11 ms·

Twitter is the Benjamin Button of startups.

218 points by hyfen 14y ago

dascripter 14y ago
I suppose I understand what all the angst about Twitter relates, but personally I don't really care. I have always used Twitter as a way to get updates from people and places that I am interested in and as long as they continue to provide that function I will keep using their service. Make that hard to do however and all bets are off.
ThomPete 14y ago
Only problem. Twitter was originally thought of as a small family/close friends network.
ardillamorris 14y ago
is it? or maybe, unlike other startups, Twitter is willing to make the changes necessary to adjust course and reinvent itself? Google cut Buzz and Wave. They were both great initiatives that never took off. You can't throw good money after bad money. I think developers are important but the users experience is paramount and if to maintain that they need to adjust their service, so be it.
therealarmen 14y ago
I wonder what impact all this Twitter-hate is having on Twitter's HR department. I say this because I don't think shutting off third-party clients will hurt the company that much. If it makes it difficult to attract the best talent, that's a different story. Look at what happened to Y! over the last decade.
- themckman 14y ago
  They still have huge engineering challenges and as long as that's true they're going to be able to find people willing and interested.
  - akkartik 14y ago
    If you think all hiring requires is a 'challenge' I have a bridge to sell you.
    - blhack 14y ago
      Excuse me? My hacker friends and I have all discussed this at length and agreed that the largest motivator for us is working on hard problems. This is how some of us justify working for the military; they offer really tough problems to solve. Twitter is the same; if twitter offered me a job, I would practically move to the bay and live out of my jeep to do it.
      - akkartik 14y ago
        I'll agree to disagree on 'largest'[1]. But there's a huge difference between 'largest' and 'only'. Which is what grandparent implied. [1] I lied. I can't sell you a bridge because I suck at it. But somebody will. To you and your friends. Let's talk again in 10 years. Sigh, when did I get so cynical? Then again, it's not cynical to see the feedback loops between who you work with and what you work on and the million other seemingly minor details that go into liking what you do. Yeah, maybe I'm ok. The comparison to suckers is entirely unfair; for that I apologize. It's just the circle of life.
      - lovskogen 14y ago
        Which hard problem at Twitter would you love to work on?
      - ececconi 14y ago
        The toughest problem that they need to learn how to solve is how to make that $$.
      - shadowmatter 14y ago
        I think there's a faction of engineers who want to work on interesting (which can be hard) problems, and those who want to work on interesting products. I believe this is demonstrated clearly by the jobs pages for both Apple and Google. From Apple: * Every detail matters… It matters all of the time. That’s how we do things at Apple. The result is some of the best-loved products in the world. * Simplicity isn’t simple... It means rethinking every customer experience until the clutter has fallen away — until all that remains is what’s essential, useful, and beautiful. That might be a new product feature that delights even die-hard fans. From Google, specifically an interview with Google employees about work there: * ”... love to work on challenging projects” * ”... love being faced with problems that were not ever solved before” * ”... you hear people talking about algorithms and coding and programming languages” * ”... it was just a pleasure being interviewed by smart people and being given a lot of puzzling questions” I discussed this in a blog post I wrote which you can find here: http://mgp.github.com/2012/02/13/problems-and-products.html http://mgp.github.com/2012/02/13/problems-and-products.html I used to work at Google, and I joined there during a period when I wanted to work on interesting (i.e. hard) problems. I left to work on interesting products.
- weego 14y ago
  Twitters open source contributions to Scala are superb and I would jump at the chance to work there based solely on that. I couldn't care less about API access restrictions compared to the effort and attention they clearly put into engineering...and honestly who would?
davewiner 14y ago
Interesting observation. It seems that Twitter might shrink into nothing eventually, and possibly then be infinitely valuable (assuming all this shrinkage makes it more valuable).
MattSayar 14y ago
Do the top-level people at Twitter not realize this? Why would they continue down this path?
- debacle 14y ago
  The money wont last forever.
  - imaffett 14y ago
    Seems like the only logical reason they are doing this is because they are in the start of an acquisition. They have to prove some type of revenue stream (ads) and restricting users to the twitter site/app will help them guarantee the made up numbers.
    - ceejayoz 14y ago
      I very much doubt Twitter is interested in an acquisition.
      - debacle 14y ago
        Why do you say that? It is likely their only out at this point. Sell the network effect, let someone else try and monetize it.
        jonknee 14y ago
        Probably because they are too big to be bought by anyone but Google and Google has already moved on.
        ceejayoz 14y ago
        Facebook already has a social network. Google already has a social network. Apple's probably not interested in running one post-Ping. Who else is going to purchase them at a price their investors - who've sunk over a billion in VC $ - wouldn't balk at?
