Especially with those huge banners "While you were away" and "Who to follow"... you can't even disable those. I really like twitter, but the web interface (probably most of the time the first interaction potential new users have) really sucks.
I wonder how much each user would have to be charged to at least break even. Of course if their business model changed to a pay scheme I imagine a large portion of the user base would leave rather than stump up even a very modest fee.
Is there room for a similar service that charges a one-off fee, recurring monthly charge or fee per message?
Their business model was 1. Grow, 2. Grow, 3. Grow, 4. ?, 5. Profit.
It baffles me that they ever made it as far as going public. Its only avenues of monetization are advertisement and selling user data. What else could it charge for? Charging users a fee would kill it.
So they're buying it to kill it off? Like it's not heading that way on its own. See it makes no sense to me for Disney to buy them unless they want to keep it away from others.
Disney has been illegally replacing american tech workers with H1b Visa Holders for years now. I was making a smart ass comment about that, but ya it makes no sense for them.
Does "outsource" mean something different now? An H1B holder is someone who has come to the US to work. So, if they're working here in the US, in an office in the US...how is that "outsourcing"?
There's probably a useful conversation to be had about whether companies are using H1b talent to drive down the cost of technical labor rather than to fill gaps in the talent pool (they probably are). But, wrapping up that conversation in misleading language seems counter-productive.
From public news sources, I imagine it's the value prop of live streaming sports games -- ESPN is largely owned by Disney, and from what I've heard it's failing as of late.
Issue with Disney from a customer side is censorship.
ESPN (owned by Disney) subs are sliding. Have been for a while. I imagine that, given how the clusters of traffic on Twitter can be pretty dense around sports that there could be some integration there. Second, Disney has a pretty massive property book right now (there's, I think, either a Star Wars or MCU movie coming out every year until sometime into the 2020s) so maybe they could view Twitter as a sort of natural channel to deliver that content?
Google could by them, move the whole thing to AppEngine as a show case product for illustrating how well AppEngine scales.
Any one paying 17 billion USD (or even between 5 and 10 billion) would need to be able to extract at least the same value from the purchase. If not, the buyers stock price is going to take a huge hit. It will anyway if the purchase of Twitter can't be rationalised from the start.
But pretty much anyone buying Twitter would have to kill it in its current form.
There is a good chance you are right, but Bret Taylor works at Salesforce now and presumably he'd end up running it in some shape or form. That gives me some hope.
Amusingly I left SFDC to join Twitter, and in my exit interview the VP of the group I worked in suggested to me that Salesforce might buy Twitter and I'd come back that way. At the time the proposition was absurd - Twitter was valued at $3B and clearly had a lot of growth ahead of it. And now here we are!
Seems like a good time to be entertaining offers. With the election, Twitter is at its highest relevance ever, the news cycle nearly runs to the rhythm of Trump's tweets.
Why didn't they attempt to monetise journalism by providing users of Twitter with a subscription that allows them to skip the paywalls of big newspapers and that could automatically aggregate the individual micropayments into a revenue stream for the publishers that sign up? (This would make sense to me: often an individual interaction is worth very little, but the aggregate can find a buyer.)
Do massively funded startups get trapped into their original revenue-creation strategy due to the original vision they sold investors? It looks like that's the case, and if so that's terrible for manoeuvrability.
This is a sad outcome, but once upon a time Twitter had a choice: be the defacto messaging backbone for the Internet or compete with Facebook and be a destination website/app.
They chose the latter and rewrote their TOS to effectively eliminate 3rd party development on their platform. An entire ecosystem of companies, products and tools was destroyed because Twitter couldn't imagine or articulate the value of powering this backbone.
Companies are paying a lot, the problem is that you don't have a lower tier. Just to compare, in AdWords you can pay $ 5 if you want, you are not forced to have a budget of a thousands. AdWords was revolutionary in that aspect, before them you needed to have a budget for advertising in Yahoo or other networks.
I think Twitter didn't want to deal with small customers, indeed nobody wants to operate small accounts but if AdWords did it several years before Twitter, why did they never learn?
The problem with monetizing the Twitter stream is that you need rather a lot of data, often in real time, to do much of anything. So the minimum useful tier is accordingly expensive to provide.
The depressing thing for me is to know that when they show me a Starbucks ad, Twitter makes pennies for that. I would much rather just pay those pennies myself and not see ads.
I feel a bit like a shill because of how much I bring it up, but checkout Google Contributor[0].
It lets you pay a specific amount per month (IIRC from $2 to $15 or so) that you use to "bid" for ads spots just like the advertisers. If you win, then you'll see whatever you choose in place of the ad. Any money left over at the end of the month is refunded.
It won't help you in the twitter case, but it does remove a good amount of ads across the net, and it even has controls that you can go in and whitelist/blacklist some websites from receiving contributions, as well as a full breakdown of where your money is going.
I've removed 16,000 ads since I signed up in april 2015
I think you are right. I was thinking yesterday how much I wish there were comment sections at the bottom of news articles that consisted of twitter posts (like how facebook has plugins for a comment field). It would make sharing the article or commenting thoughts very easy.
They could have kept the 140-char service as a free service, to raise the profile of their brand. And it probably would have been more successful without the increasingly desperate attempts to "monetise" it by stuffing your timeline with keyword-based advertising.
Meanwhile, every app or website with a messaging or notification function could have been using (and paying for) Twitter's API and infrastructure underneath. And all using a single Twitter account, so that every subscription to any of their customers' services would be a new account for them.
It could have been a great business model, but their leadership did have the imagination to try anything other than keyword advertising.
And they would have given up control of the experience, and the types of discussion and interaction would have been different, and the "X and Y fought on twitter last night" would have become "X and Y fought on Zthingthatintegrates with twitter" instead.
It's where famous and infamous people go to boast and to brownnose each other and score points. It's a forum to continue high school style social interaction (peer pressure and peer approvals) Or, as nirvana said, territorial pissings.
That social approval is what defines what's socially acceptable everywhere.
Twitter has expanded the boundaries of politically correct / acceptable speech, by enabling that brown nosing and echo chamber re-enforcement and not cracking down further on what's acceptable speech on their medium.
I agree with most of your assessment and would add that I find that so much "meaningful content" is now almost required to be packaged and "sold" as a Twitter bite. So much meaningful and necessary content is not reducible to 140 characters, but gets overlooked because it wont garner the social points that it needs to make the poster "popular" or the content recognized.
Even our political campaigns are now reduced to tweet wars, and platforms seem to need to be (lossy) compressed into 140 characters, or maybe 3 if it's very important. If you have a string of longer than 3 tweets, you lose a majority of your audience.
Twitter is a good tool, but simply should not be the de facto anything other than short messaging, in my opinion.
I am not sure I would call what happens on Twitter discussions. It's a great platform for posting things that are easily misunderstood or taken out of context due to their brevity. Then someone starts a witch-hunt, which in turn sparks a counter-witch-hunt. In the end no one is any wiser, but everyone is little more bitter.
I think the appeal of Twitter is feeling "in the loop" due to the real-time nature of the service. But in reality most of the content is just meaningless noise. It's hard to find any signal on that platform.
Plenty of what you mention is true and is a major problem with Twitter. That said, there remain some vibrant, niche Twitter communities where discussions do take place (the NBA comes to mind immediately)
Minor League Baseball as well. Speculation about scouting reports, and potential call-ups is really fun. I'm a huge baseball fan (as I imagine many here might be), and this kind of thing is just not talked about on SportsCenter and it adds a human element to The Game. Concur about the NBA. NBA-Twitter is awesome.
Twitter is a huge, huge place and your conclusions are massively over-generalized. There's lots and lots of good stuff: analysis of news stories, humor, statistics, low-level or amateur reporting. Covering tons of niches: sports, politics, music, "Black Twitter".
It's true that it's a poor platform for adversarial conversation or debate, but that's no reason to dismiss the whole thing.
I've been on Twitter for seven years and in that time I've curated a timeline which is, bar none, the most entertaining and informative web destination available to me, specifically tailored to my interests and disposition.
> They became the defacto place for public discussion instead.
I've always view Twitter as the commerical break and news teasers for the internet. I rarely see good thorough discussions on Twitter especially anything expected to last more than 30 hours of relevance.
Even in their own product, they kept deemphasizing the messaging aspect of it -- from small things like timeline filtering & reordering to large things like Moments.
This election has proven the value of old tweets; as one candidate in particular has a penchant for making shit up, and then pretending later he didn't make shit up.
