I find Twitter and it's user base incredibly interesting. On the one hand it's portrayed as an "Everyone" product. There's no reason you or your friend Bill or your boss or your Grandma couldn't use it. Because of that people have historically signed up in droves and it's valuation has increased.
In reality though (and this is entirely anecdotal), Twitter isn't something that everyone can use. A lot of people find it difficult to figure out what they should say, how to keep track of who they follow and simply how to engage with it. It isn't that everyone product. You do still have an enormous community of people though that use it frequently and keenly and recently their monetization offering (advertising platform) has become far more impressive.
I would guess then that the valuation and share price has to come down a bit (which this is a signal of) to reflect the change from an "Everyone" (Facebook, Google, Amazon) offering to "Quite a Lot of People" (Pinterest, Tumblr etc) product.
Yea, I know it's a really tired subject, but twitter really needs a major overhaul from a usability perspective. I think they should keep the 140 characters as a limit for what is shown in peoples feeds, but the character limit should be much higher. This is particularly important when you get into a conversation with many people, and the handles start taking up most of your 140 characters (as Marc Andreessen recently pointed out). It's also really hard to follow conversations, and they get separated somewhat arbitrarily. You might scoff and say that this would basically facebook-ize twitter, but honestly I don't think that's a bad thing. Facebook is moving into twitter's space, so twitter shouldn't be be so slow to act or it will get eaten, IMHO.
Also, I use twitter to keep up to date on some of the industries I'm interested in, and while it's a great tool it's still frustrating sometimes, since there is a flood of info throughout the day. TweetDeck makes it better since I can group things by interest and triage depending on how much time I have. I guess you can do that with the web interface but I have never found it as natural as with Tweetdeck.
In similar lines here are my observations as a heavy business and personal user:
1. 140chars limit had a goal and philosophy which conflicts now with image attachment flood. Most "interesting" content is typed or pictured in the attachment and the 140char limit is simply worked around
2. Twitter UI is too clunky for what it does. No progress since 7 years I'm using it.
3. Twitter mobile apps don't work properly when mobile. You can't favorite, retweet or comment properly while in an unreachable zone. My 2008 hobby Android 1.1 app has a local queue to cope with remote updates, inserts and Twitter can't implement this?
4. Families aren't on Twitter. Friends to a certain degree. Colleagues to a certain degree. Celebrities/followers yes. Gamers no. Protestors yes.
5. Facebook, LinkedIn implemented the "follow" feature quite successfully.
> Twitter UI is too clunky for what it does. No progress since 7 years I'm using it.
This. A million times this. I don't understand Twitter. I don't get what the hell they're thinking of, when they release (for example) the horrific design that is the Twitter desktop and Mobile apps. An incredibly common use case is to have more than one twitter account and switch between them. Go try it.
A bunch of people brought out superior apps, and Twitter just killed them.
If this is representative of the thinking going on at Twitter, they are (deservedly) doomed.
Twitter has what can be described as the organizational version of ADHD. They've had several changes of leadership and have had leaders who were primarily focused on other companies while guiding twitter. Jack Dorsey is an impressive person but do you think he could really give his full attention to Twitter while running Square?
The churn at the top is the best explanation I can find for some of the policy reversals we've seen (3rd party clients in, out, in again maybe sort of) and the somewhat random approach to business strategy. Twitter's core audience is a very desirable demographic but not one that's really going to react to in-stream adds at all positively. But twitter doesn't do some of the clever things it could with the firehose; and certainly doesn't use it to create secondary products that would be useful enough that businesses would pay for them.
I use Tweetbot on both platforms, but I don't think its implementation is good. Good to me would be a merged feed with tweets and mentions from all accounts, analogous to what I can do with email, IRC, instant messaging, etc.; maybe not the best for opsec, but more convenient for casual purposes than having to constantly switch between accounts.
> 140chars limit had a goal and philosophy which conflicts now with image attachment flood.
Sidenote, I always thought the goal and philosophy was invented after of the the technical limitation, which was that a tweet needed to fit into an SMS.
Agreed. I'm not a heavy Twitter user, but I'm not sure it's a good philosophy to force users to revise and revise until they get something unnaturally terse enough, after sacrificing precious space to ancillary items (at-mentions, or even hashtags) they can't necessarily control the length of.
