When I think of twitter I think nothing but mainstream. There are two platforms that anyone who is anyone (celebrity or business or politician) needs to have: either Facebook or Twitter. Niche is Instragram. Niche is Snapchat. But when Kardashian is on CNN once an hour because of a tweet, it's not niche. App.Net is niche. Twitter is the epitome of mainstream.
I think thats the main problem with Twitter, saturation. Its mainstream enough the regular people are not likely to jump on Twitter now if they already haven't.
I'd argue they're better about extracting value from network effects – Facebook allows you to broadcast, but it really encourages interactions... the value grows a lot more with your network... whereas, following more people on twitter just makes it harder to follow.
Part of Twitter's challenge is that it's mainstream, but in a "write-only" way. Every celebrity, politician, religious leader, and journalist may be tweeting 24-7, but their followers aren't engaging in the same way they do on Facebook. A lot of users don't login, tweet, or spend much time on the site/app according to various reports.
G+ is a staggering number of peoole. 2.6 billion last I checked. Its simply that mist of them don't want to be there and say nothing. Engagement is by a fraction of a percent of the whole.
CNN is precisely the journalism niche they are talking about.
It isn't about niche celebrities, but celebrities as a whole is their niche. And journalists, of course. Newspaper websites publish vast quantities of tweets because it costs them nothing, it means you indirectly consume a lot of tweets.
But the celebrity content consumed by journalists is as a whole still a niche, even if all celebrities are on there.
FWIW I think it would be a mistake to abandon that, but it does raise questions about how they grow.
When was the last time you saw a business with nothing but an Instagram profile, or saw Instagram referenced on the news, or cited in a paper, or used for a press release?
It's not about active users, it's about how it's used.
Are you saying AOL wasn't mainstream? The Internet might have been niche as a whole, but out of that, AOL was as mainstream as it got. AOL was synonymous with Internet, like Facebook and Twitter are synonymous with social media.
I don't think that's a fair comparison. AOL didn't initially position itself as a portal. It positioned itself as an ISP with a portal.
Had AOL built itself as a web portal like Yahoo from the start it may very well have stayed relevant. I still have business partners (in non tech fields) that use their AOL email and news/portal services.
It's the same thing they do when they talk about Google+ being a "ghost town". Certainly doesn't look like a ghost town from my perspective. It's because Social Media gives out exactly what you yourself put in.
Yeah, or protesters and celebrities. It could actually be anyone and celebrities, because you only see the groups that you participate in, and the only one with global visibility are, duh, celebrities!
I think Twitter's biggest problem is lack of vision and a commitment to that vision. Going public was a big mistake for them, because Wall Street has no concept of what makes technology good or interesting over the long haul, they can only reduce things to the most simplistic metrics. Facebook is pretty much a known quantity at this point, and is the biggest social network that has ever existed. So now everyone wants to measure Twitter by the Facebook yardstick. But Facebook only has 5 times as many active users as Twitter, and I would bet money that the average Twitter user is more than 5 times as influential as the average Facebook user. If you can't build a viable company with 300M of the most influential users, then something is very very wrong in the world.
The biggest tell-tale for me is that everyone knows exactly what Facebook is, and many people (especially younger ones) see it as a crufty accumulation of old friends and family that they have no interest engaging with. But for Twitter there's still a majority of people who "don't get it", and yet it has been a revolution for celebrities and the aforementioned groups in terms of what it's done for the public conversation. To me this is all an indication that Twitter has way more upside than Facebook. In fact, I'd be willing to invest in Twitter if I thought their leadership was strong, but my big concern is that they don't have a clear vision, and therefore they will get picked apart by the clueless hand-wringing of Wall Street until they become so cheap that Google or Facebook snaps them up.
"If you can't build a viable company with 300M of the most influential users, then something is very very wrong in the world."
One of the intriguing thing I'm keeping my eye on is that if TWTR keeps sinking, will there be any other follow-up effects? Because if TWTR can't convert eyeballs to money at the Wall Street-expected rate, that suggests in that invester-sphinctor-tightening way that maybe the other companies depedent on that model may have trouble too.
The market's faith in eyeballs ---advertising---> money has always struck me as excessively strong. Not that it's a stupid idea, just that Wall Street seems to believe it's about 5-10 times more effective a plan than I do.
Twitter has appeal and reach, but it seriously needs to get it UX in order and focus on being great at simplicity. The official app is a jumbled mess. Instead of trying to be Facebook it needs to be Twitter. I think the advertisers and many of the investors are placing too much pressure on Twitter to become more like Facebook. I'd wager that Twitter's userbase and power-user is more influential and savvier than the typical FB user. We don't want another Facebook experience.
The big issue is this -
The goal of many start ups and software companies (especially modern ones circa 2000) is to get really big and then figure out how to make money. The problem with Twitter is that its doing just that. Exactly that even after its IPO. Its humongous yet doesn't have a decent business model (thus the falling stock prices).
You can't get much bigger (well known) as a brand/company than Twitter. From networks such as CNN, FOX NEWS, ESPN, ABC, etc... Twitter is everywhere! Everyone knows them.
So, there's a check. The issue happens with the second part : what do do with our fame?
Can Twitter use their power to make services that are profitable? Yes! Do they? No, not really :(
I often wonder why it takes so long for companies like these to blatantly monetize their services. They are backed by billions yet you rarely see an ad here or a "shop" there. Its as if they feel that its a bad thing to do. Its as if they feel that they are betraying the people using their services.
I feel that these services can survive with a little more push towards that. Then again I'm not the CEO or founder of that BIG company so I'm sure most would feel that my idea is not valid. It just frustrates me that you see so much potential (money-wise and service-wise) in a product/service yet it takes a long time to see those changes.
The problem is that Twitter is trying to monetize like most with ad-tech at a time that many are becoming ad adverse. The rise of ad blockers should be a wake up call for such monetization efforts. Twitter is placing ads everywhere now. Auto play videos, promoted ads, a jumbled UX, and product decisions springing from a want-to-be-like-Facebook mindset are just damaging the brand especially with the lack of strong product leadership that exists (which shows in the official app). It's all about monetization and listening to advertisers who don't have UX chops.
I use it to talk to people into the things I'm into. Mostly writers, furries (which has a billion subgroup interests), and artists. You wouldn't know these communities exist on Twitter from the logged-out home page, and the discovery tools don't help until you've already figured out the major players in a community.
Twitter should make the many different and largely unconnected communities a first-class part of the Twitter experience, rather than this informal thing they are now.
Actually it is a fantastic platform for businesses to reach out to people interested in their business. It is the easiest way to do the equivalent of cold-calling and introduce your business to someone you are interested in selling to. I have always thought they don't do enough on this front to mine the possibilities here.
Because they are not profitable - everyone who defends startups who lose money have the same rationale - increase users now, at a loss, and turn it around later. Twitter is neither growing users nor turning it around.
Maybe they will come up with a new CEO and a new strategy... maybe not. But there is almost zero reason to hold their stock. There are better investments out there.
Twitter is still growing in terms of revenue, but they're losing money. They've already scaled up. They've had ads ("promoted tweets") since 2010. It's not clear where they go from here. Increasing the ad density to boost revenue begins the Myspace death spiral.
Twitter was the first in a long list of current (i.e. post-2000) startups where I thought to myself, Really? That's a $X0 billion business? I wonder if this is just the tip of the iceberg.
Twitter is huge, it costs a lot of money to run. They had a net profit of negative $162.4 million Q1. I don't know what defines an $X0 billion business, but I would imagine that it would be profit.