That said, I thought about this recently when @pmarca took a break from twitter and all of his tweets disappeared, and I figured, "Well, yes, I follow him and enjoy his tweets...but I never planned to go back and read the old ones." It is a fleeting and temporary medium, like a conversation rather than an article or book.
Nonetheless, I really doubt storage is anywhere near the majority of the cost of running Twitter. It takes a lot of 140 character tweets to fill up a terabyte.
> Nonetheless, I really doubt storage is anywhere near the majority of the cost of running Twitter. It takes a lot of 140 character tweets to fill up a terabyte.
Tweets contain photos, videos, gifs, etc. Text is far from the only things that would need to be stored.
I'm endlessly amused by the attitude people get over websites they like. I'm not sure what your personal argument for forcing twitter to be a utility is, but I'm sure it would make me laugh. Care to let me know?
It doesn't sound like you have a particularly open mind on this one, but I always address this question when it comes up on Hackner News because it's something I have strong feelings about.
I'm not going to defend Twitter being a utility (which the parent comment also doesn't mention) but I will say that in general, it's very clear to me we haven't worked out what kind of institutions can best deliver services in the digital age.
It's profoundly dubious that Twitter - a defacto 'town square' for public discussion - is owned by an institution that, at best, has few incentives to make it effective for the purpose which it is widely used.
This is significant in democracies, where the quality of national decision making will be directly linked to the design of the channels in which public debate happens.
The idea that we can take full and fair advantage of the opportunities the web offers exclusively through profit-motivated corporations is flatly wrong.
The fact that as Twitter users we agreed to some T&Cs doesn't mean we can't also wish for a more democratic digital public space - which I assume is what the parent comment is really getting at.
I think its a great idea, if a model could be found that would work (with a person at the top with the vision for such a model). Government run just screams surveillance to me, and is a non-starter for a huge percentage of the population. A non-profit wikipedia-like model could work I suppose, but I'm not sure what the problems would be with such a prolific service.
I would strongly dispute that. Twitter has that much public value. Relativley few people use for critical information. It's a default option for broad communication, but it's hardly the only one.
My issue with Twitter is people need to learn how to take things into their own hands - even if it means at their own expense. Realistically, this is impractical for most people, especially the technically illiterate or those too poor to pay for hosting (even if it is only for personal use, instead of being open to a public)
Twitter will never realistically be a utility. But there can be an open and distributed replacement for it that will meet the same goals, with fewer corporate restrictions and a more fractured government intervention.
GNUSocial is a great replacement for Twitter. With multiple hosts, your data is yours, you can move data between hosts and you can even choose to host it for yourself to control your own data.
> it's too useful as infrastructure to hand it over to some greedy jackasses.
This is an extremely dubious claim and I don't see why everyone is so eager to support it.
What exactly makes Twitter valuable infrastructure? What compelling service does it offer to people and society? What other things would stop working if Twitter were shut down?
All I see is a bunch of people shouting at each other. Most people do not and will never use Twitter.
We had public debate long before Twitter existed. [0] I have full confidence that if Twitter were to close tomorrow that we would continue to have public debate, and it might even be better debate.
[0] You might claim that Twitter is superior to other forms of public debate, but then I'd ask if you're really happy with the way politics are going.
If Twitter's current intent is to make it a platform for debate. They make it awfully confusing place for any newcomers. A crummy character count, that forces everyone to speak in acronyms, hashtags, and shortened URL's. It's a miserable experience for any type of dialogue, with various overlays, and drill downs, that honestly gets me lost most of the time. TechCrunch summarized this well.
I am, of course, not saying that Twitter is the only kind of public debate, or that public debate did not exist before Twitter.
I am saying that for millions of people Twitter is a unique way to join public debate. Personally, I have interacted with several public individuals who I couldn't conceive of contacting any other way. This is an example of two politics professors taking the time to explain something apparently well known in their circle to me:
If it does not suit you, fair enough. I find newspapers disinteresting, but I would prefer to live in a society that has them to one that does not. I would also prefer, as with Twitter, that their ownership structure was a little different (I'm in the UK).
I agree that Twitter has design flaws as a medium for public discussion, and I also believe that some of them could be alleviated if Twitter was run was by people with different incentives.
I myself am very happy with the character count, the truth is that the limiting factor is not how long a message you are permitted to write, but how long a message others will be inclined to read. I suspect Twitter is just being honest with us in this regard.
Certainly it is not the place to articulate a nuanced view. It is a place where you can find a unique audience.
Social networks are in practice a natural monopoly. Having the operation of the natural monopoly pass be handled by the state is one solution.
I think another solution is for the state to force the operator of the social network to keep its APIs open. (It's anti-competitive to do otherwise, would be the argument.)
I think it's interesting that there's a Wiki page about this issue.[0]
This is hilarious to me. If you find something valuable, your proposal is to take it and have it "owned by the world?" And I thought our presidential candidate were bad.
It's not crazy, it happens sometimes with private businesses that grow into critical public infrastructure.
New York City's subway system is one example. It started out in the 1900s as a couple of private companies, Interborough Rapid Transit (IRT) and Brooklyn Rapid Transit (BRT). The lines these two companies operated suffered more and more over time from overcrowding, leading the city to establish a third, public system in the '30s, and then in 1940 to just buy out IRT and BRT and merge all three systems into the single, publicly-operated network that serves NYC today. (See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_New_York_City_S... for more on this.)
GPS is out there for anybody to use for free. It's incredibly useful and the value to the economy of having that there as a utility anybody can use is huge.
Perhaps Twitter as a utility could be just as valuable. Maybe it doesn't need to be monetized.
But GPS is broadcast, and Twitter is ultimately packed-switched. I.e. the "GPS providers" don't have to pay more money just because there are more users - the satellite signals are already in the air, free and open for use by anyone who knows how.
We still need the thing that Twitter ought to have been, a public short messaging service.
Who is going to step up? What kind of institution could deliver something like that, while remaining open and accountable? A Wikipedia style foundation?
My guess is that it needn't be (too) expensive to run, especially if you hand over responsibility for long term storage of the messages to third parties.
My PhD (in progress) is based on the public utility of Twitter data. I'm deeply sad about this.
This is exactly the problem that XMPP is designed to solve. You pick an XMPP provider who you trust, and you can get cross-provider traffic through XMPP Federation. One of the largest XMPP providers is Google Talk, which lets you hook right into the standard GChat.
The problem is precisely that people keep re-inventing the wheel here. We don't need Facebook Chat and all the other deliberately-incompatible protocols that keep getting built out, we just need people to implement XMPP.
Realistically it would have to work the same way as spam filtering does for email.
Come to think of it, it's surprising that spamming is not more prevalent on SMS networks, because it's the same kind of federated system. But I guess access may be gated well enough and enforcement strong enough to prevent that.
XMPP is simply a publisher/subscriber architecture. So you can just have a "global" publisher that any user subscribes to when they get on the service (registered user or not) for public viewing. The protocol isn't limited to just private chat.
I'm in agreement that I wouldn't necessarily choose XMPP for Twitter but under different reasons. There is literally nothing holding back the XMPP protocol from saving and publishing messages to the public viewing. XMPP is the eXtensible Messaging and Presence Protocol and suppose to be extremely modular so I really don't think what you're describing is impossible.
Having looked at this in some detail, my feeling is that no federated solution can work. The reason is that the underlying architecture leaks through to the user experience in unacceptable ways.
As soon as a user has to understand federation - at all - I believe the proposition is dead to most people. For example Diaspora's 'pods' are, I think, fatally confusing. (I think Zuckerberg realised this, which is why he donated money to Diaspora - a project he could see would fail, but might also crowd out other OS alternatives to Facebook.)
For sure, XMPP can be part of the tech solution, in fact I suspect there are really excellent open source tools to address many of the inherent issues (perhaps Apache Cassandra can be Twitter's contribution to democracy) but I think the real problem is a social one.
You need an institution that can credibly promise to provide a platform in the long run and which can also get critical mass in at least one community. I believe the critical mass might well follow if the institution is widely perceived as reliable and legitimate in the way a foundation like Wikimedia is.
> How would you provide the functionality that hashtags do on the public timeline?
That is what search engines are for. The whole point of the Internet is that you can build businesses on top of open protocols with interoperable implementations. Giving up on open protocols and control of data (you can't even save images on Instagram...) "because hashtags" is incredibly shortsighted.
Twitter is already a federation of servers and services. It doesn't seem outrageous to imagine another server or cluster of servers being owned by a second party.