I can see value in brevity, but when it's forced, it may actually impede communication. It gets hacked around anyways, with multi-part tweets, even by Twitter's own developer account[0]. At the least, there are tweet clusters, where each individual tweet may be a complete sentence but doesn't effectively convey the entirety of what the author meant, without reading the surrounding tweets (in reverse order, of course.) At those points, it would be saner to abandon the limit. Or maybe treat it as a one-way linkblog to other places for discussion.
Counting @mentions in the limit also 'punishes' people with longer names.
But I guess if you didn't count @mentions in the limit you'd find people adding lots of people to a conversation in a spammy way. I'm not really sure how to fix that.
Perhaps there could be a meta-@mention that would include all previous recipients in a given conversation. But then how do you remove people from a conversation? Arggggh!
(Still, i've only thought about this for 2 minutes. I'm sure there's a way that makes sense if you spent more than 10 minutes working it through.)
You could treat the conversation as an endpoint that users have the option to subscribe to, and the @mentions as invitations.
From there you could also offer to exclude uninvited users from the conversation (maybe it is clearer to say, limit postings to the conversation view to people that have been @mentioned).
>But I guess if you didn't count @mentions in the limit you'd find people adding lots of people to a conversation in a spammy way. I'm not really sure how to fix that.
Simple: cap the number of @mentions in a tweet at 5, or at 120 characters total.
Same for #tags — limit those to 5 or a total number of characters.
Yeah, that. Leading @mentions and trailing hashtags shouldn't count as part of the limit. If you still want to support SMS, just strip those, the reader doesn't need them.
I think the reason why Twitter is not an "everyone" product (even though it's marketed as such) is not the interface, but something way more essential: most people simply have no use for it.
Twitter is good for people who are not only interested in constantly sharing their thoughts, but also have something interesting to say, otherwise they'd find no audience. In addition, they must be good at doing it in 140 characters. Even the ones who are strictly consumers on Twitter fit a niche - they're usually interested in some subject X which is tweeted about by certain people of note.
My grandma doesn't have witty things to say all day, and any interest she might have on what other people say is supplied by Facebook. There is no way she'd ever do anything on Twitter besides signing up and immediately forgetting about it. The best UX in the world couldn't save Twitter for her.
Twitter was able to find an active userbase because even if only 1% of people find it useful, that's plenty of people if you consider the human population. But it should never be seen as something that is useful for people in general. Regular people sign up because of marketing, but they never stay.
* Broadcasting the location of food trucks, or specials at a restaurant, or sudden openings at Alinea, &c
* Staying connected to broad but specific peer groups, like "everyone who does software security"
* Announcing and promoting content; specific example: getting a specific group of people to read a blog post
Facebook is good at very few of these things. Twitter is like a more efficient, more far-reaching version of the Facebook news feed; Facebook is a more intimate and conversational version of Twitter.
There has always been a weird rap on Twitter's lack of use cases, despite the fact that lots of people seem to find ways to use it effectively. A couple years ago, the rap was that the only reason to join Twitter was to follow celebrities. Nobody says that anymore; now it's "the only reason to join Twitter is if you're an extravert". Well, celebrities are 0.00001% of humanity, and extraverts are about half of it, so I'd say Twitter is making progress.
I know a couple people who use Twitter as a personal "online diary"; like a microblog. Nobody knows who they are; they post anonymously and are not connected with no one that knows them. These people are also, frankly, not very technology literate, because, though they try to hide themselves, they don't realise their social media apps are linked to their phone number and emails and some phones send this info to other phones.
tptacek: Yeah, it still kind of works but not the way it used to. I've noticed that in the past year or so they started to heavily filter their "public firehose"; before I was used to see 100s of new tweets per second around a major event (which was fantastic), while now I only get a few of them. The thing is that when the event it's not that big (i.e. a local event in your neighborhood) that filter makes you lose some pretty valuable info.
Could've fooled me. I'm still getting crime-beat photojournalism from Chicago reporters that's 10x faster than the Trib, and world-wide coverage that's both faster and much better than CNN, in a format that I can actually keep up with.
I think you've hit the nail on the head. Twitter's UX is painful, but that's really only the half of it. The real issue is that Twitter, regardless of how easy it can be made to use, is inherently useful to a very small proportion of people.