csmattryder 14y ago
Really can't agree with where Twitter is going with their API cutoffs, a year ago, I would've sat down for an hour or two just to build in a Twitter tweeting function into whatever software I was writing. It was an easy, no fuss way of getting social media into software. Facebook caused me no end of bother, its API was (still is?) an 'it exists, and here's the calls, good luck buddy' affair. Now, I'm not sure the functions I used would pass the API ToS.
recursive 14y ago
I've heard a lot about twitter's support for third party apps. I have never encountered one of these apps myself. When I see quotes like "the world of third-party developers", it suggests that there is a large number of applications somewhere that I'm missing. What are these apps?
- gavinlynch 14y ago
  I'm with you. And as both a consumer of Twitter using various clients, and as an implementer of Twitter-based services in production applications: Their recent API changes have had absolutely zero impact on me. shrugs
- dustyreagan 14y ago
  TwitPic, TweetDeck, Klout, Twitter's own iPhone app was once Tweetie (a 3rd party app), Hootsuite, Favstar, here's some more http://socialmediatoday.com/node/295232 http://socialmediatoday.com/node/295232
patrickaljord 14y ago
Twitter already said that most people access Twitter through their web ui and mobile apps. So even if they were shutting their whole API down, it wouldn't have such a negative effect on their usage growth. The only thing that's happening is that devs won't be able to build toys around Twitter, but Twitter doesn't care as most people don't use nor need these toys. Some of us devs just have to admit that we are not that important to the success of Twitter, at least, not anymore. It's also not a charity so they need to make money somewhere, I don't really see the problem here.
- gatordan 14y ago
  Does anyone know the actual percentage of users that access Twitter through third party client applications? And what users are currently getting out of these apps that would make them annoyed enough to quit the service if they were forced to switch to Twitter's app/web interface? My gut reaction is to agree with you that the Hacker community is overreacting to getting screwed over and that Twitter will go on fine without us. But without any facts about how popular and widely used these third party apps are, my opinion is really just a guess.
  - ChiperSoft 14y ago
    This is just my own testimony, but there are numerous features in tweet bot which Twitters own app doesn't even attempt to provide. Such as conversation threading in both directions (twitter only let's you see In Reply To). The app is also quite a bit more polished and better behaved (Twitter Mac triggers my discrete gpu, Tweetbot doesn't). Twitter Mac doesn't even support gestures. As for the website... Twitter loses all its value to me if I have to open a browser every time I want to read content.
- bittermang 14y ago
  "Twitter already said that most people access Twitter through their web ui and mobile apps." My problem with this stance is the same problem I have with so called "browser share". I am not beholden to a single interface. I'm human. I'm dynamic. I move and change. That means sometimes I use the website. Sometimes I use the mobile app. Sometimes I embed Tweets on a website. Sometimes I use a website's embedded tweets to follow them instead of following them on Twitter. I send photos and tweets from apps, and I consume tweets from multiple sources. Twitter is almost as ubiquitous as water for me, the ways I consume and use it in my day to day. There is no single one size fits all interface to Twitter in my workflow, only Twitter the service. Because if there were, if I had to go to the website and only the website, or the app and only the app, I wouldn't use it. I don't use things that get in my way. You either fit into my workflow, or you don't. And I'll miss the Mac OS desktop client if the rumors are true, because the website doesn't have a simple way to switch between multiple Twitter identities if I'm running a personal Twitter, a brand Twitter. And also because they bought Tweetie only to, eventually, kill it. But we've had this discussion before.
hiddenstage 14y ago
Twitter is evolving into a media conglomerate rather than a social tool. Too soon to tell which will be more valuable in the long run.
smacktoward 14y ago
Dusk approaches when Twitter sheds its desire to leave a mark on humanity Look, I understand the sentiment, but here's the thing. Twitter only exists as we know it today because a lot of people have poured a lot of money into it. Without that money, Twitter would be an impossibility. It simply would not exist, at least not at anywhere near the scale it exists at today. My guess is that, for the people who poured in all that money, "leaving a mark on humanity" was not the primary reason they opened their wallets. They opened their wallets because they expected to make more money by doing so. They were making investments, not charitable contributions. And at some increasingly near point, those people are going to want to see a return on their investments. That means that, barring an acquisition, Twitter needs to find a way to turn a (hopefully large, from the investors' viewpoint) profit -- and sooner rather than later. Why would you ever have thought things would be otherwise? Twitter is a company. Companies that don't make money usually don't survive. The best case scenario is that they get bought out and operated as a vanity project by a deep-pocketed patron, the