I think we may be talking past each other here, what I mean is that federation must be strictly and absolutely invisible to users.
Perhaps I was wrong to say that federation is in principle ruled out, but I do think that it must be invisible to users. - Including namespacing usernames to nodes within the federation as with the @ sign in email.
I believe this is true in spite of the technical beauty of federated solutions, and it's exactly that beauty that's lured so many onto the rocks.
I don't think the namespace issue is as big of a deal as you seem to think it is. People are used to dealing with namespaces when they make phone calls, send emails, send a letter, get a license plate, or go to a website.
I'm not sure I fully understand this comment. What does it mean to have an "XMPP backend" but not as the interface? And yes, they did use a full, open source XMPP solution for Facebook chat when it started out called "ejabberd". Ejabberd is a terrific solution if you quickly want to have a scalable, real-time messaging and event solution with low maintenance.
I'm not the person you responded to but I would assume that it would look like any other service that uses a different protocol or format on the front-end than the back-end. E.g. a REST service that talks JSON on the front end but speaks SQL to a database. So they have an XMPP backend that uses a translation layer to send a custom AJAX or socket-based protocol to the browser.
Yeah, I was pretty sure that Facebook was just using straight-up XMPP at one point in time. They have been actively trying to drive traffic to their Facebook Messenger app - first by shutting down their XMPP interface, then blocking applications that talk to their web interface, and finally by removing Facebook Messenger functionality from their mobile website.
Partially. Part of the XMPP protocol is establishing presence which I don't think is a requirement for Twitter (I wouldn't know, I don't use Twitter). Establishing presence for XMPP usually means a constantly connected client via TCP. The protocol would probably have to be tweaked so that clients don't necessarily have to remain connected to use the service. Might be possible to do this in XMPP but would require some work.
Maybe it was too early back then to see the value in it, but does anyone remember App.net? Dalton Caldwell (now working at YCombinator) had a plan to build a backbone for developers to build on top off without fear of APIs being taken away from them[0]. The idea came about from this exact topic (Twitter becoming more and more hostile to developers)[1].
I remember App.net with fondness. I was a paying customer and the community was awesome, pretty much entirely troll-free techie types, and I never felt awkward just jumping into a random thread or conversation.
First was the great apps, and the features that continued to roll out for users. Unfortunately it was under appreciated.
"The bad news is that the renewal rate was not high enough for us to have sufficient budget for full-time employees. After carefully considering a few different options, we are making the difficult decision to no longer employ any salaried employees, including founders."
http://blog.app.net/
So effectively development stopped in 2014 and it's on maintenance mode since then.
App.net proved that locking down the API wasn't Twitter's problem. Once people got over the initial phase of trying out every App.net app they stopped using it. It was the thing that brought them there, but it wasn't enough to keep them using it, regularly.
Twitter has very limited use. It's good for news/media companies to announce headlines and perhaps for businesses to reach customers with product announcements or recalls.
But in terms of having any sort of meaningful discussion on Twitter or the sharing of anything approaching deep thought or analysis, forget it. To me, there is close to nothing of value that can be added by the ordinary individual except perhaps links to other sites.
Personally, I despise Twitter. I do not use it. Never had an account, and never will. I don't know what the future is for the company and the service, but I can only hope that if they are purchased the acquirer does it purely to remove competition from the market and has a celebratory dumpster fire with the servers. If only I was so lucky. Twitter is part of the ego machine that feeds the narcissists that pervade social media.
Eliminating 3rd-party devs was only half the issue, the other half was the lack of velocity.
I've been saying for a while now that my cofounder and I add more functionality to our startup every two weeks than Twitter's 4,000 employees add to theirs in an entire year. Now this is obviously an apples-and-oranges comparison for all sorts of reasons, yet all caveats aside I think it's still pretty telling.
It's easy to speculate on what could have been but we shoudn't forget that Twitter actually did exceptionally well for itself.
I personally could never have imagined that Twitter would become so popular. I'm still surprised that people are using it (the whole thing doesn't make any sense to me).
It doesn't make sense until you find an active community around a topic you are truly interested in. The NBA is what sucked me in, and it remains 95% of the reason I used Twitter (the other 5% is for when customer service is unresponsive to my chats or emails)
I think this is why I love Twitter, but also the reason many people don't.
Unlike Facebook, where I feel beholden to follow the people I know, Twitter is different. I can follow the thoughts of people I've never met, but greatly respect. There are tons of great designers, writers and journalists that make my Twitter feed entertaining and informative. Not everyone is interested in design or media and it can be difficult to discover accounts.
The other (previous) issue for Twitter is the feed. If you follow 1,000 people it will can be overwhelming. I was hesitant about the "You might have missed" section, but think it is a step in the right direction.
I can follow the thoughts of people without having to see most or all of their thoughts. I can follow people without becoming committed to their antics.
And it's become a remarkably good way for those people you want to know to reach out to individuals. I know a couple up-and-coming rappers who got some buzz and found their idols casually reaching out to chat on twitter.
Mostly the same for me, except baseball. I get to follow teams, reporters, and players. I learn about charities the players are involved in, statistical reports on the sport and games themselves, etc. It's pretty useful.
I agree about twitter and sports. For me, everyone who uses twitter and generally enjoys it talks about sports. A lot. Twitter is the best social media platform for discussing games and getting information about the game you are watching from teams, journalists, leagues, statisticians, and fellow fans. I'd wager 80% of my tweets are sports related.
Twitter is the best platform for discussion of a "live" event as it unfolds. These events include TV epidoes, news conferences, policitcal debates, games, etc. A user can see what a famous person thinks or follow other hardcore fans who have great knowledge of what they are watching. I have become friends with several people due to twitter and sports.
Facebook, Instagram, SnapChat, etc are not great for discussing something that is ongoing over the course of multiple hours. Twitter is. The ability to mute words and hashtags to avoid spoilers or certain subjects is super handy. In addition, one can follow multiple live events in a singular, timeline fashion. Twitter is very good at getting people to talk about live events. Its problem is that it is hard to see a place for it outside that, and it is hard to monotize that.
I absolutely agree with your sentiment, but how could they have become the "defacto messaging backbone" and made money at the same time? What should their business plan have been?
It reminds me of Sun and Java. Sun built a really useful product, used by hundreds of thousands of developers, but it didn't make enough money to sustain the company. They tried opening it up and that just hurt them commercially.
I won't pretend to know how they should have monetized, that's what @jack is compensated richly to figure out. My point is that the chance to be the messaging backbone of the Internet was more valuable and a better use of Twitter's resources (human and financial capital) than the certainty of being defeated by Facebook.
I'm curious, how allowing 3rd party development would have made Twitter the messaging backbone of the internet? What exactly do you mean by 'messaging backbone'?
Why would anyone want to buy Twitter? Sure they have a great brand, loyal fans, but pretty much no way to monetizing them.
It's pretty obvious that Twitter has access to tons of interesting data, I just question if it's anything more than simply "interesting". While Twitter is huge, it's not really ubiquitous enough that you can use it for measuring things like effectiveness of marketing campaigns.
How many news stories are there every day about a politician or a celebrity tweeting about X? Just because it isn't monetisable doesn't mean it isn't valuable to the right (media, probably) organisation.
Monetisation usually implies end users paying for a product. I don't think Twitter will ever get to that point. But a media company like Disney (who, remember, own ESPN) could absolutely capitalise on the value of Twitter for live sports, for example. It would be valuable to them.
Couldn't they do that now... for free? What's the benefit to buying Twitter? If it's due to missing functionality they could probably just pay Twitter to implement the features they're missing and it would be cheaper than buying them outright, while providing a safety net in case it fails.
Right now you're suggesting that e.g. Disney is buying Twitter, for 17 billion dollars, to implement an untested business case. The cost of failure in that case is at least the purchase price of Twitter, that seems like a massive gamble.
Being able to control the entire direction of a company is a lot more powerful than just paying them to add functionality. It also grants the ability to lock competitors out of the service once you've proved the new functionality is a success.
I don't think Twitter is worth $17bn, but we live in an era of excessively hyped up and unrealistic valuations, so I have no idea what the correct price actually is. Yes, buying Twitter is a gamble, but many acquisitions are.
Rich people buy assets that allow them to influence the world or simply have it as a trophy. See Bezos and WaPo, John Henry and Boston Globe, Carlos Slim and the NYT.
I totally see someone famous buying Twitter just to own it, or another company like Disney who just wants it to break-even. It has cultural and influential value now separate from profit.