I call it an "extrovert" product. I'm sure I'll catch some flak from bringing up the introvert/extrovert axis on HN (as if we don't get that topic often enough here!). But hear me out. Twitter is for people who like conferences. Twitter is for people who like stages. Twitter is for people who want to have conversations with each other, and also want the world to overhear those conversations. To me, at the other end of the spectrum, that behavior strikes me as weird. It seems painfully and willfully fake and artificial. It seems like so much peacocking, forced smiling, and posturing. It seems like "networking," in the most brutally painful sense of that word. I don't get it. I mean, I grok it, but it holds no interest for me.
As an occasional journalist, I'm often told I "have" to use Twitter. It's "part of the job" to be a "public figure" these days. I'm not interested in being a public figure. I don't begrudge people who are. If anything, I envy and admire their ability to navigate the cognitive dissonance that the Twitter private-in-public dynamic forces. But I just can't do it. It drains me. I find using Twitter to be like doing homework, or eating my vegetables. It's not fun. It's a chore. When a consumer tech product feels like a chore, I don't bother; life's too short.
Twitter is in an unfortunate situation, in that the company was forced to scale massively and go public at around the same time its true user base and use cases were emerging from the noise. Now it's in the unenviable position of having to make billions of dollars in revenue, and of having to compete with the likes of Facebook for a putative billion-something number of users (which it'll never get), when at its essence, Twitter is a restricted product. A substantial portion of the human population will never get any personal utility from using Twitter. Twitter isn't a bad product; it's just not everyone's cup of tea. I don't think there's anything Twitter can do to make me want to use it, and I don't think I'm alone in that sentiment.
I think the biggest problem with Twitter's public perception is the belief you have to tweet to use it effectively. That's not the case at all. If I could only use Twitter in "read only" mode it would still be incredibly useful.
The real trick is curating the right set of accounts to follow, which I think is the second biggest problem with Twitter's public perception: "Following" on Twitter is nothing like "Friending" on Facebook or "Linking" on LinkedIn. Users should feel no compunction about promiscuously following every account they think they might be interested in or for which they see a funny/clever/informative retweet, and guiltlessly unfollowing any account that is wasting space in their feed. But I suspect many novice Twitter users think their Twitter "social graph" should mirror their graphs in other social media, where connections are supposed to more strongly reflect real life bonds. That's a recipe for a boring feed.
Indeed it's the "read-only" customers that are the valuable ones. Advertisers don't want to reach people composing 140 character witticisms or bots spitting out links, they want to reach people who are searching for commentary on #subject, have an interest in @celebrity or @publication or are sufficiently bored/distracted to be spending time poring through semi-curated lists of links, observations and slogans that are probably lower in quality than decent branding collateral anyway.
When it comes to following, the issue which has always kept me away from Twitter is that entities and subject-oriented feeds I'd theoretically be interested in following still seem to spit out vastly more noise than signals, and enforced extreme brevity and URL shorteners don't exactly increase the efficiency of parsing the crap
"A lot of people find it difficult to figure out what they should say, how to keep track of who they follow and simply how to engage with it."
I have been using online messaging and chat since ... 1991 ?
BBS forums, irc, unix talk, MUD/MOO, ICQ, classic mailing lists and thousands of web forums.
I still find it hard to view a conversation thread on twitter.
If I see a comment that is interesting, and is obviously part of a thread or conversation, it's still non-obvious how to view that entire conversation or respond to specific parts of it in any way that resembles a thread.
Well, take the wired telephone (please!) Of course, "everyone can use it" but I bet since its invention, a few power users have made 100x as many calls per week as the average person has. They're the real benefactors. The only difference is that on Twitter you get to see who is doing this.
>recently their monetization offering (advertising platform) has become far more impressive.
I wonder whether a saturation point will be reached with regard to our willingness to view ads in general. More specifically, might this happen in a way that impacts the viability of ad-supported models that rely on the "build an audience, then ad them to death" approach?
Google Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, and others all command a great share of our attention and rely largely on the model. Youtube also seems to be showing more ads. I have also noticed that some sites which feature, say 1 minute or less news clip videos, show 15-30 second ads before each one. Personally, I have stopped using these because I find it obnoxious. I get that they need to make money, but at some point, they crossed my personal threshold.
