your company has no niche in the ecosystem and nobody wants to buy stuff, the short term solution is lots of employees and hope for a miracle. Hence 3500 people to basically run a web to IRC gateway that nobody wants because facebook and slack (and others) do it better. If there's no miracle the employee numbers will be 0 soon enough.