Given how many of the valley's biggest thought leaders use Twitter very heavily, I'd be surprised if there weren't a lot of potential buyers. Then again, its value is high enough to shake out a lot of the smaller players, since the buy-in is pretty astronomically huge.
If the valley is an echo chamber (it is), then Twitter echoes louder than most things I can think of. Very few companies have the kind of reach and influence within the valley that Twitter has.
The operating cost is somewhat arbitrary and if a company like Google bought them there is almost 100% overlap on the technology and ads side. Only thing that would be twitter specific would be product.
I don't know if you're using the accounting terminology correctly here. Their GAAP costs are higher than revenue, but a very large percentage of that is compensation, and almost all of that compensation is stock grants. If the stock were to go to zero, the company would immediately be profitable, even if everything else stays the same.
I don't understand why people keep saying this. Twitter has multiple billions of dollars in revenue from monetizing their users.
Profitable? No. They built out a massive organization planning for user growth comparable to how fast Facebook was growing, but user growth stalled. There is a profitable business within Twitter, but someone has to be willing to do the gut job.
1. Massive access to a social network that can better integrate all their products.
2. Integration with their ad platform (improving monetization enough to make it break-even).
3. They'd own one of the most influential social networks in the world. Google buzz, Google wave, Google + were all massive failures.
4. Integration with things like Google News. They'd be able to understand trends almost perfectly (from both news stories and users).
I think people on HN and the like sometimes massively underestimate why Twitter is so important. Twitter as a big social network like Facebook is never going to happen. Their decision to pursue that route seems foolish in retrospect. Instead, what Twitter has is a smaller group of users that are extremely influential. Moreover, they have the most effective fan-out messaging platform in existence.
I think focusing on monetization/user only makes sense while TWTR is an independent company. Companies like GOOG, MSFT, etc. benefit greatly from the externalities of owning TWTR more than the business itself (consider Youtube, for example).
Does anybody know why they have never tried to create a premium version?
I've just googled, looks like they're making $0.55/user/month [1]
I would have totally paid $7-$10/yr for no-bullshit version without ads, focused on user experience instead of manipulating my attention. I bet many other people would too. And I would use it way more actively as a result.
Why do neither twitter nor facebook offer premium/business accounts? It's not like it would cost them users, many people can still use the free ad-supported version....
> Why do neither twitter nor facebook offer premium/business accounts?
Because it will cause their ad revenue to plummet. The users with money are the ones advertisers actually want to reach, so if you let them opt out of seeing advertising you'll just be left with an exclusive pool of users who won't buy anything. And no advertiser wants that.
It still remains unclear to me how letting users opt out of making Twitter $0.55/month by giving Twitter, say, $4.95/month is a bad idea. OK, so the advertising rates go down... so what? Advertising rates are not what a business is trying to optimize, revenue is.
Up to this point, the counter to this argument was basically "Well, what Twitter's doing is obviously working for them". But that's not quite as strong as it used to be now. How much money did Twitter leave on the table? It is, sure, possible that it would have been a net loss for them. But now I think a fresh look must be taken at the possibility that it would have been enough of a net gain to ensure their indepedence.
Plus one must consider the second-order effects of receiving subscription revenue. Might they have created a different and more valuable service to their customers and made even more as a result? Advertising-based businesses face the intrinsic paradox of trying to serve two customer bases at once who have somewhat opposed interests. (Even ignoring the socially corrosive influence of advertising incentivizing our smartest people to build the most powerful spying networks in history.) It is still not determined to my satisfaction that that is a stable business plan in the modern era.
One possible salutatory effect of Twitter's demise could be making the idea of subscriptions reasonable again. If even Twitter can't monetize entirely on advertising, who else can? Even Google and Facebook may be surprisingly fragile to a disruption in the advertising space, which is nominally not actually their business (even though of course it is). (The most likely disruption would be the continuing growth of ad-blocking software, but there's also the black swan possibilities as well.)
> It still remains unclear to me how letting users opt out of making Twitter $0.55/month by giving Twitter, say, $4.95/month is a bad idea.
Hypothetically speaking, allowing those users to opt out would mean Twitter makes $0.20/month from the remaining users, rather than $0.55/month. Will enough users buy a premium subscription to make up that loss? I don't see the evidence that they would.
Of course, it's all hypothetical and none of us know the actual numbers involved. But I'd wager Twitter has looked at it at least once and decided it was not a good idea.
> Hypothetically speaking, allowing those users to opt out would mean Twitter makes $0.20/month from the remaining users, rather than $0.55/month. Will enough users buy a premium subscription to make up that loss? I don't see the evidence that they would.
It can't work worse than operating at a loss until they go out of business, which is Twitter's current trajectory.
It still remains unclear to me how letting users opt out of making Twitter $0.55/month by giving Twitter, say, $4.95/month is a bad idea.
$0.55/month is the mean for the entire userbase. The actual amount for any particular user can be far more or far less (well up to .55 less) than that.
Users who are more likely to pay 4.95/month are much more likely to be worth more than 4.95/month in advertising revenue.
Few people think they know others that have made purchase decisions based on online ads, yet here we have a hundred billion dollar worldwide online ad industry.
You're putting words in my mouth. I said I didn't know anyone who's made a purchasing decision because of an ad on Twitter. Online ads as a larger entity—that's a completely different story. The vast majority of the online advertising spend which you speak of goes to PPC search, not the 2016 equivalent of banner ads.
> yet here we have a hundred billion dollar worldwide online ad industry.
... which is plagued with spam and fraud. Victims are both the advertisers (who pay for ad slots that are viewed/clicked by bots) and the consumers (who suffer from malware ads, un-usable websites because there are 30+ trackers, ad brokers etc. on one single site, and higher product prices because the vendors have to pay for ads). The only ones who profits are the countless middle men - ad brokers and "big data analysis/retargeting" companies which kill user privacy on a global scale while providing next to zero value.
We should, once and for all, simply massively regulate advertising and re-think about how we as a society fund the services currently funded by ads. Especially in media, where "real" journalism had to step back in favor of ever more clickbait crap...
I wonder if Twitter missed out by not being Patreon. There's a proven business model of paying content creators directly and they already had one of the platform for content creators to communicate with fans.
Well Facebook has "Facebook At Work" (https://work.fb.com/) that sort of accomplishes this, though at the moment they're not charging anything.
Also, it's a bit of support/maintenance/overhead for something that doesn't have as much support as you might think - otherwise tools like Google Contributor would be blowing up. I imagine like ~1% of users would actually opt to pay, maybe 2 or 3%, based upon my experience with freemium business models at a few different companies.
I think there's the hypothesis that these "pro subscribers" have higher incomes and are therefore better ripe for advertising demand. I would argue that Google has enough data and intelligence to internalize this hypothetical lifetime value from ad dollars into a reasonable price for a monthly subscription that would be roughly equivalent. If the counterpoint is that $7-10 / year doesn't quite equal how much Google could get for the same user through advertising (which could be substantially higher I think,) then it's hard to fault Sundar or Jack Dorsey or any other tech CEO in this space for going with what would provide better value to shareholders (which is ultimately their responsibility, for better or worse.)
My proposal for them has always been simple: just charge for extra characters.
Look at Twitter for a moment the way game designers look at free-to-play mobile games. Whittling Tweets down to 140 characters is the sort of un-fun, repetitive process that a game designer would describe as a "grind" (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grinding_(video_gaming)). And free-to-play games have established that letting players buy their way out of having to grind is a completely workable business model.
So just let Twitter power users skip their way out of grinding to get their Tweets under the 140 character limit by letting them buy bags of extra characters, preferably at low enough prices to be attractive as an impulse buy. If you spend all day on Twitter, and you're faced with the need spend five minutes editing a tweet to get it down under the limit, being able to just pay ten cents for a bag of ten extra characters and get that five minutes of your life back might be very attractive! And from Twitter's perspective, those ten cents are more or less pure profit, since the marginal cost of shipping 150 bytes over the wire instead of 140 is next to nothing. Free users can keep on using Twitter for free, power users can become the "whales" that provide the revenue that keeps the lights on, Twitter makes money. Everybody wins.
Kind of surprised Facebook is not interested or at least there's no news of Facebook being interested. Facebook already owns social networking, messaging and photo-sharing. Twitter would fit nicely into this portfolio as a niche for breaking news. Plus this would be an amazing opportunity to build an integrated user profile across all these platforms.
Wonder what the DOJ and the anti-trust guys would think of this though.
My understanding (at least for Europe) is that since neither Twitter or FB charges 'users', there is no market which they are considered to be monopolising.