way a lot of magazines are. But a magazine is a much smaller and cheaper-to-run enterprise than a centralized, global real-time communications network. Whose pockets are deep enough to run Twitter at a loss indefinitely? If you organize yourself as a for-profit corporation, and take on investors, at some point you have to bring in more money than you burn. Otherwise you will at some point have to scale back your ambitions, because you simply will not be able to afford them anymore. Twitter, in other words, is meeting its destiny. Maybe that destiny is not to make as big a "mark on humanity" as people wish. But without all the money they took from those investors who are breathing down their necks now, Twitter would never have been able to scale up to where it is today at all. And that money came with the condition that Twitter would at some point figure out a way to pay it back, with interest. That point is now.
- shazow 14y ago
  I completely agree with everything you've written except your "but here's the thing" should have been an "and here's the thing". We're all on the same page here. Yes, that's reality. Yes, it's unfortunate and we wish it wasn't so. I love Twitter the medium. I wish Twitter the company would find a way to monetize without taking this route. I like to think that I would have done something different in their position, but who knows.
- 14y ago
rblion 14y ago
Facebook is the Jurassic Park of startups. Founded by a hacker-idealist who wanted to bring people and technology together like never before. The experiment worked wonderfully at first as millions of people flocked to Facebook's revolutionary platform from around the world. Soon, questions of profitability came into the picture, forcing executives to compromise ethics for additional revenue. Chaos erupted and millions began to question their loyalty and wonder about their safety/privacy. Over time, the platform has become overgrown with ads (that are rarely clicked), spam (that embarrasses it's victims), and scandals (that frighten even the most loyal users). Fear of extinction due to unexpected competition has pushed Facebook to become even more aggressive by inflating the value of the company to astronomical proportions, acquihiring dozens of startups, and raising billions in an IPO. Today, the future of Facebook is in the air. No one knows how the variables will compound and what this corporate gene sequence will evolve into...
- MartinCron 14y ago
  It's a good story, but I think you're remembering both the plot details and the themes of Jurassic Park differently than I am.
  - rblion 14y ago
    I perceived inGen trying to re-create complex organisms and arrange them into a simple system, and not being prepared when the consequences of chaos unfolded. I love the movie but it leaves out much of the discussion of complexity and chaos found in the book. You ever read the books?
    - MartinCron 14y ago
      I actually just re-read the book with my son. It holds up really well considering it's age. The complexity and chaos stuff maps, I just don't see the parallel between the idealistic Zuck wanting to change the world and inGen trying to make a dinosaur theme park.
      - 14y ago
lucian303 14y ago
That's hilarious. Great sarcasm!
joejohnson 14y ago
From the comments on Google+: "Very true. Along the same lines, Google+ is the Major League Soccer of social networks. Other countries have very successful soccer leagues that happened organically. The US tried to manufacture a soccer league, and it spent a ton of money in doing so. It so happens that the most talented athletes in the country prefer sports that are already popular. The most interesting people in the league are has-beens from Europe. Still, nothing wrong with being the fifth or sixth most popular sport in the country." -Diego Basch
- cdelsolar 14y ago
  Third, actually: http://bleacherreport.com/articles/1290390-nba-and-nhl-get-the-boot-mls-is-the-3rd-most-attended-sports-league-in-america http://bleacherreport.com/articles/1290390-nba-and-nhl-get-t...
  - sureshv 14y ago
    That's an absurd report considering that NBA/NHL arenas hold about 18-20k people max while most MLS games are played in Football stadiums that can hold 65k+. The fact that MLS still barely wins in attendance per game is pretty sad.
    - Evbn 14y ago
      And that TV audience for NHL is 20x MLS.
      - streptomycin 14y ago
        And that TV audience for the NBA is a few times greater than even the NHL.
    - jdminhbg 14y ago
      You are very wrong about where MLS games are played: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Major_League_Soccer_stadiums http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Major_League_Soccer_sta...
nameiscarl 14y ago
Twitter is the batman trilogy of startups. It took an old idea and make it new and relevant again. In the second movement, it went huge and was the new sensation. The conclusion of the story will be bland and all over the place. With pundits failing to see that the emperor has no clothes.
miratom 14y ago
How to reach #1 on Hacker News. Point out something obvious about a popular tech company, but use a catchy pop-culture idiom.
gumbo 14y ago
Who remenber Color raising 41M for craps? I remember back then someone saying: "They invested in the team, that still make me laugh. They funded smart people, now they have enought cash to build something that will make money". I'm looking forward to seing this. Twitter is such a disapointment for me and i'm looking forward too to see their first profitable year.
rsanchez1 14y ago
I wonder what would happen if Twitter decided to charge people to use their service...