The net is that we are more and more inundated with ads, and I wonder if the effectiveness of those ads will wane to a point where their value can no longer deliver the massive value upon which so many companies rely.
There is an interesting stickyness argument that the only reason I follow @melpa_emacs on twitter is because they won't send the data via a zillion other technically superior technologies. Why not email, RSS feed, facebook, nntp, finger protocol, status.net, IRC bot, ...
When the only reason your platform gets traffic is legacy/laziness, network effects, and random selection, you're in very big long term trouble... You need your users to be worried, saying things like "OMG if they closed I'd have no idea how to work around" not "OMG I wish they'd shut down sooner rather than later so I'd have one less app to check"
This is an insightful comment, and the takeaway discussion is: is Twitter a product for just "quite a lot of people", or can they bend it to a product for everyone?
I think what investors are looking for is a move towards a product that is for everyone. But given that Twitter's core business / USP is precisely that it is not like "everything everyone else is using", could the conclusion thus be that investors had too high an expectation of what Twitter has to offer the world?
Interesting. I had not thought about that aspect before. When I think of it, Facebook’s UI is probably a lot more easy to use for most people. And even then some still struggle :)
In October, Twitter reported a disappointing 7% fall in timeline views per user - a closely watched measure of engagement - despite a 23% growth in its user base in the third quarter.
"Despite"? Not "because of" by any chance? That would be my first thought, that they simply diluted their hardcore audience.
This is what happens when you continually base valuations on number of users, rather than, say, revenue, or profitability. Yes, a user base can be an indicator of a company with traction - but if there's no revenue, or no functioning model which will lead to revenue... the value is entirely hypothetical, and based on weak foundations.
I expect to see a lot more of this sort of thing, which will culminate in the current bubble conclusively popping. It'll only take a few more S&P announcements like this to cause a panic sell-off, at which point... let's party like it's 1999.
Twitter's valuation isn't based on users - the stock is down ~35% this year despite user growth being 22% and revenue more than doubling.
The stock is being trashed because they missed earnings.
The S&P report itself said Twitter is experiencing very strong growth and little competitive pressure. It was downgraded because Twitter are investing their cash rather than hoarding it. Bond holders want companies to hold cash. What is good for bond holders is usually different to what is good for stock holders.
The long case on Twitter is that the fundamentals are good, the company is growing like crazy and that the market is undervaluing based on earnings which mostly missed because of one-off employee option and other writedowns as well as reinvestment.
> The long case on Twitter is that the fundamentals are good.
I'm not sure I agree with that statement. They've got a lot of users, many of which love the service, but as a business the fundamentals are far from sound. I'm yet to be convinced that paid advertising is a model that will work on Twitter, and I can't really see any other model beyond persuading people to pay to hide the adverts (which destroys their advertiser base).
Twitter started as a hobby side project to communicate between a few friends, not a business, and you can see that in everything they do.
Well it is also the difference between bonds and equities. You might value a company on users if you think it could monetise them down the line for equities as you will share in that.
Bonds however just rely on the company having cashflow to pay the interest and then repay the capital. Number of users, future profit etc are much less meaningful compared to whether you will get your money back as promised.
It's not hypothetical. Twitter has significant revenue. When revenue is generated from eyeballs (ads), then yes, number of users and engagement is a valuable metric (yet not the only one).
This may or may not directly apply to twitter, but I really don't understand how unprofitable companies with no direct revenue model get such large valuations based on: number of users, and "potential" to profit from advertising.
Snapchat? Tinder? Twitter? Quora? Tumblr? Etc.
It seems like these are the companies that are viewed as prestigious and noteworthy by the media and startup community. Everybody wants to be the company that gets a massive funding from VC and millions of users. But all of these companies still have yet to prove they can really do it.
The only returns for investors so far is based on the fact that the theoretical valuation keeps going up, and it's self perpetuating. At what point are investors going to expect real earnings to justify the valuation?
Nobody (or very few people) seems to want to solve a real problem, or offer a really useful product that people are actually willing to pay for.
Everybody just wants to get a million users, get a bunch of money from investors, and cross your fingers that maybe one day you can figure out how to actually make the thing profitable. And if it doesn't work out? Well it's somebody else's problem right?