Put simply, future value. Otherwise a sidewalk lemonade stand profiting 1 cent per glass would be far more valuable than a lemonade manufacturing business which sells millions of bottles a day and pumps all the profits plus additional investment money into manufacturing facilities. At some point, the money-losing lemonade manufacturer no longer needs to ramp up their facilities, they pay down the equipment cost, and generate boatloads of profit. That or they get bought out by a larger player who wants to enter the lemonade market but doesn't want to reinvent the wheel.
They're also consistently losing money. Even if you strip out half their capital expenditure or 3/4 of their R&D from their FY 2014 numbers, they would still lose money.
Let's say they can eventually run a 20% net income margin. This would turn their 2014 revenues into $280MM of earnings. Using the S&P 500's 21x P/E ratio, this values the business at $6bn. That's 70% less than their current market cap. And they don't appear close to running a positive margin, let alone 20%, on their 2014 numbers.
Twitter could be very profitable. They're running the business extraordinarily poorly. They have 36% of the head count of Facebook, with 12% the revenue.
They're at $1.77b in sales the last four quarters. At the clip they're growing sales, they could certainly get to $3.5 billion in two years. If they ran the business properly, instead of pretending they're Facebook, they could generate $700 to $800 million in profit (purely in my opinion) two years from now. They'd get a rich valuation (Facebook is currently 90 times earnings); even half the valuation of Facebook would get them to $30 billion in market value two years from now, backed with real earnings.
Businesses are usually valued on reasonable (e.g. 12-18x) multiples of their profit (and by that it's their actual profit not these silly non-GAAP 'profit if you ignore all this stuff we don't want you to look at' profit nonsense). Tech companies often try to pretend this isn't reality, but after you've been trading on the public markets for a while reality starts to set in hard.
So for Twitter to be a legit business valued at $18.5 billion (as it is today) they need to consistently churn out around $1.5 billion a year in pure hard core profit. They are nowhere near that and there's no sign of how they will get there. Hence all the negative pressure on the stock. When you bring it back to fundamentals that's the issue here.
What do you think of the underlying business model that is generating this $436m in revenue? Do you think the current model of <insert thinly disguised promotional content that no one ever clicks on> is a sustainable way to grow revenues? How about the idea of charging superusers (top 1% of tweeters) a yearly subscription to use Twitter?
All this tells me is that a lot of companies are willing to throw advertising budgets into the black hole of social media with no possible way of accurately measuring ROI.
I would say normally when you are using monetary value as an adjective for a company, you are describing how much it is worth, not in relation to revenues. Most companies do tend to have Revenue/EV multiples greater than 1.0, so more times than not, that would be correct. However, I would not say that would always be the case.
Fair enough. Twitter definitely doesn't produce profits in the billions. Twitter doesn't even produce profits at all. It's a poorly run billion dollar company imo [1,2].
If operated and ran efficiently it has the reach and potential to produce billion dollar profits. I highly doubt we'll ever see a twitter like that though. They're too far entrenched in the culture of frivolous spending and Silicon Valley economics.
TWTR right now has a operating margin of -26%. So they spent ~1.3B to get that 1.0B in revenue.
If I were to make a bunch of goods for $130/each, and then sell them for $100/each but managed to sell 10M of those goods should I be valued as a billion dollar company?
Twitter is like a car in first gear: loads of noise, loads of turnover (rpm) but profit (speed), not so much yet.
However if you want to get somewhere you actually need to shift up at some point: growth numbers start to decline so they'll have to, before investors lose their faith even more and they end up in a downward spiral.
It's not really the same... Facebook had a botched IPO where the price tanked immediately, but then recovered after a few quarters and their earnings started rolling in.
Twitter has had consistently bad quarters, whether through poor earnings or over promising on their projections. But in one way or another they are not meeting expectations.
Twitter hasn't focused on anything else besides twitter. Facebook is taking on the mission of "connecting the world". Google has gone well beyond being only a search engine. Amazon has expanded into mobile, AWS and ...
Twitter, on the other hand, is still pushing the same product.
Taking a step back, what's the advantage to society of every company growing into a conglomerate? Why not just let a company live and die on its core business?
Do we really want to allow all that power to be consolidated into company boards and executives?
That's a great point for the larger societal stakeholders in our collective capitalist enterprise. But given the limited horizon that the market places on Twitter's management and shareholders, I don't know that it answers the question of why Twitter doesn't expand beyond its current narrow focus.
It's not really a societal advantage, it's an investor one. If you're an equity holder you expect some return on capital you've contributed. If you're Twitter, this means returns on current products/services or on new ones. Hopefully, from a strategic perspective new products are either higher return on capital than current products/services or exhibit (excuse the wording) synergies with current products/services.
Additionally OP alludes to a greater vision which a company may use to impact its decision making on new projects to pursue.
imagine if snapchat announced that they would start living and dying on their core business rather than try to expand
now you have a bunch of investors who are upset that they invested in a company at a 16 billion dollar valuation that has jack diddly squat for income and has no promise of some magical "over the horizon" way to monetize
In all honesty how far can you take microblogging? Twitter's core business is something any half decent developer can build over a weekend and polish over a few months.
There is so much you can do to attract and keep your users engaged with Twitter's core business.
For the growth Twitter investors are looking, twitter needs to expand beyond its 140 character tweets and look for possible innovative ideas that can cultivate with its current infrastructure, data and talent.
It looks like a weekend project but isn't. Scaling it up took Twitter a long time. Showing your feed is a very expensive operation (there are users with a large number of followers and users who follow many others) and syndication and clients amplify the number of operations.
Source: I was one of the developers of Jaiku, which had a very similar model.
Not necessarily, but the world is evolving which means that maintaining the same product will not be profitable forever (or in this case, never).
Companies will want to continue exist and generate more profits for their owners, which means deploying new products - and these products might appear to be different but upon closer inspection they kind of make sense. Facebook is connecting everything (core product + whatsapp + the internet balloons etc.). Googles core business appears to be analyzing large, dynamic and complex datasets (the web, maps, their biotech research, self-driving cars).
Of course there are always outliers (Android), but companies go for profit. If they can incorporate something new they will.
The kind of investments you are referencing (ones which to me are many steps removed feom core impact) are hard to do before the core business is nailed down, which in this case the market seems to think Twitter had not yet done.
Well there's Periscope. And Vine. Their music app that went belly up. Not as much as some others, but they haven't exclusively been stuck on the Twitter app.
It's really hard to sell/explain to the uninitiated because it's a diverse platform. Even my twitter feed is very diverse- breaking news and headlines from the beat writers for my favorite teams, activists and protesters covering police brutality, and developer blogs.
With this mix, my twitter feed varies greatly. Unrest in Ferguson? Breaking news from the ground. Microsoft Build conference? Latest in tech from Redmond. Eagles training camp? Live highlights from reporters I trust. It's really a wonderful thing.
No, I've tried it. I've really tried to like it, but it just didn't click with me. I know it's perfect for others, but it can never reach the growth of a platform like Facebook that is more universally liked. That's pretty much my point.
You sound like someone who dislikes Reddit because they think the defaults are all there is. Twitter could do a better job helping people discover their interest communities, but Twitter is more than the gossip-focused logged out home page.
You need to look deeper if you think it has nothing for you.
> You need to look deeper if you think it has nothing for you.
Surely the onus is on Twitter to make the information easy to locate? This is one of their key failings, if you have to wade through too much noise to find something of interest, then the app isn't good enough.
>Facebook that is more universally liked. That's pretty much my point.
Facebook is pretty much engineered to give you what you like - the "news bubble". There's no "civil unrest" on Facebook, or is there any disagreements or arguments or storms - things you don't like just go away. There are upsides to this of course, there is better user engagement and there's no trolls. However compared to Twitter, Facebook is a Brave New World.
