I'm inclined to agree. I originally planned to not invest in Twitter until the lockup expiration next week, but tossed in a bit of money in November of last year. My investment increased by about 50% until a couple weeks ago when it ended up in negative territory. On the off chance that Twitter's last quarterly earnings ended up being awesome, I bought another chunk of stock on the afternoon before they reported. It immediately went down 10%, and so I bought some more.
I'm now excitedly looking forward to getting to triple(?) down on my investment with the lockup expiration on the 6th. Call Twitter a social network, or whatever you feel like. I think it's essentially part of the fabric of the Internet today, and far less replaceable than something like Facebook, despite the significantly smaller user base. I'm bullish—and very long—on TWTR.
I think I disagree. Twitter's economic moat seems very narrow. From a user's perspective it's just a pub/sub messaging system. Facebook has a much deeper set of features. It feels very much like Twitter can be replaced by a decentralized, open alternative if executed well. If Twitter's ads start to get annoying enough, or the network itself becomes full of trash, people will be ready for an alternative at some point. (And in general, these types of networked messaging services fall in and out of favor every 5-7 years or so it seems.) I don't think the same holds true for Facebook (which has been tried before and failed.)
But I look at something like the bitcoin blockchain and wonder if that concept is just a few conceptual degrees from something that could replace the twitter stream. In 5-10 years will we be using twitter or will all devices just have a way to broadcast out into the ether, with a 'distributed ledger' of messages maintained by agents on the network?
I'm almost certain there is someone tooling away on this right now, the question is will they be able to make it accessible and easy to migrate onto from twitter.
Very unlikely to happen. Traction is such a huge factor why people use social networks that outweighs all the features such as ad-free or better usability by the amount of 10 probably.
Twitter needs to f up big time to lose its current popularity.
I think it's essentially part of the fabric of the Internet today, and far less replaceable than something like Facebook
There are many examples of communication mediums getting abandoned suddenly and rapidly on the internet, just off the top of my head there's BBSes, ICQ & MSN Messenger. Even email to an extent, I get much less personal email than I used to and it seems to be much less common for young people to have their own email address.
What people use to talk on the internet seems to be an incredibly faddish thing.
That's true, but the point the article makes is that Twitter is not primarily a tool for talking to people you already know, but instead for publishers/content creators to broadcast their material. These sorts of things change much less frequently: I never got an ICQ message from the New York Times, but I sure get a lot of tweets from them.
You probably know this already, but I would be extremely wary of playing "active investor" with anything greater than 5-10% of my total portfolio.
I look at it this way: even if you believe it is possible to beat an index consistently through active management (which I don't), you're unlikely to do it without spending 80+ hours/wk focusing on it like the pros do.
I disagree. Most of the pros are pros at finance, but not in the industries they actually invest in. By having expertise in a particular industry, you may be able to recognize disconnects between most pros and reality. Case in point, if you recognized that traditional hard drives weren't really going to be displaced by SSD's back in 2011, and saw the major players start to consolidate through M&A thus reducing competition, and bought Seagate and Western Digital stocks then at mid single digit P/E's, you'd have done pretty well with a 3-4x return in as many years. All the pros seem to love these stocks now, but certainly didn't back then. Now that may have been an extreme case, but a clear example of how financial analysts speculate based on very shallow understanding of the companies they make bold predictions about. Any time they get it wrong, which is not uncommon, there is an investment opportunity. Perusing financial news of the industries you have expertise in for a few minutes a day is sufficient for spotting such opportunities. Or to look at it a another way, consider the 80 hours a week you already put into your own industry as investment research.
With that said, it's good to mix in some fundamentals with your contrarianism to reduce risk, and investing in companies that are actually making money. Twitter is not one of these companies. That's not to say that I'm bearish on Twitter, I just think it's far too risky to invest in or against given that its price is more affected by rampant speculation than economic realities.
I'm inclined to disagree, simply because the social media reach being talked about has everything to do with people using Twitter and nothing to do with how Twitter will make money...
If you think Google is immediate purchase advertising, facebook is friend recommendation and branding advertising what is the purpose of advertising on twitter at the moment....
Any marketing with no directly quantifiable benefit is called branding. It allows big advertising managers to support their favourite sport without fear....
I'm now excitedly looking forward to getting to triple(?) down on my investment with the lockup expiration on the 6th. Call Twitter a social network, or whatever you feel like. I think it's essentially part of the fabric of the Internet today, and far less replaceable than something like Facebook, despite the significantly smaller user base. I'm bullish—and very long—on TWTR.