It's sort of funny that, as long as the investor community all agree on $X valuation -- you NEVER need to make a single dollar in profit because the next guy in line will cover your "loss." Or finally some giant will buy you out to acquihire or get rid of competition.
Probably sounds like I'm just a hater and ranting, but just my 2 cents.
Twitter solves a "real problem". Relatively convenient 1:N communication, where N is the number of twitter users and at the same time a method to selectively subscribe to some of those messages by certain criteria (hashtags, selection of users). There is a reason why Television channels love Twitter, it has essentially the same characteristics as traditional broadcast television, plus some form of interactive feedback. That the system is centralised and has few message types is purely coincidental.
The math goes something like 'expected customer lifetime value * number of customers'. Where the lifetime value is based on either some base assumptions about conversion to a premium product or some base assumptions about what they feel they can make of their users in terms of ad impressions or some other relatively low yield income stream. If this yields a huge number then everybody is happy.
This is further inflated by exits such as whatsapp and instagram, after all if they are worth that much then surely this other non-related product will be worth at least as much or more.
In the end, valuations have a pretty high random component and the perceived market can push that up or down tremendously.
Who even knows what drove this company to issue a warning like this, maybe one of their bigger customers is planning a take-over bid. It wouldn't be the first time something like that happened either.
>It's sort of funny that, as long as the investor community all agree on $X valuation -- you NEVER need to make a single dollar in profit because the next guy in line will cover your "loss." Or finally some giant will buy you out to acquihire or get rid of competition.
If companies get swallowed up by the Google/Facebook behemoths like so many do then investors usually get their exit, to make an example of 2 from your list Tumblr was bought for $1bn by Yahoo and Snapchat allegedly had multibillion dollar acquisition offers from Facebook and Google. Apparently the megacompanies don't buy these smaller companies for the value that could be generated by revenue streams from them(when and if), but more a combo of the "strategic advantage" - so their competitors don't snap them up first, or out of a fear that one of them could end up being a direct competitor to them one day, as is the case with the Facebook Instagram acquisition and attempted Snapchat acquisition.
Facebook, Google and LinkedIn already proved it. No investor wants to feel dumb that they didn't invest their money in the "thing that looks just like FB and Google" even if the business model isn't a complete 1:1.
You are mixing together vastly different companies (public, private, mature, start-ups), and then ignoring companies that did make the transition to profit. So yeah, seems a bit like a rant.
Aside from issues from a consumer standpoint, I was actually interested in testing the advertising for mobile apps. Unfortunately, they don't have an SDK for conversion tracking. They rely on third parties that charge for the conversion tracking. This is absurd. Every other advertiser I can think of provides conversion tracking. Without it, the advertising is worthless. It is the thing that provides value compared to other advertising mediums.
Twitter have recieved a lot of flack lately for their poor handling of abuse complaints. Particularly in relation to #gamergate. I've no idea whether that makes a difference, but it's worth considering: abuse, like spam, is going to be a big problem for any communications service.
One of the worst aspects is they'll close any issue referring to now-deleted tweets without any action.
I'm quite certain tweets are soft-deleted and accessible by the abuse team (if the Secret Service wanted one they'd get it) so it comes across as callous indifference.
When they rate a bond as junk yes. We can be suspicious when they rate some garbage as AAA, but given the economics of the ratings business when they tell you something is junk then it probably is.
> A number of empirical papers have shown that unsolicited ratings are significantly lower than solicited ratings, both in the U.S. market and outside the U.S
Sure this is probably the only reason the bonds have been rated as junk. If Twitter had paid then there is little chance that the quants down in the basement could say what they really thought.
This is posible, but I suspect it would work a lot better if the agency has a quiet discusssion with the CFO before doing the rating. Something like explaining to the CFO that you can't trust those quants to understand the sensitivities involved unless they have a framework to constrain their thinking - if they are left to their own devices they might even say what they think.
I'm the last person to defend ratings agencies, but even in a world where ratings agencies were paragons of neutrality and forecasting accuracy one would expect that to be the case simply because those expecting an investment grade rating due purely to a sound business model can lower their borrowing costs by ensuring their bond is rated accurately by at least one of the agencies.