Twitter, once it clicks is an addicting source of news - and its so hard to get it to click, I only really started seriously using twitter when I had blocked Facebook, Reddit, HN, and other distractions in an attempt to stay focused on work - even still, I don't tweet.
My "twitterverse" is much more diverse than any other platform I visit - (my facebook feed is now nearly exclusively pictures 20-something yuppies on vacation or HN which might as well be heavily curated) and there are a lot more interests outside my own bubble that I can at least pretend to have insight to just be being exposed to it.
However without the curation nor the inherent network effects of Facebook I can see why Twitter can be hard to use - you really have to invest in the platform and it does take a while.
You're not alone. I can't stand Twitter...IMO it's just noise and confusion in 140 characters or less.
It also delivers little value to businesses who advertise on it because people tweeting have a very short attention span. The Twitter ecosystem is closed since they closed their API. It blows my mind that Tweets don't appear in Google searches.
It's almost as though the management team are going out of their way to stifle growth and innovation. The areas where Twitter could have been powerful and unique have not been maximised at all.
I've been on a long journey to break out of the (breaking | hourly | daily ) news cycle and on reflection Twitter represents everything that is wrong with that cycle.
There is a perceived need in Western society to hear about events right now even if those initial reports turn out to be inaccurate or plain false. Not only does it seem pointless to spend time discussing such reports but often they are a distraction from things that are important.
If the event is significant, there will be in-depth analysis at the weekend and I'll learn about it then.
This would be fantastically niche and tech-person-oriented, probably not the right move for the company as a whole. That said, nothing stops you from writing a bot on top of Twitter to power any of these interactions.
It would be a big niche if you consider how many people use Excel functions. It could make Twitter part of enterprise and group communications infrastructures.
I've been short on Twitter from the get-go, I just didn't think it would take this long. This doesn't mean I'm anti-Twitter - I would actually prefer that it stay the niche platform for journalists/celebrities/activists.
I don't know the business strategy to make sure that is viable, but I don't want it to be a mass-market product (except in terms of consumption)...the signal to noise ratio is so much better than other social platforms.
Twitter, quite bizarrely, is filling a void no longer filled by newspapers (wow, what that says about our attention spans). It's only peripherally mainstream but incredibly useful as a _tool_ to a small group of people. It's not any one thing: it's different depending on who you are.
That's why I wrote ‘Twitter Should Be A Public Utility’ http://blog.higg.im/2015/06/12/on-twitter/ For me the disconnect was that Twitter failed and partially succeeded in making Twitter what I call 'plumbing', or a sort of duct tape for the web. If microblogging had a stack similar to TCP/IP that could be fundamental to how the web operates, then they missed that boat repeatedly.
To me the problem with Twitter lies solely with what Twitter's logged-out homepage looks like. I don't know what it's trying to be but asking me to sign up, browse categories (?), and read top celebrity posts is not it.
Why is logged-out Twitter not a search engine? They have up-to-the-second thoughts from their users about everything and it's the first place I go when a site is down, or some news story is breaking. They're sitting on a search goldmine yet they're trying to convert signups and popular celebrity post clickthroughs.
That to me is the problem, that for some reason conversions is the sole metric with which success is measured. Why is that though? I don't have to be a GMail/Google user to get value out of Google search, yet Google generates most of its revenue from search.
If Twitter knows what everyone likes, or is talking about (especially the influencers), then that would be a good source of search results if I'm looking for something to buy or do. Its an entirely different search engine than Google or even Facebook.
That prompts a question as to whether Twitter can best grow its future value more through user signups / conversions, or through maximizing one-way consumption as a broadcast medium.
I read the nytimes.com all the time. They have no idea who I am and never will. I'll never signup for an account. They still get to feed me ads.
I consume ESPN one-way. They have no idea who I am and never will. It's worth $50 +/- billion to Disney (per Forbes and others).
Why can't Twitter maximize that potential? Most of Google's global users don't have or don't use a G account, and are not signed in when they search (even if Google builds a profile on them anyway). That doesn't detract from Google's ability to monetize based on interest and intent. Twitter's intent will never be as valuable, but it wouldn't take much given we're talking about Google's intent being worth $100 billion in advertising sales in the near future.
My point being, perhaps Twitter's biggest mistake is in trying to be Facebook and worrying about users. Instead they should focus on maximizing output of high quality sources, and boosting total consumption.
How do you read nytimes "all the time" with the paywall?
Edit: I'm confused by the downvotes. I wasn't trying to turn it into a discussion about whether paywalls are right or wrong, I was just drawing out that either the parent was not reading nytimes all the time, or they were evading the paywall, or they were paying for access. They're talking about how Twitter should get value from giving readers access and using nytimes as an example - but it seems like a terrible example, given that nytimes actively tries to prevent people from reading more than 10 articles/mo for free.
As another comment mentioned, Google the title. Also, some parts of their site and some articles are not paywalled. I probably also burn the article limit per month without paying attention. Add it all up, and I can't remember the last time I was blocked out of reading an article on their site.
> I read the nytimes.com all the time. They have no idea who I am and never will. I'll never signup for an account. They still get to feed me ads.
How do you know you're not being tracked through cookies on other sites that you have logged into, or ad networks that interact with those sites? When I load nytimes.com and view the network trace, I see about 50 different domains appear there:
I'll stop there. I assume that these sites can track my persona whether or not I'm logged in, and probably with a pretty good chance even if I use an incognito window.
I'm giving away my secrets here, hopefully this is buried enough that NY Times won't see it and won't change. :)
1) use Firefox
2) use NoScript, don't allow Javascript on NY Times or any other domains it pulls in
3) set Firefox -> Preferences -> Privacy -> Clear history when Firefox closes -> clear all items except browsing history
To access NY Times (or really any website) first QUIT Firefox. Then restart. Now there are no cookies, caches, etc in existence. Then when you go to nytimes.com, all those other domains don't see any existing cookies. It's all new. Let them track you all they want.
When done reading, quit Firefox. Now none of the domains mentioned above can track you via cookies. Their tracking has accomplished nothing. They've all seen your single session on nytimes.com and nothing else!
Side effect from using NoScript is no paywall limits on number of articles.
One possible complaint is that I clear caches every time I exit Firefox. But I never notice any delays when starting, using a decent speed connection means the caches reload quickly. Also, I happen to have a knack for remembering passwords, so I don't mind re-entering on those sites that need them. But nytimes.com does not need a password in the scenario I just presented. (BTW I rarely re-use passwords across different sites).
I can still be tracked by IP address. Not much I can do about that other than force Comcast to give me a new one every once in a while. But that's merely a palliative, since a determined tracker can probably reestablish who I am from other information (c.f. panopticlick.eff.org).
My next step will be to get Squid running on my firewall, to help sanitize my HTTP headers, etc. But I've been meaning to do that for at least 10 years and haven't gotten around to it yet. So my paranoia does have its limits. :)
Using Firefox profiles might make simplify some of your separation goals. I create and destroy profiles regularly, and also have a few long-lived ones. Some are site-specific.
I don't even need a search. Just give me a "Trending on Twitter" view. Then as I read through it, make the "Follow" button more obvious. As soon as I click "Follow" then sign me up (or get me to log in).
Even when you go to a tweet from an external link when not logged in, 20% of the vertical height is taken up by a big blue "Sign up for Twitter (or log in)" thing.
Just give me the content and lure me into hitting the "Follow" button.
The moment a topic becomes trending, it gets overrun with spam and shitposts by attention-seekers who know exactly where to find attention. That's not the best first impression.
Yep and sometime you just want the cliff notes on that trend without the spam.
This was why I put together our trending search feature @ http://theenginuity.com on the front-page.
We compile a list of social trends from our indexes of social data and make it easy to instantly figure out what's going on based on your language / region settings.