218 points by hyfen 14y ago

I suppose I understand what all the angst about Twitter relates, but personally I don't really care. I have always used Twitter as a way to get updates from people and places that I am interested in and as long as they continue to provide that function I will keep using their service. Make that hard to do however and all bets are off.

ThomPete 14y ago

Only problem. Twitter was originally thought of as a small family/close friends network.

ardillamorris 14y ago

is it? or maybe, unlike other startups, Twitter is willing to make the changes necessary to adjust course and reinvent itself? Google cut Buzz and Wave. They were both great initiatives that never took off. You can't throw good money after bad money. I think developers are important but the users experience is paramount and if to maintain that they need to adjust their service, so be it.

therealarmen 14y ago

I wonder what impact all this Twitter-hate is having on Twitter's HR department. I say this because I don't think shutting off third-party clients will hurt the company that much. If it makes it difficult to attract the best talent, that's a different story. Look at what happened to Y! over the last decade.

themckman 14y ago
They still have huge engineering challenges and as long as that's true they're going to be able to find people willing and interested.
- akkartik 14y ago
  If you think all hiring requires is a 'challenge' I have a bridge to sell you.
  - blhack 14y ago
    Excuse me? My hacker friends and I have all discussed this at length and agreed that the largest motivator for us is working on hard problems. This is how some of us justify working for the military; they offer really tough problems to solve. Twitter is the same; if twitter offered me a job, I would practically move to the bay and live out of my jeep to do it.
    - akkartik 14y ago
      I'll agree to disagree on 'largest'[1]. But there's a huge difference between 'largest' and 'only'. Which is what grandparent implied. [1] I lied. I can't sell you a bridge because I suck at it. But somebody will. To you and your friends. Let's talk again in 10 years. Sigh, when did I get so cynical? Then again, it's not cynical to see the feedback loops between who you work with and what you work on and the million other seemingly minor details that go into liking what you do. Yeah, maybe I'm ok. The comparison to suckers is entirely unfair; for that I apologize. It's just the circle of life.
    - lovskogen 14y ago
      Which hard problem at Twitter would you love to work on?
    - ececconi 14y ago
      The toughest problem that they need to learn how to solve is how to make that $$.
    - shadowmatter 14y ago
      I think there's a faction of engineers who want to work on interesting (which can be hard) problems, and those who want to work on interesting products. I believe this is demonstrated clearly by the jobs pages for both Apple and Google. From Apple: * Every detail matters… It matters all of the time. That’s how we do things at Apple. The result is some of the best-loved products in the world. * Simplicity isn’t simple... It means rethinking every customer experience until the clutter has fallen away — until all that remains is what’s essential, useful, and beautiful. That might be a new product feature that delights even die-hard fans. From Google, specifically an interview with Google employees about work there: * ”... love to work on challenging projects” * ”... love being faced with problems that were not ever solved before” * ”... you hear people talking about algorithms and coding and programming languages” * ”... it was just a pleasure being interviewed by smart people and being given a lot of puzzling questions” I discussed this in a blog post I wrote which you can find here: http://mgp.github.com/2012/02/13/problems-and-products.html http://mgp.github.com/2012/02/13/problems-and-products.html I used to work at Google, and I joined there during a period when I wanted to work on interesting (i.e. hard) problems. I left to work on interesting products.
