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Twitter is often held up as a darling of startups, but they don't act very startup-like. They move very very slowly and seem very risk averse. Twitter is extre
by gruseom 17y ago
Twitter is often held up as a darling of startups, but they don't act very startup-like. They move very very slowly and seem very risk averse.
Twitter is extremely startup-like in one critical respect: their attention to how the community is using their product. That's how they became huge. It's the fact that they became huge by focusing on this while others who happened upon the same space did not do this, and thus did not become huge, that wins them respect in the startup realm. Much of what you call their risk-averseness comes from this desire to follow rather than force their users. It's a lesson many of us would do well to learn and, I suspect, one of those things that is far deeper than appears on first sight.
- axod 17y ago>> "Much of what you call their risk-averseness comes from this desire to follow rather than force their users. It's a lesson many of us would do well to learn and, I suspect, one of those things that is far deeper than appears on first sight." It'll be interesting to see how well that works when/if they try to monetize those users.
- whopa 17y agoFacebook is in the same space as Twitter, but is bigger than Twitter. Why does Twitter deserve more respect than Facebook? Twitter is entirely unproven. It's a big mystery what Twitter's actual user engagement numbers are, so nobody really knows how sticky the site is. How do you know Twitter's approach is working? It seems entirely too premature to say. Honestly to me it seems like either Twitter's user engagement numbers are really bad, which is why Twitter doesn't talk about them, or Twitter's analytics are so poor that they don't know how their users behave, which doesn't really reflect well on them either.