Twitter Falls Below IPO Price as Concerns Mount Over CEO, Growth

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.

The thing is, this keeps causing me to miss moments to engage with them. Someone posts a link, I find something on a website, etc. that go to Twitter? BAM! SIGN-UP NOW OR LEAVE!

While I do of course have an account, if I were a non-user, I'd keep thinking "why would I sign-up when I have no idea if it is worth my time to be nagged by you via email?"

There's a well understood notion that on user-generated content sites like Twitter, Reddit, etc. the number of content producers is relatively low compared to the number of content consumers. While I don't have data to support my hypothesis on this yet, my gut tells me that you have a better chance of converting people to content producers if you can get them hooked on being a content consumer. Lowering the barrier to entry for that is critical. If I felt like I was really missing out on all the cool stuff going on within Twitter, I might be more inclined to sign up if I hadn't yet, and exposing that data lowers the barrier to entry.

But again, I'd be shocked if they hadn't tested that to death.

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.

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.

AND I know that I'm likely not the ideal client for Facebook and their efforts probably enhance the experience for said clients. I'm not sure who Twitter's ideal client is...

Twitter had always a hard to grasp UI. Especially for vistors without an account. It got a bit better about one year ago, but they transformed it to a worse experience a few months ago.

I actually love twitter for those reasons.

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.

From my normal user perspective (not advertising, not a celebrity...) they've never been an internally innovative company - @mentions and retweets are community inventions, the best clients for niche, power, and general use have always been 3rd party, and after stumbling onto a private messaging hit they shot DMs behind the woodshed just before the world went wild for whatsapp and snapchat. The community continues to come up with interesting ideas, never to be implemented. There's no doubt Twitter has stellar engineers. It's strategy that needs to be externalized. A shame they've spoiled so many developer relationships.

They're all too busy passing joints and/or bongs around to really care about HN or about their product. :-)

   Peter Thiel: Twitter Executives 'Probably'
   Smoke Too Much Pot, And That's Why It's A
   'Horribly Mismanaged Company'

I thought they just figured out a revolutionary code change that allows them to support messages over 140 characters! That's real progress...

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.

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.

Your comment that Twitter owns unique and compelling content: I view unique and compelling content as a scarce resource. Growth rate in the boring tail perhaps means less if they're cornering the market on the compelling blurb real estate.

Twitter as a REIT, where the real estate is focused attention on compelling content? Are The Donald's FB posts featured on the networks nightly?

The nightmare scenario for Twitter is that they've stumbled into a Craigslist-style niche of providing incredible, essential value that can't be monetized in proportion to the value it actually provides.

The main concern to investors is primarily the growth and their ability to warrant a premium price on the stock.

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.

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.

Do we really want to allow all that power to be consolidated into company boards and executives?

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.

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.

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.

A set of highly filtered feeds might be better. Still tough to pull off.