I know that and I use it, but the problem is bigger because that homepage has no idea what it is or what it's trying to do. Search is an afterthought and I'm suggesting that search should be their primary focus for this page.
Logged in, yea you can get your feed and do whatever you want. But this logged-out page has absolutely 0 value for anyone who isn't a Twitter user.
I've gone to the twitter website (on my phone, especially) several times in the past to try and look up "local, now" things -- e.g. I hear a big bang/explosion, or there are fire/police in force nearby, or I thought there was a tremor, or there's a big storm.
And every time, I've sighed and been disappointed that (as I thought) I couldn't search tweets without being logged in, and I rarely ever log in to any services on my phone. And so then I clicked away, opened up facebook/NYT/boston.com/etc. instead.
I also thought about this when I started building Testimote. A lot of interesting things are being said (positive things about companies in my case), and are drowning out there in the great torrent coming from the firehose. I think there's room for both Twitter and outside companies to continue to build out curation ideas around this, as the data set is quite rich (and Twitter - at least recently - has been fairly generous with their basic APIs with things like rate limits [though I think lower cost plans would be fantastic for higher rate limits, rather than big money for the full hose].)
A combination of better curation and rebuilt developer relations could really help - maybe not user growth, per se, but certainly with service usage. What about web sites and mobile apps giving people a way to give feedback to the company (something as simple as a Tweet box that says "give instant public feedback") that simply tweets out the message using their account? People would start using Twitter without doing anything more than filling in a form and supplying an email address (for first-time users.) There's a lot of untapped potential around this. I think it also helps to think of Twitter as a giant, sometimes overlapping set of IRC channels and DMs, but with the ability to tap into it all. Like with IRC bots that would catch stuff, and put it in a database. Interesting conversations happening, not much being done with it. Twitter could encourage people to do more with it from the outside, and help everyone, including themselves.
It still has tons of potential if cards are played right.
Twitter blocked Flattr from providing micropayments based on favoriting, then failed to fill that gap in the market. There are so many gaps which could have been filled by 3rd-party developers, but Twitter's API posture scared away investors from building on their API.
Hopefully, they'll reconsider some of those policies now. We know the data (including certain event data, like favoriting, like you say) is probably their most valuable asset, but opening the valve on it a bit more would be in everyone's interest, I think.
Some ideas: make public commitments to better developer-related policies that they promise to not renege on, outreach, reopen formerly closed APIs, lower-cost API plans so that incentives with small and medium-sized developers/companies are better aligned (developers pay something so Twitter doesn't feel like all value is being sucked out of it for free, less likely to shut things down.)
I sometimes wonder if there is a large disconnect between two types of twitter users - those that use it as a sort of "news-gathering" medium, and those that use it as a conversation medium.
Twitter, as a company, seems to assume that the former is the default. I don't know if the majority of their users are actually like that. The vast majority of my tweets is replies to other people, and for most people I know it is the same, but of course, self-selection would do that. The analogy as twitter being unrolled IRC is, for me, definitely how I've been thinking of it for years.
I think its actually because you don't need Twitter to get the information that is there. Anything worth knowing that happens on Twitter is on every other main stream outlet. They have a unique problem in that powerful people use their platform but anyone can get that information and re-post it anywhere. Probably for that reason I've signed up for Twitter a few times and both times lasted no longer than a week, realizing it just isn't useful to the normal person.
Twitter isn't some fly-by-night company that has to hard-sell what it is. It's a well-known product that has independent mentions in media left, right, and centre. News shows, current affairs shows, morning TV, newspaper websites... all of these mention twitter constantly, as they use it as a lazy source of react quotes. Even talking-head panel shows have runners at the bottom of the screen showing what's happening with twitter. Twitter doesn't have a problem with people understanding what it's about.
I can know exactly what twitter is and still not want an account. I can get what I want out of twitter, and twitter can get access to my eyeballs by just showing me things when I want to see them.
Don't get me wrong. I loathe twitter, and I don't have an account. My point is that twitter doesn't need to do the hard sell on what it is anymore - as far as the public is concerned, it's almost a utility like power or water. It's everywhere, through everything, and it's "just assumed" that you use it, whether you actually do or not.
My point is that if people are online and looking at the twitter homepage, they know what twitter is already. The exceptions to the rule would be a vanishingly thin slice of netizens.
I can't count the number of times I clicked a link to read a news story (even on news outlets like Al Jazeera) and the "article" was basically "Here's what twitter users had to say" followed by a dozen or so tweet cards
I agree, but one point against that is that the web experience with Twitter is probably the worst - it's clunky. I hate using it.
I use the phone app (simple, OK) and the OS X app (neglected, but a great way to use Twitter IMO). In those two apps, there isn't a logged out front page. They could improve both to create a useful equivalent though.
It's terrible. I recently started to use it and I'm shocked at how poor it is. Scroll down, see something interesting. Click. Now I've lost where I was, no way back. Going back reloads the entire page (slow) then, since content is loaded in after scrolling, scrolls one page down and stops. They're basically saying "don't engage too long with Twitter, just keep it quick and then stop".
How they have 3000 employees and no one that has fixed their main product is very strange.
If it was the only way to access Twitter, I would've given up. And Twitter is my favoured social network - just so frustrating to see how they're flailing around. Yet to see a single ad that was remotely relevant to me. Keep quitting the "While you were away" and acknowledging that I don't like it, but they keep showing it. Insane.
I don't think a product Tweetbot can exist in Twitter's stable because it cuts all the cruft out of the modern Twitter experience, and is likely the opposite of the direction Twitter would like to go.
It has kind of happened already — Twitter bought Tweetie, which was a well-liked desktop client, and then let it languish.
The question (for Twitter) is why are people like you hitting their homepage logged-out instead of logged-in? You gain growth by getting people to try your service, you build value by offering something that brings people back continuously.
Imagine if Google required you to be logged in before searching... do you think their revenue numbers would be anywhere near what they are?
"Whoa there, matey! You're not logged in. We can't just let you see our advertising-laden stream, click on it, and create revenue for us without an account, you know... Please jump through a sign-up process, that's going to mean looking for a username you like that isn't taken, giving us your email address, logging into that to find the email confirmation link, and then coming back here, and then you can finish that search you were doing on a whim."
From my perspective (a developer who has leveraged the API from 1.0 on), search has always been 'different'.
At first, it didn't exist. So some company (Summize) created it. Then, Twitter acquired them (actually their first acquisition).
Some time later the search method was absorbed into the Twitter API. The syntax hasn't changed since.
It always felt like they just re-deployed the Summize app and proxied an API path to it. Though it's quite likely it's been rewritten many times by now.
Farfetched, but I guess I'm saying it may be a cultural thing.
In fact, they are remarkably similar (and bland). No public search for Facebook either, which does not seem to be hurting them.
To be honest in a Google/search-dominated Net, I firmly believe homepages are irrelevant. You can see that in how little effort these large companies are investing in them: they only represent a tiny percentage of their total traffic.
Why isn't every site's homepage not search? I've been beating G+ up over this for years. Throwing a barricade and nag straight off the top is fucking stupid.
I've got a G+ account, but still hit the site unauthenticated fairly often.
The interesting question will be the on-going struggle between engineering (Roetter/Weil) and business (Noto/Bain), who actually want to run a profitable company. My bet is Roetter and Weil will be out before the year is done.
Is there anyone else who hates Twitter because of its 140 character limit and overall focus on broadcasting rather than sharing?
For the 140 character limit, I get the historical SMS reasons and that it helps you "focus" your content, but taking 10 minutes to squeeze a thought in that turns from something half interesting to "bc u r 4 the GPL" or whatever.
Sure MAYBE I could reword things a little denser, but a tweet should be somewhat in the moment and nothing takes me out of it like editing to some arbitrary limit.