weego 14y ago
Twitters open source contributions to Scala are superb and I would jump at the chance to work there based solely on that. I couldn't care less about API access restrictions compared to the effort and attention they clearly put into engineering...and honestly who would?

davewiner 14y ago

Interesting observation. It seems that Twitter might shrink into nothing eventually, and possibly then be infinitely valuable (assuming all this shrinkage makes it more valuable).

MattSayar 14y ago

Do the top-level people at Twitter not realize this? Why would they continue down this path?

debacle 14y ago
The money wont last forever.
- imaffett 14y ago
  Seems like the only logical reason they are doing this is because they are in the start of an acquisition. They have to prove some type of revenue stream (ads) and restricting users to the twitter site/app will help them guarantee the made up numbers.
  - ceejayoz 14y ago
    I very much doubt Twitter is interested in an acquisition.
    - debacle 14y ago
      Why do you say that? It is likely their only out at this point. Sell the network effect, let someone else try and monetize it.
      - jonknee 14y ago
        Probably because they are too big to be bought by anyone but Google and Google has already moved on.
      - ceejayoz 14y ago
        Facebook already has a social network. Google already has a social network. Apple's probably not interested in running one post-Ping. Who else is going to purchase them at a price their investors - who've sunk over a billion in VC $ - wouldn't balk at?

csmattryder 14y ago

Really can't agree with where Twitter is going with their API cutoffs, a year ago, I would've sat down for an hour or two just to build in a Twitter tweeting function into whatever software I was writing. It was an easy, no fuss way of getting social media into software. Facebook caused me no end of bother, its API was (still is?) an 'it exists, and here's the calls, good luck buddy' affair. Now, I'm not sure the functions I used would pass the API ToS.

recursive 14y ago

I've heard a lot about twitter's support for third party apps. I have never encountered one of these apps myself. When I see quotes like "the world of third-party developers", it suggests that there is a large number of applications somewhere that I'm missing. What are these apps?

gavinlynch 14y ago
I'm with you. And as both a consumer of Twitter using various clients, and as an implementer of Twitter-based services in production applications: Their recent API changes have had absolutely zero impact on me. shrugs
dustyreagan 14y ago
TwitPic, TweetDeck, Klout, Twitter's own iPhone app was once Tweetie (a 3rd party app), Hootsuite, Favstar, here's some more http://socialmediatoday.com/node/295232 http://socialmediatoday.com/node/295232

patrickaljord 14y ago

Twitter already said that most people access Twitter through their web ui and mobile apps. So even if they were shutting their whole API down, it wouldn't have such a negative effect on their usage growth. The only thing that's happening is that devs won't be able to build toys around Twitter, but Twitter doesn't care as most people don't use nor need these toys. Some of us devs just have to admit that we are not that important to the success of Twitter, at least, not anymore. It's also not a charity so they need to make money somewhere, I don't really see the problem here.