Since the agencies don't rate everything, the best way to ensure that is to pay a fee, so if you're issuing debt without the rating you're sending a pretty strong signal your bond is junk, whether the agency chooses to bother with a "speculative" rating on just how bad it thinks your fundamentals are or not.
There is no _the_ way to use it. But I can tell you about how I use it:
- I follow a couple of industry professionals and companies to stay up to date with their updates. As a MSFT developer I follow MSDN, the .NET team, but also important players like Scott Hanselman and Scott Guthrie. By doing this I always get the latest updates.
- I never follow more than 50 people and unfollow everyone who posts too much... If there are so many tweets that you don't have time to read them, you're not being effective. Be picky about who you follow. You don't have to follow your followers in return.
- I use Twitter a LOT to communicate with people I'd otherwise have no access to, because I don't have their email or they are too busy answering me through the company mailbox. Twitter makes everyone (except for celebs) reachable. If I need some guy at Google who write library X, I just send him a tweet.
- I use the search to find what people are saying about my product, but sometimes I also use it to engage with people who are talking about a subject I'm interested in.
> - I use Twitter a LOT to communicate with people I'd otherwise have no access to, because I don't have their email or they are too busy answering me through the company mailbox. Twitter makes everyone (except for celebs) reachable. If I need some guy at Google who write library X, I just send him a tweet.
That one is a killer-feature right there I've managed to discover lately.
Twitter completely sucks, because if you are just a normal person doing normal things noone will ever care about you.
BUT, in case you're interested in some very specific topic and the contributing people then you should give twitter a try...
Actually this is one of the things that makes twitter so useful. With email the person can pretend that they didn't get your email ("it must have ended up in my junk mail folder"), while with twitter it is all public.
> If there are so many tweets that you don't have time to read them, you're not being effective.
I am convinced, completely convinced, that the idea that you have to read every tweet in your timeline is why so many people don't get Twitter. Even constraining yourself like you describe seems just so silly. I follow 300 people, some of whom (manually) tweet A hundred times a day. I don't read all of them. I dip in and out as I have a few minutes of downtime.
It's a distributed sort of vaguely topical bar chatter. Trying to follow the whole thing is insane, and you have lists if you want to curate particular people.
It's only insane when you follow a huge amount of people and/or people who tweet a lot (or worse, both).
I'll make exception for a handful of companies/organizations (e.g. WSJ, NASA) but generally I won't follow accounts that tweet more than once or twice a day.
I may have misunderstood you. I thought by "whole thing" you were referring to everything that shows up in your timeline, but seems you probably were referring to all of Twitter.
Like I said, I follow 300 people. But I don't break my ass to read everything by everyone. I dip in and out, because anything interesting is going to pop back up eventually and having that broad a cross-section of people to follow exposes me to more and more interesting people.
This is almost exactly how I use it as well. I find Twitter to be incredibly valuable, even though I scoffed at it for a couple years before finally signing up.
I also know many people who game their main feed by reciprocally following everyone for audience building, then set up lists for groups they actually care about. This makes the main view too noisy for me, but I could see that as a viable strategy.
> I never follow more than 50 people and unfollow everyone who posts too much
You might want to check out a small side-project of mine[1] which I created because I also don't like to follow people who tweet too much. Just put in a username and it'll show you how many times a day (on average) they tweet.
I used some library, something didn't work, asked a question on Stackoverflow, didn't get an answer. What to do?
Twittered the author, he twittered back, telling me that there's a bug, and here's the workaround, and invited me (and all his followers) to try that new product that replaces the thing I was using.
So it's a unique communication tool which found a sweet spot with opt-in, brevity, low involvement, and publicity.
(It's can also be anywhere from crappy to decent as a social network, a news aggregator, a blog site ... but I wouldn't bother with these aspects)
problems:
- finding someone's email
- not knowing if they will reply or if it bothers them
- they would have to put in effort just for one person
On Twitter the guy's profile stated he wrote the library and is working in the same field. Helping me gave him the chance to plug his current work and skill.
Sign up and follow people with similar interests. I follow very few people (approx 80) and remove anyone who starts tweeting things that's no longer relevant to me.
Within that timeline I get a decent amount of tech info from respected people in the industry and other small snippets from friends.
If you do as most people seem to and follow 500+ people you're never going to be able to keep up with the noise and to me it loses its value.