As for the aspect of people liking smaller messages, they can do what FB does and hide behind a "Read more" link.
Overall, Twitter feels like being in a crowded bar. Lots of noise, not many conversations.
But often it encourages abusing the limitation by splitting long(er)-form content into multiple tweets.
I agree that it's so fundamental to the brand and Twitter's identity that it might cause a lot of problems if it were reverted, but frankly it's completely arbitrary. If you want to produce 140 (or less) content, you can do that without a hard limit.
People hack around it because it's such a ubiquitous platform, but people would also like to address that audience in long(er)-form. It culminates in inconvenience for both producer and consumer.
No, I agree. Twitter as a general-purpose communication platform is impractical. Yet a ton of industry figures have crowded into it for some reason. Twitter is the flashy, arbitrarily constrained version of what fingering other people's .plan files was in the 80s and 90s.
The 140 char limit turns it into a new journalistic form - almost anyway.
I have many issues with it, in addition to the sign-in page and general lack of access:
For non-celebs, the value of having tens of thousands of followers is often close to zero, so it's more vanity nano-press than useful communication channel.
For newsy events, real-time reporting is incredibly noisy and repetitive.
Retweet count isn't a good reader value marker. There should be some better way to find the best content.
Developer relationships aren't great, and unlimited access to the firehose would help create some innovation - which is badly needed at this point.
Handling multiple accounts is painful. If you want to use the same devices to tweet for a business and tweet as a person it's really not fun.
Twitter management history is uninspiring. No one seems to be in charge of thinking of cool new stuff, so Twitter is turning into formerly cool old stuff.
Many here comment just on sub-IPO price of shares.
The problem is bigger. As per Financial Times, there is a larger shift in investor mood towards Twitter. It seems that there are many who intend to short Twitter indicated by the amount of "borrowed" shares.
I never thought the problem was the product, rather it is the management and the community. What's valuable about hacker news is the people who are involved, and what's great about Quora are the people who give a response.
It's not helpful that most people spam useless tweets constantly. It took a while, but I finally set my twitter to follow news updates perfectly.
It's a delicate mix of both. Ello caused a mass migration away from Facebook but new users had difficulty understanding the Ello UI, and eventually after the hype simmered, people generally stuck with Facebook as their main network interface.
There was also much talk around the time Whatsapp was acquired by Facebook.. people were eager to find alternatives and could easily migrate.
I can't imagine Twitter being around in 5 years. IMO the best aspect Twitter has right now above all other services is it's realtime tag/search/trend system. The 140 char limit is antiquated, the userbase is mostly twitter joke addicts and an unceasing torrent of self promotional noise.
I'm still sorta hoping Ello get's their shit together. I'd gladly pay for their service instead of being immersed in AOL 2015.
Maybe it was different for your social circle(s)..?
Many of my friends were active on Ello for a few weeks. It catered mostly to original content producers and artists, so most normal people who simply want to repost news articles and music videos were deterred from being tossed into the "noise" category.
Twitter seems like both current-shareholders and the userbase would be best served by either acquisition by Google/Alphabet, or a takeover by either activist shareholder or private equity, with new, product-focused management.
If you focused on mobile in the right ways, you could turn Twitter into a legitimate $30-50b company.
It's amazing that FB Newsfeed has basically taken the low hanging fruit from Twitter -- "normal" people sharing life events, leaving only weird communities of people interacting in public. There has to be a way to preserve that, grow that, and get interpersonal interaction among more closely-knit communities happening.
They had such a huge opening when Facebook fucked themselves with the shitty-HTML5-only-mobile-clients. Sad.
Twitters main problem is that it's a protocol more than an actual content platform. What they need is to get more content onto their platform and the only way to really do that is to allow for richers posts which means loose the 140 character limit.
I know a lot of people will say "but thats what so great about twitter" and I would claim that it isn't, they just think it is. The short tweets and the asyncronous character of twitter creates quite a lot of noise and so you are actually reading way way more than interesting 140 character tweets you also read a lot of noise and redundancy.
No whats really great about twitter is that it's more centerede around interests than friendship and that this provide the actual value of using the service.
Totally agree. I stopped using Twitter because I got so tired of rewording everything to fit into 140 characters. The most interesting people on Twitter tend to use multiple tweets to broadcast one message, and join them up with "...", but when I see that I'd rather they had just written a short blog post and linked it.
In my opinion, what Twitter is most useful for is sharing links and short updates to prompt action from your followers, like reading your new blog post. And because of this, it's not the kind of place where you want to spend a lot of time, because the content isn't that engaging, it's just the news ticker that you scroll through for 5 minutes and leave.
Snapchat's "Stories" page is the UI Twitter should have built...It has search, a list of your friends updates, and targeted content from a few big name media vendors. Logging into twitter just takes you to a big list of crappy, uninteresting content IMO.
I have never installed Snapchat. I don't know if it is good or bad. All my friends doesn't have Snapchat, but everyone has Twitter. I found Twitter a better place, and it's ageless to me compared to all those new-UI paradigms that come each year. The problem of Twitter is they cut off all the innovation of 3rd party software developers to keep their shitty in house software.
Three answers, one of which makes me feel shamefully too much of an asshole.
1) I think optimizing the naive-to-twitter experience is something which can't really be done through incremental A/B testable changes.
2) They have had technical capability limits which prevent them from surfacing great content for users based on what anyone else would call "ad tech". These are both technical and organizational/philosophical (which, over a long enough timescale, are the root cause of technical limitations in a $20b company).
3) (the obvious one involving the quote about clown cars and gold mines).
It's not just "not logged in", it's "haven't been an active user for a long time". If one of my friends joins and JUST follows me, Twitter is boring/useless as can be. Their "recommend to follow" thing is utterly inadequate. Compare this to Facebook which is fucking awesome from your first interaction.
On Facebook you're generally connected to people you know in real life. So if a new person joins Facebook and connects with you, the FB recommendations are likely people the new person also knows. You frequently follow people on Twitter you only know from Twitter. Even if they follow you back, your friend just signing up may not know who the hell they are. So recommendations are more difficult.
Absolutely - Twitter has a harder problem to solve. Facebook also capitalized on the benefits of rich media earlier (biggest photo site in the world, now borging YouTube).
> Someone posts a link, I find something on a website, etc. that go to Twitter? BAM! SIGN-UP NOW OR LEAVE!
If they force you to sign up, they get more user data for the pool. I don't think that the slice of their market they're losing out on by this is very big.
> Lowering the barrier to entry for that is critical.
The barrier to entry for content creation on twitter is absurdly low. It's not the login process. It's the content itself, which is only a couple of sentences. It's not editing a video, or writing a short article, or creating an image, or managing a forum. It's just 'spurt out what I'm thinking right now in one sentence'. Login processes are not the barrier to content creation, effort required is.
Anecdotally, I've never bothered to sign up for Twitter, and the experience for logged-out users has contributed to that. Instead of thinking "wow all my friends and important people are on there so I guess I'll sign up," I think "well this isn't very engaging, but I still technically got the content I came for, so I'm not really incentivized to go further."
And I disagree in general - login processes are often a huge barrier. People don't want to create accounts everywhere; it used to be cool and novel, now it's a burden.
I do agree that login processes can be a huge barrier. Slack got to be a gorilla by making onboarding buttery smooth, whilst its competitors had a fairly vanilla approach, clunky by comparison.
But, in terms of content creation that the GP mentioned (rather than content consumption), login processes are not the problematic part.
I think one of the mistakes may be that they focus on a wrong metric. I alway read signups/users as a cited metric. It would be way wiser to focus on improving more active metrics (engagement stuff).