gatordan 14y ago
Does anyone know the actual percentage of users that access Twitter through third party client applications? And what users are currently getting out of these apps that would make them annoyed enough to quit the service if they were forced to switch to Twitter's app/web interface? My gut reaction is to agree with you that the Hacker community is overreacting to getting screwed over and that Twitter will go on fine without us. But without any facts about how popular and widely used these third party apps are, my opinion is really just a guess.
- ChiperSoft 14y ago
  This is just my own testimony, but there are numerous features in tweet bot which Twitters own app doesn't even attempt to provide. Such as conversation threading in both directions (twitter only let's you see In Reply To). The app is also quite a bit more polished and better behaved (Twitter Mac triggers my discrete gpu, Tweetbot doesn't). Twitter Mac doesn't even support gestures. As for the website... Twitter loses all its value to me if I have to open a browser every time I want to read content.
bittermang 14y ago
"Twitter already said that most people access Twitter through their web ui and mobile apps." My problem with this stance is the same problem I have with so called "browser share". I am not beholden to a single interface. I'm human. I'm dynamic. I move and change. That means sometimes I use the website. Sometimes I use the mobile app. Sometimes I embed Tweets on a website. Sometimes I use a website's embedded tweets to follow them instead of following them on Twitter. I send photos and tweets from apps, and I consume tweets from multiple sources. Twitter is almost as ubiquitous as water for me, the ways I consume and use it in my day to day. There is no single one size fits all interface to Twitter in my workflow, only Twitter the service. Because if there were, if I had to go to the website and only the website, or the app and only the app, I wouldn't use it. I don't use things that get in my way. You either fit into my workflow, or you don't. And I'll miss the Mac OS desktop client if the rumors are true, because the website doesn't have a simple way to switch between multiple Twitter identities if I'm running a personal Twitter, a brand Twitter. And also because they bought Tweetie only to, eventually, kill it. But we've had this discussion before.

hiddenstage 14y ago

Twitter is evolving into a media conglomerate rather than a social tool. Too soon to tell which will be more valuable in the long run.

smacktoward 14y ago

Dusk approaches when Twitter sheds its desire to leave a mark on humanity Look, I understand the sentiment, but here's the thing. Twitter only exists as we know it today because a lot of people have poured a lot of money into it. Without that money, Twitter would be an impossibility. It simply would not exist, at least not at anywhere near the scale it exists at today. My guess is that, for the people who poured in all that money, "leaving a mark on humanity" was not the primary reason they opened their wallets. They opened their wallets because they expected to make more money by doing so. They were making investments, not charitable contributions. And at some increasingly near point, those people are going to want to see a return on their investments. That means that, barring an acquisition, Twitter needs to find a way to turn a (hopefully large, from the investors' viewpoint) profit -- and sooner rather than later. Why would you ever have thought things would be otherwise? Twitter is a company. Companies that don't make money usually don't survive. The best case scenario is that they get bought out and operated as a vanity project by a deep-pocketed patron, the way a lot of magazines are. But a magazine is a much smaller and cheaper-to-run enterprise than a centralized, global real-time communications network. Whose pockets are deep enough to run Twitter at a loss indefinitely? If you organize yourself as a for-profit corporation, and take on investors, at some point you have to bring in more money than you burn. Otherwise you will at some point have to scale back your ambitions, because you simply will not be able to afford them anymore. Twitter, in other words, is meeting its destiny. Maybe that destiny is not to make as big a "mark on humanity" as people wish. But without all the money they took from those investors who are breathing down their necks now, Twitter would never have been able to scale up to where it is today at all. And that money came with the condition that Twitter would at some point figure out a way to pay it back, with interest. That point is now.