Of course they are in the advertising market, but there are not dominant there.
Internet was a way to share information, things, it was never for money. Money destroy everything. Human Rights Council have stated "to condemn the restrictions on access to information on the Internet" (A/HRC/32/L.20)
It's all about ethic and control of the source. If you can check the source, you can't tell if it's true or not and also access to information should not be limited by your money.
That's an analogue to saying that 'tools destroy everything'. Money is just a tool, you can use it for good and you can use it for bad.
The 'old' internet is still there, underneath all the ad-driven cruft, but for some reason the majority of the people active on the net prefer those ad driven services. I'm not one of them but It's hard to ignore the fact that you - and I - are not in the majority here.
As for being able to check the source, that hasn't been true in a very very long time except for scientific publications (and even there you have to check to see who funded the study).
Still Twitter is the fastest and the least spammed medium to follow the cream of your / any technological industry: follow just a selection of very relevant influencers or firms and you are done, you have a live coverage of news and issues. Neat and passive.
I got put off on using twitter for so long. It was till probably 8 months ago I started using it. And was able to get over their character limit. (which was mostly my reason for not using it)
I tend to type too much ("I would have written a shorter letter, but I did not have the time."), so Twitter has been good for me. Twitter has value in teaching brevity.
Let's hope the bidders will factor in 'change of control' risks because depending on who buys it those could be substantial. Twitter is one of those companies that may be worth substantially more or less depending on who is bidding.
Good on them--it's a wise choice to get out before the bubble pops.
I've said before[1] that Twitter is the poster child for the tech bubble and that people's opinion of Twitter is a good litmus test for people's understanding of the industry. It sounds like Twitter's management understands their position and is looking to get out while there are still people who think Twitter has value.
There's this and two more tweets, in rotation. They are three sports-related Tweets from two years ago, with that shit image quality, and what's even more amusing: since I'm based in Spain, they believe I'm interested in Argentinian football, probably because I speak the same language (but Spaniards usually know absolutely nothing about sports from South America, neither are they interested in that).
Even better, the cookie use banner moves the tweet down, making it overlap with the footer.
And this has been like this for two years already. I guess nobody ever logs in in the company?
The logged out user experience was a topic of discussion since before I joined, and I spent over 4 years there and have been gone for almost 2. This is the real problem Twitter has internally -- lots of interest in improving things, but no intestinal fortitude to ship things, especially if they don't A/B test well. The logged out home page you see tests very well at one thing and one thing only: getting people to login. What it doesn't test well at (and no alternative demonstrated better performance at) is getting people who don't care about Twitter to try it.
My personal hypothesis is that Twitter is a ~500M user niche social network. Which sounds absurd to me, because when I started using the Internet there were ~15M people online, total. But there it is.
Twitter only makes sense for public figures. For regular people, nobody on Twitter gives a crap about what you have to say.
Facebook is fundamentally better because you only get updates from people who you know in real life - When you post something on FB, those people actually care about what you have to say (interactions are bidirectional).
To the average user, Twitter is just a glorified RSS news feed. You read other people's tweets, but nobody actually reads your tweets. The interaction is mostly unidirectional.
I only got into twitter to follow people I knew in real life; I've ended up following a lot of strangers and public figures and I've made a few friends over it. My wife has made even more friends by tweeting along with TV, especially Eurovision.
When you publish something, how do you let your followers know about it? Have you ever compared how much traffic your RSS feed generates compared to your tweets?
Your post is just not true. There are writers, artists, actors, etc who have been discovered through Twitter or have used it to significantly broaden their audience. @sosadtoday and Mira Gonzalez are two writers off her top of my head who basically built their careers on Twitter. And this isn't even getting into the "weird Twitter" phenomenon.
Point being, people do read what you say and it's possible to get a lot of exposure. Maybe you're just not tweeting anything interesting.
This will get downvotes here, because many HNers somehow see value in Twitter. But I'm actually surprised that many people would bid on Twitter at anywhere close to its current valuation of ~$17 billion. Here's one reason why:
Go ask any major affiliate marketing network how they feel about Twitter traffic. Many of them have an outright ban on it - meaning it actually has negative value to their advertisers. It simply doesn't monetize nearly as well as the traffic from other social networks. Much like the average Android user is worth far less to app developers than an iOS user is, the Twitter user base is simply not worth much to people looking to monetize it. That's a huge problem when asking someone to justify a $17B acquisition price.
Means (and typically last-click based means at that) are surprisingly poor summaries of distributions.
Even if the average for Twitter users is low, there are probably pockets of value for particular services. These are potentially not the kinds of customers these affiliate networks are interested in.
Your Android point is rather different, given the wide disparity of Android devices.
If 80% of Android devices are worth less than $10 per year, while 20% are worth $100 per year, and all iPhones are worth $100 per year, you'll have a much lower mean value for Android while also having a subset of very profitable users.
As you may have noticed, I'm not a fans of means in the advertising world.
On your point on Twitter's value, I see a lot of missed opportunity.
It felt like they slowed down really early in terms of what they did (and specifically their success with their product changes). Their growth stalled at quite a low point (relative to other social networks/services), which made it hard for them to attract good people, which further compounded the effect.
But then, I never used Twitter (and maybe that's the problem).
>Your Android point is rather different, given the wide disparity of Android devices.
I disagree that it's different. Of course there are pockets of both value and worthlessness everywhere, but overall the LTV of an Android user to developers and advertisers is a small fraction of that of an ioS user, and a Twitter user is worth (to advertisers) an even smaller fraction of the value of a Facebook user.
At scale, averages are what count.
>As you may have noticed, I'm not a fans of means in the advertising world.
I did notice that, and I cannot disagree with you there. But currently, for many advertisers, last-click based means is the most efficient available attribution model, even though I agree that it's far from perfect.
I don't think its efficient, just easy. It makes very little sense though. Do you attribute which beer you drink to the sign outside the bar?
I think that its difficult to assess your premise under a last-click model, to be honest. When you look at the history of advertising, its very difficult to believe that a direct response (measurable by click) is actually the whole thing.
I'm pretty sure I've never clicked on a Coca-Cola ad, but I have bought a lot of their product over the years.
I mean, conditional on your experience with the value of Twitter users (for a particular set of clients/services) and a last-click model, I don't disagree with you, I just think that such a view of advertising leaves an awfully large amount of stuff out.
Full disclosure: mobile attribution is hard, there is not standard or even dominant way of tracking views there (i believe) and so for some mobile-heavy/only advertisers better attribution methods are just a pipe dream at this point.
Very curious to hear from the HN crowd - do people actually see high ROI on Twitter ads? I've personally conducted full scale Facebook ads for a consumer product company with great success (very positive ROI) but almost literally couldn't get anyone to buy product via Twitter ads. Where does that $2B in revenue come from!?
I would suspect it might have something to do with promoted tweets and things which drive traffic to their twitter/website. These sites are paying for the traffic (which then earns them ad revenue) and seem to be happy with the results. I have seen very few ads for purchasable items on twitter, just lots of traffic driving.
Ads aren't their only revenue stream - they also charge for better access to real-time (and archival) data - for example via Gnip[1], which they purchased in 2014.
I think it depends on the intentions of the buyer. If they think they can grow like Facebook, I think they are screwed.
On the other hand, if they work from the assumption that Twitter is done growing and now it's time to focus on existing users rather than potential users, they might do okay, depending on the purchase price.
If Salesforce goes down this route I don't think it will end well for either entity. Granted, I'm not sure I'd prefer Planatir Technologies to pick up Twitter (not that they will) but from a business perspective I don't think Salesforce should chase the kind of market - or whatever it is - that Twitter has. I've had to use Salesforce on several occasions and as a relatively recent Twitter user from time to time, I don't see constructive overlap. Could be me, I know.
It's interesting that Twitter is discussed in the media very often lately thanks to Trump's tweets, but investors still seem to fail to see the world-changing power of a broadcast platform.
Let's hope that something else emerges post-Twitter that is similarly broadcast-focused, not real-name oriented, and lightweight.
248 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 256 ms ] threadIs there room for a similar service that charges a one-off fee, recurring monthly charge or fee per message?
It baffles me that they ever made it as far as going public. Its only avenues of monetization are advertisement and selling user data. What else could it charge for? Charging users a fee would kill it.
If only Twitter managed a small pie ...
* Edit removed the word "outsource"
It's illegal to replace a job of an american worker using H1b Visa's.
Maybe insourcing is a better word :)
Issue with Disney from a customer side is censorship.
