Let Twitter Be Twitter

The problem with letting Twitter be Twitter is that Twitter took money on the promise of being something other that just Twitter.

Or to put it in analogy form. You give me $500,000 to buy you a Ferrari and I give you a Toyota Corolla.

You complain that I haven't held up my end of the bargain and I point out that the Corolla is a perfectly fine car that can get you from point a to point b and even has some strengths when compared to the Ferrari, so why are you complaining?

That's the point Twitter is at right now. They took the money to be something other than what they are right now. If Twitter wants to be just Twitter, that's fine, but you'll need to cut their 20 Billion market cap down to somewhere around a 3-4 Billion market cap, I don't have a model with me right now.

having said that, Twitter has some good things going for it.

  - Mobile Advertising numbers are up Year over year

  - Data licensing revenue is up

  - monthly active users are up

IMHO, twitter just needs to shrink in size or find a way to really start growing revenue.

EDIT to the child comment, you are confusing revenue and earnings. There is a huge difference between the two:)

Twitter, in its current state, is a platform for power users.

Twitter is a field you put some stuff in, and that stuff displays to everyone who follows you. Disregarding scale, the premise is very, very simple.

The difficulty stems from knowing who or what to follow.

It takes a long time to figure out who you want to follow, and Twitter doesn't have enough information about you to solve the cold start problem. I love Twitter because I'm constantly pruning my feed (and lists), and it's pretty great.

My mom joined Twitter, followed who Twitter recommended, got a bunch of generic PR accounts and celebrities, and doesn't use it anymore. Conversely, when she joined Facebook all of her friends and family started adding her. Her feed was now full of the people she loves (the value was already there), and she learned to become a fully participating user. That's why Facebook has 1.5B monthly active users (holy shit!).

She figured out how to use Facebook because the value was already there. She doesn't use Twitter because it's not. It's really that simple.

So Twitter goes public saying, "Look, there are all these people using Twitter already, we can fix this problem for people, then we'll grow way quickly!" They start curating for you, and it turns out it's not what you want, and no one cares. Wall Street is pissed that it's not growing quickly enough, and everyone starts freaking out.

What we're seeing is the freakout. Everyone trying to figure out how to "fix" Twitter. Everybody coming up with solutions. But no one has figured out the fundamental problem behind Twitter: You have to put a lot of effort in before you get any value out. There are only so many people in the world willing to do that. It will still grow, but it may not be rocketship growth. If you're private that's OK, but if you're public and you're not growing quickly enough you're going to get a lot of shit.

This reminds me again of a problem I'm seeing on the Web. Every time a social network springs up, it seeks to "connect users" and "build communities." And every time it reaches critical mass, it tries to use its users as a product to be sold to advertisers. The only exception is Wikipedia, which the author of this article brings up, but as Wikipedia is more of a collaborative content platform than a social network I'll just relegate that to a tangential concern.

Is it not possible to create a social network where the product is the social network? Perhaps not. App.net attempted this, and wasn't able to generate enough money to both keep the lights on and pay its employees.

As someone who once founded a company that published game books, I'm acutely aware of the fact that people are rarely willing to buy content in this age of free information. So what, then, would make them willing to pay to be a part of a social network?

Weird thought:

I've seen some people on HN commenting on how the "responsibility" of funding R&D seems to be shifting (somewhat) from the public to the private sector. Surely this varies by industry (aerospace and defense is still hugely gov't funded) but it seems to be an increasing trend in the education, consumer goods, and healthcare sectors at least.

Twitter is not very profitable, but it is useful. Try to make it profitable w/ ads and dumb changes to a service that was fine without it, and you'll make it less useful. It's like taking a park and putting billboards on all the trees.

It would be interesting to see some sort of cost/benefit analysis from the gov perspective on whether or not to subsidize a public service like Twitter. We must do it for the large public energy companies we subsidize, why not for a network that (ostensibly) adds value to people's lives in a more abstract sort of way? If there was a compelling argument for putting our tax money towards Twitter rather than the DoD/NSA budget, I would at least be interested in hearing it.

Unless we start to think longer term about investing (50-100 years, not 5-10), we will be missing out on a ton of great products and services that investors shoot down with silly short-term monetization schemes.

I definitely understand the fact that it's probably disappointing (?) to investors, but I'm confused when I hear it's dying. It's THE way to get realtime news on just about anything. It's my first go-to for sports, news, politics, even tech. The author hits it on the head; the 'vast confusion' of the timeline is kind of why I use it (and maybe why others do too).

>The company’s revenue merely doubled last year, to $1.4 billion. Only 300 million people use Twitter every month. Apparently that isn’t enough.

Nope, because there no profit to be found. Twitter is to old a company to not make any money. Investors either need to stock increase in value or be paid a dividend, otherwise why invest?

Letting Twitter be Twitter clearly isn't making the investors any money, so of cause there's going to be suggestions to changes. At this point I think they should wait to see what Jack Dorsey does to be honest, and the article is written before he became permanent CEO.

I know this is going to be an unpopular view, but Twitter is a zombie. They've come, they've gone but they don't seem to know it yet.

It's a case of scaling too far, before your revenue model can catch up with your size, I think.

People forget that Facebook was 8 figures into the black before they even took a Series A.

The problem with Twitter isn't that they're a social network on par with Facebook, it's that they're not on par as a business, and never will be.

Twitter is a fantastic tool for searching. If you want some information that's immediate or location based, such as if there's a Verizon FiOS outage, or a parade that you're trying to figure out the theme of (common in NYC), then Twitter is your go-to resource.

"I am 'on' Twitter (odd phrase). I’m not on Facebook; I don’t like the caged environment, with marketers and algorithms absorbing my information and distracting people with shiny objects."

I've got bad news for the author....

I don't think the problem is that Twitter needs to re-invent itself or change what they are. It serves a purpose, some people use it well, and some people find value in it. Almost everyone who does see that value says exactly the same thing - curate your own feed, and it becomes a good tool.

But then those same people say it is about teaching everyone else to do it the same way. But I am not sure that is true. Not everyone wants to see content in the same way. Just like not everyone read newspapers or watched TV news when they were dominant, people will have their own preferences. So the assumption that the market for Twitter is "Everyone on the internet." is flawed.

It seems to me that Twitter has simply reached its market capacity. Their growth curve has flattened. But they have significant revenue. They need to stop trying to change the product to grow their market, and start simplifying their internal processes and decreasing costs. They need to serve their existing market even better, while spending less money.

If they can do that, then they will move into the black, and start operating like a non-startup, which is not such a bad thing for a company that has been around for almost 10 years.

Twitter would do itself and its users much good if it focused on making its core service work better. Three example areas screaming for improvement: Search, discovery, and alternatives to timeline-based views

Twitter has certainly carved out a nice niche--I love real-time information from important people, news sources, etc. They will be around for a long time.

Even so, I can't imagine them becoming more profitable any time soon. Still a short if I had to guess (which I typically try to avoid).

Has there been any speculation that they'll roll out a Premium (read, "ad-free") monthly subscription format?

Maybe Twitter should recharter as a Public Benefit Corporation?

Besides the "Twitter as a business" discussion..

You guys here on Hacker News don't seem to fancy Twitter so much and I wonder why..