shazow 14y ago
I completely agree with everything you've written except your "but here's the thing" should have been an "and here's the thing". We're all on the same page here. Yes, that's reality. Yes, it's unfortunate and we wish it wasn't so. I love Twitter the medium. I wish Twitter the company would find a way to monetize without taking this route. I like to think that I would have done something different in their position, but who knows.
14y ago

rblion 14y ago

Facebook is the Jurassic Park of startups. Founded by a hacker-idealist who wanted to bring people and technology together like never before. The experiment worked wonderfully at first as millions of people flocked to Facebook's revolutionary platform from around the world. Soon, questions of profitability came into the picture, forcing executives to compromise ethics for additional revenue. Chaos erupted and millions began to question their loyalty and wonder about their safety/privacy. Over time, the platform has become overgrown with ads (that are rarely clicked), spam (that embarrasses it's victims), and scandals (that frighten even the most loyal users). Fear of extinction due to unexpected competition has pushed Facebook to become even more aggressive by inflating the value of the company to astronomical proportions, acquihiring dozens of startups, and raising billions in an IPO. Today, the future of Facebook is in the air. No one knows how the variables will compound and what this corporate gene sequence will evolve into...

MartinCron 14y ago
It's a good story, but I think you're remembering both the plot details and the themes of Jurassic Park differently than I am.
- rblion 14y ago
  I perceived inGen trying to re-create complex organisms and arrange them into a simple system, and not being prepared when the consequences of chaos unfolded. I love the movie but it leaves out much of the discussion of complexity and chaos found in the book. You ever read the books?
  - MartinCron 14y ago
    I actually just re-read the book with my son. It holds up really well considering it's age. The complexity and chaos stuff maps, I just don't see the parallel between the idealistic Zuck wanting to change the world and inGen trying to make a dinosaur theme park.
    - 14y ago

lucian303 14y ago

That's hilarious. Great sarcasm!

joejohnson 14y ago

From the comments on Google+: "Very true. Along the same lines, Google+ is the Major League Soccer of social networks. Other countries have very successful soccer leagues that happened organically. The US tried to manufacture a soccer league, and it spent a ton of money in doing so. It so happens that the most talented athletes in the country prefer sports that are already popular. The most interesting people in the league are has-beens from Europe. Still, nothing wrong with being the fifth or sixth most popular sport in the country." -Diego Basch

cdelsolar 14y ago
Third, actually: http://bleacherreport.com/articles/1290390-nba-and-nhl-get-the-boot-mls-is-the-3rd-most-attended-sports-league-in-america http://bleacherreport.com/articles/1290390-nba-and-nhl-get-t...
- sureshv 14y ago
  That's an absurd report considering that NBA/NHL arenas hold about 18-20k people max while most MLS games are played in Football stadiums that can hold 65k+. The fact that MLS still barely wins in attendance per game is pretty sad.
  - Evbn 14y ago
    And that TV audience for NHL is 20x MLS.
    - streptomycin 14y ago
      And that TV audience for the NBA is a few times greater than even the NHL.
  - jdminhbg 14y ago
    You are very wrong about where MLS games are played: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Major_League_Soccer_stadiums http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Major_League_Soccer_sta...

nameiscarl 14y ago

Twitter is the batman trilogy of startups. It took an old idea and make it new and relevant again. In the second movement, it went huge and was the new sensation. The conclusion of the story will be bland and all over the place. With pundits failing to see that the emperor has no clothes.

miratom 14y ago

How to reach #1 on Hacker News. Point out something obvious about a popular tech company, but use a catchy pop-culture idiom.

gumbo 14y ago

Who remenber Color raising 41M for craps? I remember back then someone saying: "They invested in the team, that still make me laugh. They funded smart people, now they have enought cash to build something that will make money". I'm looking forward to seing this. Twitter is such a disapointment for me and i'm looking forward too to see their first profitable year.

rsanchez1 14y ago

I wonder what would happen if Twitter decided to charge people to use their service...