The start page is a good example...sure right now it seems to optimize for account creation but I'd say it would be more of a win if users actually engaged with the twitter stream. If it's useful they'll sign up.
[alas I hope all of this was discussed and tested to death already]
I assume that metrics are why every site I go to has a glossy landing page with a huge "Sign Up" button, and then the "sign in" link is hidden in the corner. I'm sure that passes all the A/B tests but it gives me the impression that returning Web users just aren't that important.
A site I signed up for recently at least lets you log in by typing your existing username and password into the huge sign-up form. That was a breath of fresh air.
> Noto struck a critical tone, saying user growth won’t improve until the service boosts its appeal to a bigger market and that product improvements and marketing so far have met with minimal success.
This is going to sound anecdotal, but still feel is telling: until my parents and my co-workers (enterprise IT professionals) see the benefit in adopting Twitter, then Twitter will forever be in limbo. I fear the same for reddit. Neither service has a product that supports a wide enough appeal to be considered for that demographic, and they are effectively the last mile in this equation.
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 227 ms ] threadI found that line interesting, because I often think of Twitter as a niche forum favored by technology workers and celebrities.
Chris Sacca said a lot about this recently. http://lowercasecapital.com/2015/06/03/what-twitter-can-be-2...
It isn't about niche celebrities, but celebrities as a whole is their niche. And journalists, of course. Newspaper websites publish vast quantities of tweets because it costs them nothing, it means you indirectly consume a lot of tweets.
But the celebrity content consumed by journalists is as a whole still a niche, even if all celebrities are on there.
FWIW I think it would be a mistake to abandon that, but it does raise questions about how they grow.
Except Instagram has more active users than Twitter...
It's not about active users, it's about how it's used.
> Everyone had an AOL keyword. AOL isn't dead, but it fell hard. Ubiquity isn't enough.
Every business having a Twitter account won't save Twitter any better than everyone having an AOL keyword saved AOL.
Had AOL built itself as a web portal like Yahoo from the start it may very well have stayed relevant. I still have business partners (in non tech fields) that use their AOL email and news/portal services.
I think Twitter's biggest problem is lack of vision and a commitment to that vision. Going public was a big mistake for them, because Wall Street has no concept of what makes technology good or interesting over the long haul, they can only reduce things to the most simplistic metrics. Facebook is pretty much a known quantity at this point, and is the biggest social network that has ever existed. So now everyone wants to measure Twitter by the Facebook yardstick. But Facebook only has 5 times as many active users as Twitter, and I would bet money that the average Twitter user is more than 5 times as influential as the average Facebook user. If you can't build a viable company with 300M of the most influential users, then something is very very wrong in the world.
The biggest tell-tale for me is that everyone knows exactly what Facebook is, and many people (especially younger ones) see it as a crufty accumulation of old friends and family that they have no interest engaging with. But for Twitter there's still a majority of people who "don't get it", and yet it has been a revolution for celebrities and the aforementioned groups in terms of what it's done for the public conversation. To me this is all an indication that Twitter has way more upside than Facebook. In fact, I'd be willing to invest in Twitter if I thought their leadership was strong, but my big concern is that they don't have a clear vision, and therefore they will get picked apart by the clueless hand-wringing of Wall Street until they become so cheap that Google or Facebook snaps them up.
One of the intriguing thing I'm keeping my eye on is that if TWTR keeps sinking, will there be any other follow-up effects? Because if TWTR can't convert eyeballs to money at the Wall Street-expected rate, that suggests in that invester-sphinctor-tightening way that maybe the other companies depedent on that model may have trouble too.
The market's faith in eyeballs ---advertising---> money has always struck me as excessively strong. Not that it's a stupid idea, just that Wall Street seems to believe it's about 5-10 times more effective a plan than I do.
You can't get much bigger (well known) as a brand/company than Twitter. From networks such as CNN, FOX NEWS, ESPN, ABC, etc... Twitter is everywhere! Everyone knows them.
So, there's a check. The issue happens with the second part : what do do with our fame?
Can Twitter use their power to make services that are profitable? Yes! Do they? No, not really :(
I often wonder why it takes so long for companies like these to blatantly monetize their services. They are backed by billions yet you rarely see an ad here or a "shop" there. Its as if they feel that its a bad thing to do. Its as if they feel that they are betraying the people using their services.
I feel that these services can survive with a little more push towards that. Then again I'm not the CEO or founder of that BIG company so I'm sure most would feel that my idea is not valid. It just frustrates me that you see so much potential (money-wise and service-wise) in a product/service yet it takes a long time to see those changes.
Twitter should make the many different and largely unconnected communities a first-class part of the Twitter experience, rather than this informal thing they are now.
Maybe they will come up with a new CEO and a new strategy... maybe not. But there is almost zero reason to hold their stock. There are better investments out there.
The main concern to investors is primarily the growth and their ability to warrant a premium price on the stock.
They're also consistently losing money. Even if you strip out half their capital expenditure or 3/4 of their R&D from their FY 2014 numbers, they would still lose money.
Let's say they can eventually run a 20% net income margin. This would turn their 2014 revenues into $280MM of earnings. Using the S&P 500's 21x P/E ratio, this values the business at $6bn. That's 70% less than their current market cap. And they don't appear close to running a positive margin, let alone 20%, on their 2014 numbers.
They're at $1.77b in sales the last four quarters. At the clip they're growing sales, they could certainly get to $3.5 billion in two years. If they ran the business properly, instead of pretending they're Facebook, they could generate $700 to $800 million in profit (purely in my opinion) two years from now. They'd get a rich valuation (Facebook is currently 90 times earnings); even half the valuation of Facebook would get them to $30 billion in market value two years from now, backed with real earnings.
So for Twitter to be a legit business valued at $18.5 billion (as it is today) they need to consistently churn out around $1.5 billion a year in pure hard core profit. They are nowhere near that and there's no sign of how they will get there. Hence all the negative pressure on the stock. When you bring it back to fundamentals that's the issue here.
All this tells me is that a lot of companies are willing to throw advertising budgets into the black hole of social media with no possible way of accurately measuring ROI.
If operated and ran efficiently it has the reach and potential to produce billion dollar profits. I highly doubt we'll ever see a twitter like that though. They're too far entrenched in the culture of frivolous spending and Silicon Valley economics.
1. http://money.cnn.com/2014/03/06/technology/social/twitter-ca...
2. http://in.reuters.com/article/2015/04/28/us-twitter-results-...
If I were to make a bunch of goods for $130/each, and then sell them for $100/each but managed to sell 10M of those goods should I be valued as a billion dollar company?
However if you want to get somewhere you actually need to shift up at some point: growth numbers start to decline so they'll have to, before investors lose their faith even more and they end up in a downward spiral.
Twitter has had consistently bad quarters, whether through poor earnings or over promising on their projections. But in one way or another they are not meeting expectations.
Twitter, on the other hand, is still pushing the same product.
Do we really want to allow all that power to be consolidated into company boards and executives?
Additionally OP alludes to a greater vision which a company may use to impact its decision making on new projects to pursue.
now you have a bunch of investors who are upset that they invested in a company at a 16 billion dollar valuation that has jack diddly squat for income and has no promise of some magical "over the horizon" way to monetize
There is so much you can do to attract and keep your users engaged with Twitter's core business.
For the growth Twitter investors are looking, twitter needs to expand beyond its 140 character tweets and look for possible innovative ideas that can cultivate with its current infrastructure, data and talent.
Source: I was one of the developers of Jaiku, which had a very similar model.
Companies will want to continue exist and generate more profits for their owners, which means deploying new products - and these products might appear to be different but upon closer inspection they kind of make sense. Facebook is connecting everything (core product + whatsapp + the internet balloons etc.). Googles core business appears to be analyzing large, dynamic and complex datasets (the web, maps, their biotech research, self-driving cars).