Best I could do.
Any one paying 17 billion USD (or even between 5 and 10 billion) would need to be able to extract at least the same value from the purchase. If not, the buyers stock price is going to take a huge hit. It will anyway if the purchase of Twitter can't be rationalised from the start.
But pretty much anyone buying Twitter would have to kill it in its current form.
But then again, Twitter itself has been a bad fit for Twitter, so maybe something will come out of this.
[0] and valuation as a side-effect.
Why didn't they attempt to monetise journalism by providing users of Twitter with a subscription that allows them to skip the paywalls of big newspapers and that could automatically aggregate the individual micropayments into a revenue stream for the publishers that sign up? (This would make sense to me: often an individual interaction is worth very little, but the aggregate can find a buyer.)
Do massively funded startups get trapped into their original revenue-creation strategy due to the original vision they sold investors? It looks like that's the case, and if so that's terrible for manoeuvrability.
Such are times.
They chose the latter and rewrote their TOS to effectively eliminate 3rd party development on their platform. An entire ecosystem of companies, products and tools was destroyed because Twitter couldn't imagine or articulate the value of powering this backbone.
I think Twitter didn't want to deal with small customers, indeed nobody wants to operate small accounts but if AdWords did it several years before Twitter, why did they never learn?
It lets you pay a specific amount per month (IIRC from $2 to $15 or so) that you use to "bid" for ads spots just like the advertisers. If you win, then you'll see whatever you choose in place of the ad. Any money left over at the end of the month is refunded.
It won't help you in the twitter case, but it does remove a good amount of ads across the net, and it even has controls that you can go in and whitelist/blacklist some websites from receiving contributions, as well as a full breakdown of where your money is going.
I've removed 16,000 ads since I signed up in april 2015
[0]https://www.google.com/contributor/welcome/
The focus on 3rd party api's hindered that and would have hurt their growth in that regard maybe?
Journalism happens on twitter first, it's where famous people talk to each other, not facebook, yeah?
Meanwhile, every app or website with a messaging or notification function could have been using (and paying for) Twitter's API and infrastructure underneath. And all using a single Twitter account, so that every subscription to any of their customers' services would be a new account for them.
It could have been a great business model, but their leadership did have the imagination to try anything other than keyword advertising.
It's also good as a breaking news medium.
Twitter has expanded the boundaries of politically correct / acceptable speech, by enabling that brown nosing and echo chamber re-enforcement and not cracking down further on what's acceptable speech on their medium.
Even our political campaigns are now reduced to tweet wars, and platforms seem to need to be (lossy) compressed into 140 characters, or maybe 3 if it's very important. If you have a string of longer than 3 tweets, you lose a majority of your audience.
Twitter is a good tool, but simply should not be the de facto anything other than short messaging, in my opinion.
I think the appeal of Twitter is feeling "in the loop" due to the real-time nature of the service. But in reality most of the content is just meaningless noise. It's hard to find any signal on that platform.
It's true that it's a poor platform for adversarial conversation or debate, but that's no reason to dismiss the whole thing.
I've been on Twitter for seven years and in that time I've curated a timeline which is, bar none, the most entertaining and informative web destination available to me, specifically tailored to my interests and disposition.
Twitter is probably the best thing that has happened to low-quality journalism over the past 15 years.
I've always view Twitter as the commerical break and news teasers for the internet. I rarely see good thorough discussions on Twitter especially anything expected to last more than 30 hours of relevance.
That said, I thought about this recently when @pmarca took a break from twitter and all of his tweets disappeared, and I figured, "Well, yes, I follow him and enjoy his tweets...but I never planned to go back and read the old ones." It is a fleeting and temporary medium, like a conversation rather than an article or book.
Nonetheless, I really doubt storage is anywhere near the majority of the cost of running Twitter. It takes a lot of 140 character tweets to fill up a terabyte.
Tweets contain photos, videos, gifs, etc. Text is far from the only things that would need to be stored.
I'm not going to defend Twitter being a utility (which the parent comment also doesn't mention) but I will say that in general, it's very clear to me we haven't worked out what kind of institutions can best deliver services in the digital age.
It's profoundly dubious that Twitter - a defacto 'town square' for public discussion - is owned by an institution that, at best, has few incentives to make it effective for the purpose which it is widely used.
This is significant in democracies, where the quality of national decision making will be directly linked to the design of the channels in which public debate happens.
The idea that we can take full and fair advantage of the opportunities the web offers exclusively through profit-motivated corporations is flatly wrong.
The fact that as Twitter users we agreed to some T&Cs doesn't mean we can't also wish for a more democratic digital public space - which I assume is what the parent comment is really getting at.
I'm told that in Afghanistan it played (plays?) a key role in for aid agencies.
Twitter will never realistically be a utility. But there can be an open and distributed replacement for it that will meet the same goals, with fewer corporate restrictions and a more fractured government intervention.
GNUSocial is a great replacement for Twitter. With multiple hosts, your data is yours, you can move data between hosts and you can even choose to host it for yourself to control your own data.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_social
This is an extremely dubious claim and I don't see why everyone is so eager to support it.
What exactly makes Twitter valuable infrastructure? What compelling service does it offer to people and society? What other things would stop working if Twitter were shut down?
All I see is a bunch of people shouting at each other. Most people do not and will never use Twitter.
Good systems for public debate are the precondition for democracy.
In a democracy they are the infrastructure on which all other infrastructure depends. Every subsequent spending decision is influenced by them.
If you turn off public debate nothing will break the next day, but in a decade most people's lives will be misery.
[0] You might claim that Twitter is superior to other forms of public debate, but then I'd ask if you're really happy with the way politics are going.
What's next? A well designed debate platform that allows only emojis? A well designed debate platform that allows only meme pictures?
https://techcrunch.com/2016/09/19/twitters-new-simpler-rules...
"SIMPLE".
I am saying that for millions of people Twitter is a unique way to join public debate. Personally, I have interacted with several public individuals who I couldn't conceive of contacting any other way. This is an example of two politics professors taking the time to explain something apparently well known in their circle to me:
https://twitter.com/Jimmytidey/status/757494127537905664
Where else would that happen?
If it does not suit you, fair enough. I find newspapers disinteresting, but I would prefer to live in a society that has them to one that does not. I would also prefer, as with Twitter, that their ownership structure was a little different (I'm in the UK).
I agree that Twitter has design flaws as a medium for public discussion, and I also believe that some of them could be alleviated if Twitter was run was by people with different incentives.
I myself am very happy with the character count, the truth is that the limiting factor is not how long a message you are permitted to write, but how long a message others will be inclined to read. I suspect Twitter is just being honest with us in this regard.
Certainly it is not the place to articulate a nuanced view. It is a place where you can find a unique audience.
I think another solution is for the state to force the operator of the social network to keep its APIs open. (It's anti-competitive to do otherwise, would be the argument.)
I think it's interesting that there's a Wiki page about this issue.[0]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_media_as_a_public_utili...
New York City's subway system is one example. It started out in the 1900s as a couple of private companies, Interborough Rapid Transit (IRT) and Brooklyn Rapid Transit (BRT). The lines these two companies operated suffered more and more over time from overcrowding, leading the city to establish a third, public system in the '30s, and then in 1940 to just buy out IRT and BRT and merge all three systems into the single, publicly-operated network that serves NYC today. (See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_New_York_City_S... for more on this.)
It can happen, co-operatives are a viable business model. My bank is a co-operative and they work for their member-owners.
If you charge per user, it's unaffordable for small developers (unless they push the cost on to their users).
If you charge per app, you won't make enough money for it to be worthwhile.
Perhaps Twitter as a utility could be just as valuable. Maybe it doesn't need to be monetized.
FWIW, I believe GPS costs the US on the order of $1 per user per month.
Who is going to step up? What kind of institution could deliver something like that, while remaining open and accountable? A Wikipedia style foundation?
My guess is that it needn't be (too) expensive to run, especially if you hand over responsibility for long term storage of the messages to third parties.
My PhD (in progress) is based on the public utility of Twitter data. I'm deeply sad about this.
The problem is precisely that people keep re-inventing the wheel here. We don't need Facebook Chat and all the other deliberately-incompatible protocols that keep getting built out, we just need people to implement XMPP.
Come to think of it, it's surprising that spamming is not more prevalent on SMS networks, because it's the same kind of federated system. But I guess access may be gated well enough and enforcement strong enough to prevent that.
Isn't the meme that XMPP is horribly complex and the support for various sub-standards varies hugely?