It sounds like Twitter didn't have enough cash to finance its growth and that the IPO didn't result in enough cash available to do whatever needs to be done.
So if you put the information together:
The IPO was triggered b/c some investors wanted to get out. The public funding was insufficient to fund whatever initiatives are going on. The debt issue was an attempt to get capital asap. The rating could have been easily predicted and so it must be the case that Twitter's management chose to take the hit of the bad PR in exchange for the cash provided by the debt. This suggests that Twitter expects to be in for some tough times ahead.
All this is probably very rational decision making and is probably the best bet the company has in an increasingly competitive market.
I've never understood why Twitter doesn't run way more ads than they do. When I view my Twitter timeline in a browser there's an enormous amount of unused space on both sides of the timeline and it would not bother me one little bit if they displayed some ads in that space. In fact, it would be much less distracting/detracting than sticking sponsored tweets into the middle of my feed.
Like most people, I find ads kind of annoying, but Twitter's an unusual case — I would be 0% less inclined to use Twitter if they put some ads in that totally unused space.
Twitter might lose approximately .01% of their users if they ran ads, but they'd be making billions in profits.
You're right. Now that I think about it, the majority of Twitter user probably happens on phones and tablets, where there is no out-of-feed real estate for advertising, and a smaller percentage of people on desktops use a native app instead of the browser site.
So the revenue potential is probably not as much as I'd imagined.
And I fully agree that I don't want to see an increased number of sponsored tweets inserted in my feed.
Yes, but my point is that ads in the empty space around the central feed would not be "overwhelming" to anyone except chronic complainers.
Ad blocking is a problem for all ad-supported web sites. There are heavy-handed ways to thwart it, and I personally wouldn't mind if Twitter used such tactics — Twitter is a valuable service and I don't have any objection to them making money to keep the lights on and making a ton of profit on top.
Interesting how Peter Thiel who froze $45,000 of assets of Facebook competitor Diaspora* has taken a special interest in bad mouthing Twitter, call them "horribly mismanaged" etc. It's very clear he wants Twitter to fail. Peter Thiel influenced the debt downgrade with his comments. Knowing how the world works Thiel may very well have called up an analyst and played some dirty tricks as in the case of Diaspora*.
Twitter has become a dumping ground for what used to be RSS. The "twitter" traffic is now really over at Instagram. Instagram needs to upgrade their product mix (multi- accounts), but geeks and news organizations are propping Twitter up, but it's not a general conversation or personal broadcasting tool anymore.
I really don't know how anyone didn't see this coming. The Twitter IPO was the nail in the coffin for the company. It was wishful thinking that they would ever become profitable with their current model.
Twitter is an elegant and open platform. It is what you make it. And over the course of Twitter’s relatively short existence, millions of users have creatively found ways to extract utility from it. Businesses use Twitter to grow – without paying the service anything. Businesses have also been built directly on top of the service.
So why can't Twitter take these and go directly to their users with them as use case options?
It's not open. After killing off lots of development happening in their platform with the token limit decision, they effectively shut off that avenue. No sane developer will base his bread and butter on Twitter now.
Some effects of that decision were positive, like increasing engagement with advertising. Lots were negative, namely non competition on mobile app space, or lack of innovation in the use of the platform.
I personally think it was a short term vision move, that effectively killed twitter in the long term. It'll never evolve as much as it needs to survive, now that it lost its developer ecosystem.
Don't be fooled! I doubt the many developers of third party clients were happy to be surprise informed overnight that their apps would all be banned or limited to 100k users.
I just read BBC's article about Twitter not being able to make a profit. It's the classic 'investor story time' narrative where Twitter now have to scramble to make money via whatever means necessary - even if that means harming the product. Example of harm recently are:
• Many spinoff projects not related to Twitter, like Music, Flight, and a myriad of other, quite splintered attempts at adding new features.
• ADs getting more aggressive; instead of a simple injected AD in the timeline - now we have newsletters and 'sign up' with the email you have registered with Twitter. Twitter cards are also being used to show rich media for 'partnered' brands. A far cry from small, polite injected ADs. Very few people make time for watching video in a Twitter reading session.