Of course there are always outliers (Android), but companies go for profit. If they can incorporate something new they will.
With this mix, my twitter feed varies greatly. Unrest in Ferguson? Breaking news from the ground. Microsoft Build conference? Latest in tech from Redmond. Eagles training camp? Live highlights from reporters I trust. It's really a wonderful thing.
You need to look deeper if you think it has nothing for you.
Surely the onus is on Twitter to make the information easy to locate? This is one of their key failings, if you have to wade through too much noise to find something of interest, then the app isn't good enough.
Facebook is pretty much engineered to give you what you like - the "news bubble". There's no "civil unrest" on Facebook, or is there any disagreements or arguments or storms - things you don't like just go away. There are upsides to this of course, there is better user engagement and there's no trolls. However compared to Twitter, Facebook is a Brave New World.
Twitter, once it clicks is an addicting source of news - and its so hard to get it to click, I only really started seriously using twitter when I had blocked Facebook, Reddit, HN, and other distractions in an attempt to stay focused on work - even still, I don't tweet.
My "twitterverse" is much more diverse than any other platform I visit - (my facebook feed is now nearly exclusively pictures 20-something yuppies on vacation or HN which might as well be heavily curated) and there are a lot more interests outside my own bubble that I can at least pretend to have insight to just be being exposed to it.
However without the curation nor the inherent network effects of Facebook I can see why Twitter can be hard to use - you really have to invest in the platform and it does take a while.
It also delivers little value to businesses who advertise on it because people tweeting have a very short attention span. The Twitter ecosystem is closed since they closed their API. It blows my mind that Tweets don't appear in Google searches.
It's almost as though the management team are going out of their way to stifle growth and innovation. The areas where Twitter could have been powerful and unique have not been maximised at all.
There is a perceived need in Western society to hear about events right now even if those initial reports turn out to be inaccurate or plain false. Not only does it seem pointless to spend time discussing such reports but often they are a distraction from things that are important.
If the event is significant, there will be in-depth analysis at the weekend and I'll learn about it then.
I don't need it.
@friends Don't forget my birthday party on #(Aug 20, 8pm) at #SomePub
or
@friends Don't forget my birthday party! #invitation(Aug 20, 8pm, SomePub)
And I want to be able to create a list where all invitations from people in the @friends group go
And finance people could do things like
Twitter has bottomed #buy(TWTR)
And I want to be able to specify a rule that makes these messages go to my stock trading list
I don't know the business strategy to make sure that is viable, but I don't want it to be a mass-market product (except in terms of consumption)...the signal to noise ratio is so much better than other social platforms.
Twitter, quite bizarrely, is filling a void no longer filled by newspapers (wow, what that says about our attention spans). It's only peripherally mainstream but incredibly useful as a _tool_ to a small group of people. It's not any one thing: it's different depending on who you are.
Why is logged-out Twitter not a search engine? They have up-to-the-second thoughts from their users about everything and it's the first place I go when a site is down, or some news story is breaking. They're sitting on a search goldmine yet they're trying to convert signups and popular celebrity post clickthroughs.
If Twitter knows what everyone likes, or is talking about (especially the influencers), then that would be a good source of search results if I'm looking for something to buy or do. Its an entirely different search engine than Google or even Facebook.
I read the nytimes.com all the time. They have no idea who I am and never will. I'll never signup for an account. They still get to feed me ads.
I consume ESPN one-way. They have no idea who I am and never will. It's worth $50 +/- billion to Disney (per Forbes and others).
Why can't Twitter maximize that potential? Most of Google's global users don't have or don't use a G account, and are not signed in when they search (even if Google builds a profile on them anyway). That doesn't detract from Google's ability to monetize based on interest and intent. Twitter's intent will never be as valuable, but it wouldn't take much given we're talking about Google's intent being worth $100 billion in advertising sales in the near future.
My point being, perhaps Twitter's biggest mistake is in trying to be Facebook and worrying about users. Instead they should focus on maximizing output of high quality sources, and boosting total consumption.
Edit: I'm confused by the downvotes. I wasn't trying to turn it into a discussion about whether paywalls are right or wrong, I was just drawing out that either the parent was not reading nytimes all the time, or they were evading the paywall, or they were paying for access. They're talking about how Twitter should get value from giving readers access and using nytimes as an example - but it seems like a terrible example, given that nytimes actively tries to prevent people from reading more than 10 articles/mo for free.
How do you know you're not being tracked through cookies on other sites that you have logged into, or ad networks that interact with those sites? When I load nytimes.com and view the network trace, I see about 50 different domains appear there:
I'll stop there. I assume that these sites can track my persona whether or not I'm logged in, and probably with a pretty good chance even if I use an incognito window.1) use Firefox 2) use NoScript, don't allow Javascript on NY Times or any other domains it pulls in 3) set Firefox -> Preferences -> Privacy -> Clear history when Firefox closes -> clear all items except browsing history
To access NY Times (or really any website) first QUIT Firefox. Then restart. Now there are no cookies, caches, etc in existence. Then when you go to nytimes.com, all those other domains don't see any existing cookies. It's all new. Let them track you all they want.
When done reading, quit Firefox. Now none of the domains mentioned above can track you via cookies. Their tracking has accomplished nothing. They've all seen your single session on nytimes.com and nothing else!
Side effect from using NoScript is no paywall limits on number of articles.
One possible complaint is that I clear caches every time I exit Firefox. But I never notice any delays when starting, using a decent speed connection means the caches reload quickly. Also, I happen to have a knack for remembering passwords, so I don't mind re-entering on those sites that need them. But nytimes.com does not need a password in the scenario I just presented. (BTW I rarely re-use passwords across different sites).
I can still be tracked by IP address. Not much I can do about that other than force Comcast to give me a new one every once in a while. But that's merely a palliative, since a determined tracker can probably reestablish who I am from other information (c.f. panopticlick.eff.org).
My next step will be to get Squid running on my firewall, to help sanitize my HTTP headers, etc. But I've been meaning to do that for at least 10 years and haven't gotten around to it yet. So my paranoia does have its limits. :)
Even when you go to a tweet from an external link when not logged in, 20% of the vertical height is taken up by a big blue "Sign up for Twitter (or log in)" thing.
Just give me the content and lure me into hitting the "Follow" button.
This was why I put together our trending search feature @ http://theenginuity.com on the front-page.
We compile a list of social trends from our indexes of social data and make it easy to instantly figure out what's going on based on your language / region settings.
Logged in, yea you can get your feed and do whatever you want. But this logged-out page has absolutely 0 value for anyone who isn't a Twitter user.
I've gone to the twitter website (on my phone, especially) several times in the past to try and look up "local, now" things -- e.g. I hear a big bang/explosion, or there are fire/police in force nearby, or I thought there was a tremor, or there's a big storm.
And every time, I've sighed and been disappointed that (as I thought) I couldn't search tweets without being logged in, and I rarely ever log in to any services on my phone. And so then I clicked away, opened up facebook/NYT/boston.com/etc. instead.
I also thought about this when I started building Testimote. A lot of interesting things are being said (positive things about companies in my case), and are drowning out there in the great torrent coming from the firehose. I think there's room for both Twitter and outside companies to continue to build out curation ideas around this, as the data set is quite rich (and Twitter - at least recently - has been fairly generous with their basic APIs with things like rate limits [though I think lower cost plans would be fantastic for higher rate limits, rather than big money for the full hose].)
