3 ms·

I wonder how Twitter is even alive because the amount of mismanagement that happened in the last 10 years is staggering.

jl6 6y ago
Winner-takes-all-network-effect-first-mover-advantage.
adventured 6y ago
A spectacular example of how hard it can be to remove a networked product/service once it's entrenched. You can do a lot of things wrong if you reach that position, and still keep your place. People will reference MySpace as a counter to that. Except MySpace was never close to being entrenched, they had no moat or stake in the ground. They never had all the world's celebrities and politicians on their platform, using it as a core broadcast method to the world. At their peak in 2006-2007, MySpace's monthly active users measured in the tens of millions. Certainly very large for its time, however as a general purpose social network meant to pursue max scale, MySpace contrasted against Facebook demonstrates just how dramatically far away from entrenched-scale MySpace really was (they got maybe 10%-20% of the way there). To put it into perspective, Cristiano Ronaldo's following on Instagram is as big as MySpace at its peak. Now that's an entrenched max audience social network in action. MySpace was too early, before there were enough global users to even be able to obtain that level of necessary entrenchment protection. Their network - for its specific purpose - was small enough that it was still quite possible to unseat them. Facebook's boom phase also coincided perfectly with the rise of the modern app smartphone beginning in 2007-2008, which ultimately brought the Internet to a dramatically larger audience around the world (and was responsible for enabling Facebook to reach three billion users; without the smartphone that would either never happen or would have taken several more decades). I reference the type or purpose aspect because obviously not all social networks are max scale general purpose networks. Twitter's potential base isn't three billion users, as that many people will never want to use the platform under any circumstances. Each type of social network has a max potential userbase (Pinterest's max base is different from LinkedIn's which is different from Facebook's). Twitter has likely heavily (not entirely) saturated their maximum reach and long since gotten to the required entrenchment scale for what they particularly do.
cvhashim 6y ago
Twitter has pretty much captured the bite-sized, piecemeal form of Internet-based content in tweets and such.

jl6 6y ago

Winner-takes-all-network-effect-first-mover-advantage.

adventured 6y ago

A spectacular example of how hard it can be to remove a networked product/service once it's entrenched. You can do a lot of things wrong if you reach that position, and still keep your place. People will reference MySpace as a counter to that. Except MySpace was never close to being entrenched, they had no moat or stake in the ground. They never had all the world's celebrities and politicians on their platform, using it as a core broadcast method to the world. At their peak in 2006-2007, MySpace's monthly active users measured in the tens of millions. Certainly very large for its time, however as a general purpose social network meant to pursue max scale, MySpace contrasted against Facebook demonstrates just how dramatically far away from entrenched-scale MySpace really was (they got maybe 10%-20% of the way there). To put it into perspective, Cristiano Ronaldo's following on Instagram is as big as MySpace at its peak. Now that's an entrenched max audience social network in action. MySpace was too early, before there were enough global users to even be able to obtain that level of necessary entrenchment protection. Their network - for its specific purpose - was small enough that it was still quite possible to unseat them. Facebook's boom phase also coincided perfectly with the rise of the modern app smartphone beginning in 2007-2008, which ultimately brought the Internet to a dramatically larger audience around the world (and was responsible for enabling Facebook to reach three billion users; without the smartphone that would either never happen or would have taken several more decades). I reference the type or purpose aspect because obviously not all social networks are max scale general purpose networks. Twitter's potential base isn't three billion users, as that many people will never want to use the platform under any circumstances. Each type of social network has a max potential userbase (Pinterest's max base is different from LinkedIn's which is different from Facebook's). Twitter has likely heavily (not entirely) saturated their maximum reach and long since gotten to the required entrenchment scale for what they particularly do.

cvhashim 6y ago

Twitter has pretty much captured the bite-sized, piecemeal form of Internet-based content in tweets and such.