• A constantly shifting API that developers cannot trust, and have to relearn constantly. On top of sunsetted in-house features. Remember Twitter Anywhere? I feel like Twitter Widgets will vanish over-night and without much warning too. It turns out; I rely on these solutions very heavily. The 'very little adoption' argument is used to sunset these features, and it's a terrible argument, because it destroys webs of trust with developers.
What Twitter must realize is that Twitter is plumbing. I know that microblogging existed before it, and there are countless (better) alternatives like app.net - but things like app.net are geek toys just like Diaspora. Sure - the greybeard hackers love services like that - but it's not especially for the masses, and also services like Diaspora/ADN will never achieve the status of 'plumbing' (despite app.net's tagline as a platform for Apps.). Twitter got there first, and they must realize this.
So Twitter should give us back the API we all grew to love, and not deprecate it to impress investors. It needs an eco system. It's what made Twitter take off in the first place. When I first joined Twitter in 2007; it was classic bottom up technology, built by the people and the API evangelists. The recent bait-and-switch to 'consumer product' annoyed a lot of people. It's time to see whether Twitter can do another bait-and-switch and go back to its roots.
If they manage to achieve this bait-and-switch - it will be monumental. It will be big news. And I will not be muting Twitter in my timeline for it.
> Twitter reported a ... 7% fall in timeline views per user
> -a 23% growth in its user base in the third quarter.
... I can't tell if that's a net volume increase or decrease.
> Twitter shares gave up most of the 7% gain made on Wednesday
If this is relevant to you, you're a day trader, and this would be very old news by this point. This is misleading as they're talking about the day-to-day price right next to the percent change over the year.
They're down 3.87% (1.61 points) from IPO to now (less than 12 months). Even if I was confused and picked their performance as a "year to date" it would be 23% down. However, if I cherry pick my data and find the high point from the short-lived spike at a very specific date 10 months ago (not a year), their shares have fallen about 33%. I'm sure it was cherry picked for when "today" was also.
Basically. I think this is biased junk or a financially literate reporter.
Frustratingly, I can't find the report on S&P's site.
> Even if I was confused and picked their performance as a "year to date" it would be 23% down.
You seem indeed confused. "Year to date" is the only reasonable way to understand "so far this year" and the stock is down $23 (37%). From the all-time high closing price, it has lost $33 (45%).
> Basically. I think this is biased junk or a financially literate reporter.
I guess you meant illiterate, but actually you got it right...
Their share price is nearly irrelevant to success since they can easily raise money through debt. They went to markets asking for 1.3 billion and offering nothing in return and the market said "why not 1.8?" If they were raising money through secondary equity offerings the their share price would matter. This debt rating also doesn't matter except to the chumps who own the debt. Twitter already has the money in the bank and 1.8 billion is a substantial amount of capital any way you look at it.
Oh, absolutely. There is no substance here, but it looks bad, and in the stockmarket that's really all that matters. That's why you can have CEOs from companies with solid fundamentals ousted when the company has two bad quarters in a row. It's a ridiculous system that focuses on the short term only. Twitter raised money with the express intent of investing it, not to hoard it.
I don't think it is either good or bad, I think they should go their merry way but once you IPO you're putting yourself in an aquarium and this sort of thing is to be expected (assuming that the motives of this agency are pure, which is definitely not a given).
As I commented elsewhere in this thread I think it is ridiculous that a company can be taken to task about investing 12 months after an IPO but we're living in a pretty weird world where you're supposed to see your stock go 'up' every quarter or you're doing wrong in the eyes of the market. It's all perception and very little substance.
Comparing twitter with Visa is a bit of a stretch I think.
The comments here are just so funny. HN crowd once again trying to defend a useless product. I guess if twitter goes down the drain, it doesn't look good for your own products either.
In reality though (and this is entirely anecdotal), Twitter isn't something that everyone can use. A lot of people find it difficult to figure out what they should say, how to keep track of who they follow and simply how to engage with it. It isn't that everyone product. You do still have an enormous community of people though that use it frequently and keenly and recently their monetization offering (advertising platform) has become far more impressive.
I would guess then that the valuation and share price has to come down a bit (which this is a signal of) to reflect the change from an "Everyone" (Facebook, Google, Amazon) offering to "Quite a Lot of People" (Pinterest, Tumblr etc) product.