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Comment by freehunter | Hacker News Reader

When I think of twitter I think nothing but mainstream. There are two platforms that anyone who is anyone (celebrity or business or politician) needs to have: either Facebook or Twitter. Niche is Instragram. Niche is Snapchat. But when Kardashian is on CNN once an hour because of a tweet, it's not niche. App.Net is niche. Twitter is the epitome of mainstream.

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CNN is precisely the journalism niche they are talking about.

It isn't about niche celebrities, but celebrities as a whole is their niche. And journalists, of course. Newspaper websites publish vast quantities of tweets because it costs them nothing, it means you indirectly consume a lot of tweets.

But the celebrity content consumed by journalists is as a whole still a niche, even if all celebrities are on there.

FWIW I think it would be a mistake to abandon that, but it does raise questions about how they grow.

Part of Twitter's challenge is that it's mainstream, but in a "write-only" way. Every celebrity, politician, religious leader, and journalist may be tweeting 24-7, but their followers aren't engaging in the same way they do on Facebook. A lot of users don't login, tweet, or spend much time on the site/app according to various reports.

Chris Sacca said a lot about this recently. http://lowercasecapital.com/2015/06/03/what-twitter-can-be-2...

Google will buy it because Google+ is Twitter minus the people.

G+ is a staggering number of peoole. 2.6 billion last I checked. Its simply that mist of them don't want to be there and say nothing. Engagement is by a fraction of a percent of the whole.

I think thats the main problem with Twitter, saturation. Its mainstream enough the regular people are not likely to jump on Twitter now if they already haven't.

This. Nobody who could conceivably make an account is just waiting to hear about this hot new thing called microblogging.

And yet Facebook is still signing up users

I'd argue they're better about extracting value from network effects – Facebook allows you to broadcast, but it really encourages interactions... the value grows a lot more with your network... whereas, following more people on twitter just makes it harder to follow.

My understanding was that FB growth stalled in the US./EU in 2012, slipping since. No?

> "Niche is Instagram"

Except Instagram has more active users than Twitter...

When was the last time you saw a business with nothing but an Instagram profile, or saw Instagram referenced on the news, or cited in a paper, or used for a press release?

It's not about active users, it's about how it's used.

Everyone had an AOL keyword. AOL isn't dead, but it fell hard. Ubiquity isn't enough.

Are you saying AOL wasn't mainstream? The Internet might have been niche as a whole, but out of that, AOL was as mainstream as it got. AOL was synonymous with Internet, like Facebook and Twitter are synonymous with social media.

I said:

> Everyone had an AOL keyword. AOL isn't dead, but it fell hard. Ubiquity isn't enough.

Every business having a Twitter account won't save Twitter any better than everyone having an AOL keyword saved AOL.

I don't think that's a fair comparison. AOL didn't initially position itself as a portal. It positioned itself as an ISP with a portal.

Had AOL built itself as a web portal like Yahoo from the start it may very well have stayed relevant. I still have business partners (in non tech fields) that use their AOL email and news/portal services.

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