Twitter Acquires Magic Pony
blog.twitter.com
blog.twitter.com
As ironically stated here [1], "The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads."
Though Twitter has a good record of open-sourcing internal infrastructure projects, I think it's it's safe not to expect any substantive amount of this work to see the light of day.
On the other hand, the quality of their search and recommendations when it comes to non-text content will significantly improve. They're really doubling down on Twitter being the "best place to see what's happening and why it matters, first", which is a welcome change from the confusing signalling in months prior.
It's a little ironic that they announce this in a blog post.
There is a strong argument that as long as they continue to publish and produce open source (which they have been doing) then you could think of ads as just a source of funding and tons of data to continue to push the state of the art. It can also be a stepping stone to other ventures [1].
[1]: http://www.wsj.com/articles/where-would-we-be-without-intern...
Thanks. Perfectly succinct summary of what I hate so much about today's business world.
Dear all advertisers: how about you stop trying to figure out how to make people want your product/service more, and focus on making it discoverable and clearly understood when the time comes where they finally realize they do want such a product/service and go seeking it out from someone? And if they never do end up wanting it, MAYBE THAT'S FINE and maybe it's time you stop selling it?
Sometimes I think we are in a difficult dichotomy -- we like Twitter and we consume it voraciously and love that it is free, but we don't want them to use advertising as a source of revenue even though that might be the source that keeps it alive for us to consume. And, for free!
It seems that there's a mentality of compartmentalization, where people believe there to be 'evil ad companies' that somehow do nothing but make ads and don't actually sell products, nor employ people in the creative industry.
In brief, advertising is trying to get you to buy a specific product, whereas branding is about mindshare. When Coca-Cola runs TV commercials, you're seeing branding, and you're associating Coca-Cola with energetic, smiling people living life to the fullest and all that good stuff.
Advertising, however, has a clearer call-to-action. In the US, car commercials seamlessly combine the two where they show people like actor Matthew McConaughey driving a Lincoln, and you think 'wow, successful people drive Lincolns' -- branding -- and at the end, they show current offers for leasing the car for 36 months -- advertising. What you propose actually happens in grocery stores today: sales. The rotating sales are a way to gauge market loyalty to a particular brand not currently on sale, vs. the other brand currently on sale.
I don't think so? 90% of businesses sell to businesses, not to consumers, and in that world it's more about networking than advertising. (You could argue that that's just another form of advertising, but at the very least it's easier to avoid).
The best minds of the previous generation were thinking about how to kill Russians. I'd say it's an upgrade.
At least the results of the previous generations research went (largely) unused, whereas the results of ad clicking research is targeted against and used on people on a daily basis, to their considerable detriment. An upgrade? If so, it seems kind of dubious at best.
Even if it weren't, it's certainly wasteful. Advertising is mostly an arms race. Pepsi spends to challenge Coke. Coke spends even more to maintain hegemony. Neither is informing consumers, the perennial econ-theory justification for advertising. We all know those products exist. If we banned advertising tomorrow, consumers would be no worse off, and all those people could be doing something actually useful.
What are people doing to change this? What do you think needs done?
Asking seriously because I'm actively trying to figure out the answers to these questions.
That's just half the truth. The other half of the best are thinking how to skim money off financial transactions.
Much of the very very good minds are thinking of ways to make us click more on ads.
The main application I saw was applying neural networks to video compression, improving compression by 3x or more (I guess by regenerating the lost detail?). Not sure if Twitter has much use for that but it looks like they have patented a bunch of other stuff too, and I'm sure will be a great addition to twitter's ML team.
Congrats to the guys - and hope they continue creating interesting tech in old blighty after the vesting period is over.
People are not using Twitter because of many reasons and bad image compression is probably not one of them. Unless Twitter is planning some massive pivot what they should have spent their M&A budget on companies that will help them improve their growth situation directly (in my opinion).
- They bought Crashlytics and released Fabric.io, a souped-up Twitter SDK + Crashlytics + their bundled ad platform MoPub. The idea is you'll develop your app with this SDK and get crash reporting, usage stats, ad serving, 'Sign in via Twitter', Twitter integration, and all of this other stuff [1] for free.
- They bought Digits, which is a 'log in with your phone number'-as-a-service and made it free to use. It's now integrated with Fabric.
- They just bought Magic Pony which will help them better classify non-text posts so that their currently-awful suggestions are better.
Fact is, 'Twitter', the service where people post tweets, is no longer their primary growth area. It's their most externally visible, sure, but they want their SDK inside every app, and mine data and serve ads, just like Google and Facebook. This might actually work, because their SDK has some very nice things you might want anyway, compared to the other two that only give you identity, integration, and ads.
Or even better, let me "publish" an algorithm and let other people use it.
I still get errors sometimes where I see, "1 new tweet" and it's the top tweet in my timeline, except here it is again.
The #1 reason why I moved from Facebook to Twitter was that the latter service used straightforward algoritms for deciding what to show me. When I opened Twitter, I could be almost sure that the timeline would only contain posts from people I followed, arranged in chronological order.
Of course, there were some exceptions. Firstly, they always had ads. I see how many people here get angry about it, but I think ads on such site is perfectly normal. After all, they have to make money somehow, right?
Secondly, there were times when I saw "While you were away" box. This was the thing I found annoying from the beginning. How did Twitter infer that I was interested in these five posts more than in those five posts? It got worse over time. In fact, now this box shows up after a few hours of my absence, as if I am expected to check Twitter 10 times a day.
And it appears that they are planning to take these features to a new level. I really hope they don't do everything they talk about, but if they do, maybe I will have to seek a new social media service.
* Account I follow, 15s ago.
* PROMOTED post from 5 days ago. (here I've already run out of browser real estate on a 27" display because the tweets take so much damn room. Scroll down a page)
* While you were away: post from 3 days ago
* While you were away: post from 4h ago
* While you were away: post from 1 day ago
* While you were away: post from 3 days ago
* While you were away: post from 6h ago
* While you were away: retweet from 2 days ago
* While you were away: post from 1 day ago
* Actual twitter post from user I follow, 2h ago.
* PROMOTED from 18 days ago
For all intents and purposes, the Twitter feed is less chronological, less useful, and less content-dense than Facebook, and that's saying something considering that Twitter is supposedly a 140char service.
I had to scroll through 3 pages of crap before I got to the actual chronological twitter you speak of.
Also, they have this horrible habit of making tweets with a white background, then a tiny grey divider between tweets so it can be hard to tell at a glance when you've moved from one section of content to another -- much like when GMail went from colored message threading to all-monochrome.
It's likely money left over from the IPO & previous fund raising events.
Also, was kind of sad we can't post images, this story would be flooded with so many pony memes.
Come to think of it, this is also more evidence for the case that Silicon Valley can't get any more outlandish than Silicon Valley, isn't it?
London needs strong, original startups. It's dire if you're looking for employment out here.
Just like the slew of CV startups getting bought by Snapchat.
I sense a trend here (machine learning).