As soon as a user has to understand federation - at all - I believe the proposition is dead to most people. For example Diaspora's 'pods' are, I think, fatally confusing. (I think Zuckerberg realised this, which is why he donated money to Diaspora - a project he could see would fail, but might also crowd out other OS alternatives to Facebook.)
For sure, XMPP can be part of the tech solution, in fact I suspect there are really excellent open source tools to address many of the inherent issues (perhaps Apache Cassandra can be Twitter's contribution to democracy) but I think the real problem is a social one.
You need an institution that can credibly promise to provide a platform in the long run and which can also get critical mass in at least one community. I believe the critical mass might well follow if the institution is widely perceived as reliable and legitimate in the way a foundation like Wikimedia is.
I went into some more detail on this in a blogpost: http://jimmytidey.co.uk/blog/building-a-better-twitter/
I don't see why not. Is the problem fundamentally different than SMS messaging or email?
- How would users know which nodes they could trust?
I think email and Sms are pretty weird user experiences that have succeeded in part because there was no alternative.
That is what search engines are for. The whole point of the Internet is that you can build businesses on top of open protocols with interoperable implementations. Giving up on open protocols and control of data (you can't even save images on Instagram...) "because hashtags" is incredibly shortsighted.
Perhaps I was wrong to say that federation is in principle ruled out, but I do think that it must be invisible to users. - Including namespacing usernames to nodes within the federation as with the @ sign in email.
I believe this is true in spite of the technical beauty of federated solutions, and it's exactly that beauty that's lured so many onto the rocks.
Which is funny because Facebook Chat also used to be powered by XMPP
Yeah, I was pretty sure that Facebook was just using straight-up XMPP at one point in time. They have been actively trying to drive traffic to their Facebook Messenger app - first by shutting down their XMPP interface, then blocking applications that talk to their web interface, and finally by removing Facebook Messenger functionality from their mobile website.
[0]http://daltoncaldwell.com/an-audacious-proposal [1]http://daltoncaldwell.com/what-twitter-could-have-been
First was the great apps, and the features that continued to roll out for users. Unfortunately it was under appreciated.
So effectively development stopped in 2014 and it's on maintenance mode since then.
But in terms of having any sort of meaningful discussion on Twitter or the sharing of anything approaching deep thought or analysis, forget it. To me, there is close to nothing of value that can be added by the ordinary individual except perhaps links to other sites.
Personally, I despise Twitter. I do not use it. Never had an account, and never will. I don't know what the future is for the company and the service, but I can only hope that if they are purchased the acquirer does it purely to remove competition from the market and has a celebratory dumpster fire with the servers. If only I was so lucky. Twitter is part of the ego machine that feeds the narcissists that pervade social media.
I've been saying for a while now that my cofounder and I add more functionality to our startup every two weeks than Twitter's 4,000 employees add to theirs in an entire year. Now this is obviously an apples-and-oranges comparison for all sorts of reasons, yet all caveats aside I think it's still pretty telling.
There was just a discussion of a closely related topic a few days ago:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12626314
> I think it's still pretty telling
Huh? Telling of what? That you don't have a good grasp on what's going on at Twitter?
I personally could never have imagined that Twitter would become so popular. I'm still surprised that people are using it (the whole thing doesn't make any sense to me).
Unlike Facebook, where I feel beholden to follow the people I know, Twitter is different. I can follow the thoughts of people I've never met, but greatly respect. There are tons of great designers, writers and journalists that make my Twitter feed entertaining and informative. Not everyone is interested in design or media and it can be difficult to discover accounts.
The other (previous) issue for Twitter is the feed. If you follow 1,000 people it will can be overwhelming. I was hesitant about the "You might have missed" section, but think it is a step in the right direction.
I can follow the thoughts of people without having to see most or all of their thoughts. I can follow people without becoming committed to their antics.
Twitter = people you want to know
Twitter is the best platform for discussion of a "live" event as it unfolds. These events include TV epidoes, news conferences, policitcal debates, games, etc. A user can see what a famous person thinks or follow other hardcore fans who have great knowledge of what they are watching. I have become friends with several people due to twitter and sports.
Facebook, Instagram, SnapChat, etc are not great for discussing something that is ongoing over the course of multiple hours. Twitter is. The ability to mute words and hashtags to avoid spoilers or certain subjects is super handy. In addition, one can follow multiple live events in a singular, timeline fashion. Twitter is very good at getting people to talk about live events. Its problem is that it is hard to see a place for it outside that, and it is hard to monotize that.
It reminds me of Sun and Java. Sun built a really useful product, used by hundreds of thousands of developers, but it didn't make enough money to sustain the company. They tried opening it up and that just hurt them commercially.
Edit: which is my slightly harsh way of saying dreams are easy, but doing is what counts.
The ecosystem would be a loss leader, simply for the purpose of having lots of market share.
They would make money on their main product.
Same as how google runs all sorts of services without making money on them, simply for the purpose of expanding online usage.
It's basically a variant of the Freemium model.
It's pretty obvious that Twitter has access to tons of interesting data, I just question if it's anything more than simply "interesting". While Twitter is huge, it's not really ubiquitous enough that you can use it for measuring things like effectiveness of marketing campaigns.
Perhaps the gossip magazines should pool their money and buy Twitter?
That power can be used to make massive amounts of money.
Right now you're suggesting that e.g. Disney is buying Twitter, for 17 billion dollars, to implement an untested business case. The cost of failure in that case is at least the purchase price of Twitter, that seems like a massive gamble.
I don't think Twitter is worth $17bn, but we live in an era of excessively hyped up and unrealistic valuations, so I have no idea what the correct price actually is. Yes, buying Twitter is a gamble, but many acquisitions are.
I totally see someone famous buying Twitter just to own it, or another company like Disney who just wants it to break-even. It has cultural and influential value now separate from profit.
If the valley is an echo chamber (it is), then Twitter echoes louder than most things I can think of. Very few companies have the kind of reach and influence within the valley that Twitter has.
I don't understand why people keep saying this. Twitter has multiple billions of dollars in revenue from monetizing their users.
Profitable? No. They built out a massive organization planning for user growth comparable to how fast Facebook was growing, but user growth stalled. There is a profitable business within Twitter, but someone has to be willing to do the gut job.
1. Massive access to a social network that can better integrate all their products. 2. Integration with their ad platform (improving monetization enough to make it break-even). 3. They'd own one of the most influential social networks in the world. Google buzz, Google wave, Google + were all massive failures. 4. Integration with things like Google News. They'd be able to understand trends almost perfectly (from both news stories and users).
I think people on HN and the like sometimes massively underestimate why Twitter is so important. Twitter as a big social network like Facebook is never going to happen. Their decision to pursue that route seems foolish in retrospect. Instead, what Twitter has is a smaller group of users that are extremely influential. Moreover, they have the most effective fan-out messaging platform in existence.
I think focusing on monetization/user only makes sense while TWTR is an independent company. Companies like GOOG, MSFT, etc. benefit greatly from the externalities of owning TWTR more than the business itself (consider Youtube, for example).
I've just googled, looks like they're making $0.55/user/month [1]
I would have totally paid $7-$10/yr for no-bullshit version without ads, focused on user experience instead of manipulating my attention. I bet many other people would too. And I would use it way more actively as a result.
Why do neither twitter nor facebook offer premium/business accounts? It's not like it would cost them users, many people can still use the free ad-supported version....
[1] http://qz.com/131932/twitter-average-revenue-per-user/
Because it will cause their ad revenue to plummet. The users with money are the ones advertisers actually want to reach, so if you let them opt out of seeing advertising you'll just be left with an exclusive pool of users who won't buy anything. And no advertiser wants that.
Up to this point, the counter to this argument was basically "Well, what Twitter's doing is obviously working for them". But that's not quite as strong as it used to be now. How much money did Twitter leave on the table? It is, sure, possible that it would have been a net loss for them. But now I think a fresh look must be taken at the possibility that it would have been enough of a net gain to ensure their indepedence.
Plus one must consider the second-order effects of receiving subscription revenue. Might they have created a different and more valuable service to their customers and made even more as a result? Advertising-based businesses face the intrinsic paradox of trying to serve two customer bases at once who have somewhat opposed interests. (Even ignoring the socially corrosive influence of advertising incentivizing our smartest people to build the most powerful spying networks in history.) It is still not determined to my satisfaction that that is a stable business plan in the modern era.