A combination of better curation and rebuilt developer relations could really help - maybe not user growth, per se, but certainly with service usage. What about web sites and mobile apps giving people a way to give feedback to the company (something as simple as a Tweet box that says "give instant public feedback") that simply tweets out the message using their account? People would start using Twitter without doing anything more than filling in a form and supplying an email address (for first-time users.) There's a lot of untapped potential around this. I think it also helps to think of Twitter as a giant, sometimes overlapping set of IRC channels and DMs, but with the ability to tap into it all. Like with IRC bots that would catch stuff, and put it in a database. Interesting conversations happening, not much being done with it. Twitter could encourage people to do more with it from the outside, and help everyone, including themselves.
It still has tons of potential if cards are played right.
Twitter, as a company, seems to assume that the former is the default. I don't know if the majority of their users are actually like that. The vast majority of my tweets is replies to other people, and for most people I know it is the same, but of course, self-selection would do that. The analogy as twitter being unrolled IRC is, for me, definitely how I've been thinking of it for years.
My point is that if people are online and looking at the twitter homepage, they know what twitter is already. The exceptions to the rule would be a vanishingly thin slice of netizens.
If I remember correctly they recently announced a public homepage, and said they will be slowly rolling it out in the US.
My honest guess is they are freaking scared to change their website.
Another problem with a public homepage is scrapers. It is something they seem to be very careful about.
I use the phone app (simple, OK) and the OS X app (neglected, but a great way to use Twitter IMO). In those two apps, there isn't a logged out front page. They could improve both to create a useful equivalent though.
How they have 3000 employees and no one that has fixed their main product is very strange.
They should have better app options for content creators IMO. Not every user in a news-dominated social network is going to be a passive reader.
It has kind of happened already — Twitter bought Tweetie, which was a well-liked desktop client, and then let it languish.
"Whoa there, matey! You're not logged in. We can't just let you see our advertising-laden stream, click on it, and create revenue for us without an account, you know... Please jump through a sign-up process, that's going to mean looking for a username you like that isn't taken, giving us your email address, logging into that to find the email confirmation link, and then coming back here, and then you can finish that search you were doing on a whim."
From my perspective (a developer who has leveraged the API from 1.0 on), search has always been 'different'.
At first, it didn't exist. So some company (Summize) created it. Then, Twitter acquired them (actually their first acquisition).
Some time later the search method was absorbed into the Twitter API. The syntax hasn't changed since.
It always felt like they just re-deployed the Summize app and proxied an API path to it. Though it's quite likely it's been rewritten many times by now.
Farfetched, but I guess I'm saying it may be a cultural thing.
https://www.facebook.com/
In fact, they are remarkably similar (and bland). No public search for Facebook either, which does not seem to be hurting them.
To be honest in a Google/search-dominated Net, I firmly believe homepages are irrelevant. You can see that in how little effort these large companies are investing in them: they only represent a tiny percentage of their total traffic.
I've got a G+ account, but still hit the site unauthenticated fairly often.
Overall, Twitter feels like being in a crowded bar. Lots of noise, not many conversations.
This could all just be me, though...
I agree that it's so fundamental to the brand and Twitter's identity that it might cause a lot of problems if it were reverted, but frankly it's completely arbitrary. If you want to produce 140 (or less) content, you can do that without a hard limit.
People hack around it because it's such a ubiquitous platform, but people would also like to address that audience in long(er)-form. It culminates in inconvenience for both producer and consumer.
I actually love twitter for those reasons.
I have many issues with it, in addition to the sign-in page and general lack of access:
For non-celebs, the value of having tens of thousands of followers is often close to zero, so it's more vanity nano-press than useful communication channel.
For newsy events, real-time reporting is incredibly noisy and repetitive.
Retweet count isn't a good reader value marker. There should be some better way to find the best content.
Developer relationships aren't great, and unlimited access to the firehose would help create some innovation - which is badly needed at this point.
Handling multiple accounts is painful. If you want to use the same devices to tweet for a business and tweet as a person it's really not fun.
Twitter management history is uninspiring. No one seems to be in charge of thinking of cool new stuff, so Twitter is turning into formerly cool old stuff.
I'm guessing there will be a buyout soon.
The problem is bigger. As per Financial Times, there is a larger shift in investor mood towards Twitter. It seems that there are many who intend to short Twitter indicated by the amount of "borrowed" shares.
Just curious: What's your setup or setup philosophy?
There was also much talk around the time Whatsapp was acquired by Facebook.. people were eager to find alternatives and could easily migrate.
I can't imagine Twitter being around in 5 years. IMO the best aspect Twitter has right now above all other services is it's realtime tag/search/trend system. The 140 char limit is antiquated, the userbase is mostly twitter joke addicts and an unceasing torrent of self promotional noise.
I'm still sorta hoping Ello get's their shit together. I'd gladly pay for their service instead of being immersed in AOL 2015.
Maybe for Danish architecture enthusiasts.
Many of my friends were active on Ello for a few weeks. It catered mostly to original content producers and artists, so most normal people who simply want to repost news articles and music videos were deterred from being tossed into the "noise" category.
If you focused on mobile in the right ways, you could turn Twitter into a legitimate $30-50b company.
It's amazing that FB Newsfeed has basically taken the low hanging fruit from Twitter -- "normal" people sharing life events, leaving only weird communities of people interacting in public. There has to be a way to preserve that, grow that, and get interpersonal interaction among more closely-knit communities happening.
They had such a huge opening when Facebook fucked themselves with the shitty-HTML5-only-mobile-clients. Sad.
I know a lot of people will say "but thats what so great about twitter" and I would claim that it isn't, they just think it is. The short tweets and the asyncronous character of twitter creates quite a lot of noise and so you are actually reading way way more than interesting 140 character tweets you also read a lot of noise and redundancy.
No whats really great about twitter is that it's more centerede around interests than friendship and that this provide the actual value of using the service.
In my opinion, what Twitter is most useful for is sharing links and short updates to prompt action from your followers, like reading your new blog post. And because of this, it's not the kind of place where you want to spend a lot of time, because the content isn't that engaging, it's just the news ticker that you scroll through for 5 minutes and leave.
1) I think optimizing the naive-to-twitter experience is something which can't really be done through incremental A/B testable changes.
2) They have had technical capability limits which prevent them from surfacing great content for users based on what anyone else would call "ad tech". These are both technical and organizational/philosophical (which, over a long enough timescale, are the root cause of technical limitations in a $20b company).
3) (the obvious one involving the quote about clown cars and gold mines).
It's not just "not logged in", it's "haven't been an active user for a long time". If one of my friends joins and JUST follows me, Twitter is boring/useless as can be. Their "recommend to follow" thing is utterly inadequate. Compare this to Facebook which is fucking awesome from your first interaction.
If they force you to sign up, they get more user data for the pool. I don't think that the slice of their market they're losing out on by this is very big.
> Lowering the barrier to entry for that is critical.
The barrier to entry for content creation on twitter is absurdly low. It's not the login process. It's the content itself, which is only a couple of sentences. It's not editing a video, or writing a short article, or creating an image, or managing a forum. It's just 'spurt out what I'm thinking right now in one sentence'. Login processes are not the barrier to content creation, effort required is.
And I disagree in general - login processes are often a huge barrier. People don't want to create accounts everywhere; it used to be cool and novel, now it's a burden.
But, in terms of content creation that the GP mentioned (rather than content consumption), login processes are not the problematic part.
[alas I hope all of this was discussed and tested to death already]
A site I signed up for recently at least lets you log in by typing your existing username and password into the huge sign-up form. That was a breath of fresh air.
This is going to sound anecdotal, but still feel is telling: until my parents and my co-workers (enterprise IT professionals) see the benefit in adopting Twitter, then Twitter will forever be in limbo. I fear the same for reddit. Neither service has a product that supports a wide enough appeal to be considered for that demographic, and they are effectively the last mile in this equation.