One possible salutatory effect of Twitter's demise could be making the idea of subscriptions reasonable again. If even Twitter can't monetize entirely on advertising, who else can? Even Google and Facebook may be surprisingly fragile to a disruption in the advertising space, which is nominally not actually their business (even though of course it is). (The most likely disruption would be the continuing growth of ad-blocking software, but there's also the black swan possibilities as well.)
Hypothetically speaking, allowing those users to opt out would mean Twitter makes $0.20/month from the remaining users, rather than $0.55/month. Will enough users buy a premium subscription to make up that loss? I don't see the evidence that they would.
Of course, it's all hypothetical and none of us know the actual numbers involved. But I'd wager Twitter has looked at it at least once and decided it was not a good idea.
It can't work worse than operating at a loss until they go out of business, which is Twitter's current trajectory.
$0.55/month is the mean for the entire userbase. The actual amount for any particular user can be far more or far less (well up to .55 less) than that.
Users who are more likely to pay 4.95/month are much more likely to be worth more than 4.95/month in advertising revenue.
Given the paucity of people I know who've made a purchasing decision based off of an ad on Twitter, I seriously doubt that.
... which is plagued with spam and fraud. Victims are both the advertisers (who pay for ad slots that are viewed/clicked by bots) and the consumers (who suffer from malware ads, un-usable websites because there are 30+ trackers, ad brokers etc. on one single site, and higher product prices because the vendors have to pay for ads). The only ones who profits are the countless middle men - ad brokers and "big data analysis/retargeting" companies which kill user privacy on a global scale while providing next to zero value.
We should, once and for all, simply massively regulate advertising and re-think about how we as a society fund the services currently funded by ads. Especially in media, where "real" journalism had to step back in favor of ever more clickbait crap...
A good distinction but even if you assume a power-law/Pareto distribution for the revenue per customer, it would be roughly ~$2.20/user/month.
Also, it's a bit of support/maintenance/overhead for something that doesn't have as much support as you might think - otherwise tools like Google Contributor would be blowing up. I imagine like ~1% of users would actually opt to pay, maybe 2 or 3%, based upon my experience with freemium business models at a few different companies.
I think there's the hypothesis that these "pro subscribers" have higher incomes and are therefore better ripe for advertising demand. I would argue that Google has enough data and intelligence to internalize this hypothetical lifetime value from ad dollars into a reasonable price for a monthly subscription that would be roughly equivalent. If the counterpoint is that $7-10 / year doesn't quite equal how much Google could get for the same user through advertising (which could be substantially higher I think,) then it's hard to fault Sundar or Jack Dorsey or any other tech CEO in this space for going with what would provide better value to shareholders (which is ultimately their responsibility, for better or worse.)
Look at Twitter for a moment the way game designers look at free-to-play mobile games. Whittling Tweets down to 140 characters is the sort of un-fun, repetitive process that a game designer would describe as a "grind" (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grinding_(video_gaming)). And free-to-play games have established that letting players buy their way out of having to grind is a completely workable business model.
So just let Twitter power users skip their way out of grinding to get their Tweets under the 140 character limit by letting them buy bags of extra characters, preferably at low enough prices to be attractive as an impulse buy. If you spend all day on Twitter, and you're faced with the need spend five minutes editing a tweet to get it down under the limit, being able to just pay ten cents for a bag of ten extra characters and get that five minutes of your life back might be very attractive! And from Twitter's perspective, those ten cents are more or less pure profit, since the marginal cost of shipping 150 bytes over the wire instead of 140 is next to nothing. Free users can keep on using Twitter for free, power users can become the "whales" that provide the revenue that keeps the lights on, Twitter makes money. Everybody wins.
https://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com/
Wonder what the DOJ and the anti-trust guys would think of this though.
Of course they are in the advertising market, but there are not dominant there.
http://thehill.com/sites/default/files/a_hrc_32_l.20_english...
It's all about ethic and control of the source. If you can check the source, you can't tell if it's true or not and also access to information should not be limited by your money.
This make me sad the way Internet is turning to.
That's an analogue to saying that 'tools destroy everything'. Money is just a tool, you can use it for good and you can use it for bad.
The 'old' internet is still there, underneath all the ad-driven cruft, but for some reason the majority of the people active on the net prefer those ad driven services. I'm not one of them but It's hard to ignore the fact that you - and I - are not in the majority here.
As for being able to check the source, that hasn't been true in a very very long time except for scientific publications (and even there you have to check to see who funded the study).
I've said before[1] that Twitter is the poster child for the tech bubble and that people's opinion of Twitter is a good litmus test for people's understanding of the industry. It sounds like Twitter's management understands their position and is looking to get out while there are still people who think Twitter has value.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12564298
It will be interesting to see the consequences of a major drop in twitters valuation.
https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-s5LeMVvmcJ0/V_UeJYgxG6I/A...
There's this and two more tweets, in rotation. They are three sports-related Tweets from two years ago, with that shit image quality, and what's even more amusing: since I'm based in Spain, they believe I'm interested in Argentinian football, probably because I speak the same language (but Spaniards usually know absolutely nothing about sports from South America, neither are they interested in that).
Even better, the cookie use banner moves the tweet down, making it overlap with the footer.
And this has been like this for two years already. I guess nobody ever logs in in the company?
My personal hypothesis is that Twitter is a ~500M user niche social network. Which sounds absurd to me, because when I started using the Internet there were ~15M people online, total. But there it is.
https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/sjFY1xcd8zjgSkpU_3AF1UP7vm...
Facebook is fundamentally better because you only get updates from people who you know in real life - When you post something on FB, those people actually care about what you have to say (interactions are bidirectional).
To the average user, Twitter is just a glorified RSS news feed. You read other people's tweets, but nobody actually reads your tweets. The interaction is mostly unidirectional.
I only got into twitter to follow people I knew in real life; I've ended up following a lot of strangers and public figures and I've made a few friends over it. My wife has made even more friends by tweeting along with TV, especially Eurovision.
On the flipside, how do you discover things?
Point being, people do read what you say and it's possible to get a lot of exposure. Maybe you're just not tweeting anything interesting.
Go ask any major affiliate marketing network how they feel about Twitter traffic. Many of them have an outright ban on it - meaning it actually has negative value to their advertisers. It simply doesn't monetize nearly as well as the traffic from other social networks. Much like the average Android user is worth far less to app developers than an iOS user is, the Twitter user base is simply not worth much to people looking to monetize it. That's a huge problem when asking someone to justify a $17B acquisition price.
Even if the average for Twitter users is low, there are probably pockets of value for particular services. These are potentially not the kinds of customers these affiliate networks are interested in.
Your Android point is rather different, given the wide disparity of Android devices.
If 80% of Android devices are worth less than $10 per year, while 20% are worth $100 per year, and all iPhones are worth $100 per year, you'll have a much lower mean value for Android while also having a subset of very profitable users.
As you may have noticed, I'm not a fans of means in the advertising world.
On your point on Twitter's value, I see a lot of missed opportunity.
It felt like they slowed down really early in terms of what they did (and specifically their success with their product changes). Their growth stalled at quite a low point (relative to other social networks/services), which made it hard for them to attract good people, which further compounded the effect.
But then, I never used Twitter (and maybe that's the problem).
I disagree that it's different. Of course there are pockets of both value and worthlessness everywhere, but overall the LTV of an Android user to developers and advertisers is a small fraction of that of an ioS user, and a Twitter user is worth (to advertisers) an even smaller fraction of the value of a Facebook user.
At scale, averages are what count.
>As you may have noticed, I'm not a fans of means in the advertising world.
I did notice that, and I cannot disagree with you there. But currently, for many advertisers, last-click based means is the most efficient available attribution model, even though I agree that it's far from perfect.
I think that its difficult to assess your premise under a last-click model, to be honest. When you look at the history of advertising, its very difficult to believe that a direct response (measurable by click) is actually the whole thing.
I'm pretty sure I've never clicked on a Coca-Cola ad, but I have bought a lot of their product over the years.
I mean, conditional on your experience with the value of Twitter users (for a particular set of clients/services) and a last-click model, I don't disagree with you, I just think that such a view of advertising leaves an awfully large amount of stuff out.
Full disclosure: mobile attribution is hard, there is not standard or even dominant way of tracking views there (i believe) and so for some mobile-heavy/only advertisers better attribution methods are just a pipe dream at this point.
[0] https://gnip.com/
On the other hand, if they work from the assumption that Twitter is done growing and now it's time to focus on existing users rather than potential users, they might do okay, depending on the purchase price.
Let's hope that something else emerges post-Twitter that is similarly broadcast-focused, not real-name oriented, and lightweight.