Vine isn’t growing and most of its top executives have left
recode.net
recode.net
Facebook (and Instagram) and Snapchat have both transformed from their original incarnations, in ways that have improved the companies' valuation, but have not always improved the experience of users. It seems every single social network is trending towards feature parity with each other -- Facebook now has streaming video, Snapchat now has a decent text chat with messages that need not disappear, Instagram has an algorithmic no-longer-timeline wall and private messaging, they all have ads, even Tumblr now has IM and livestreaming. Some (important) differences remain, but from an observer time-travelling forward from 2012, the social networks of today would appear nearly interchangeable.
But there's Twitter. All these years, it has stayed remarkably close to the original concept of microblogging. Instead, it developed (or acquired) other formats and cultivated them as separate services, separate communities. It's unfortunate that not even wide societal impact can make a service profitable, or at least quell the pressure to feature-creep outside of your original scope.
Maybe you _need_ to iterate and change up the game a bit if you're to continue growing, expanding into new markets, etc. ("There are no sacred cows.")
Facebook and Snapchat will begin to be perceived as a 'utility' (something that has already happened to Twitter), meaning, we as a society all expect these functions of social networking and messaging to be fulfilled by a provider, but the exact provider is no longer relevant. Pressures to maintain a positive balance sheet will lead to a proliferation of ads.
This will leave room for new upstarts to target a niche they can serve better than the incumbents, and lure engagement away. They will use VC money to fund their effort and offer ad-free, carefully-focused refuges away from the big networks. But the incumbents have so much money, they will all get bought out in the end. (Snapchat refused to be bought out by Facebook for $3,000,000,000, at a time when it was still known as a sexting app)
I see analogues to the churn of free image hosts -- new one starts up because all the old ones are full of ads; introduces ads a few years later because they can't pay the bills. The cycle continues.
right, they only added photos, video, FB style profile pages, link shortening, location metadata, algorithmic timeline, moments, messaging, and extensively developed mobile apps but otherwise yes exactly the same as when they were an 140 char SMS broadcast service.
Whereas Facebook's primary function went from a carefully-curated yearbook-style personal and interest page to an... algorithmic timeline of friend's status updates and tumble-blog reposts.
Snapchat went from an app that sends disappearing photos to a general-purpose multimedia messaging app that happens to still put a timer on photos.
Instagram went from a photo and selfie-sharing app to a general-purpose social network with an algorithmic timeline, sponsored posts, and private messaging.
This looks like a logical fallacy.
Twitter went algorithmic timeline not too long ago, sadly.
Fortunately, it can still be turned off - but is on by default.
Where? I unchecked every setting that I found, but I still get that "While you were away" and "#something is currently trending" bullshit.
twitter.com##has-recapAlso, they are dying. They have never turned a profit. Facebook or Google or Microsoft will eventually buy them, because of the users - but they have so far given no indication they can survive independently. And they have had a few billion dollars in funding and ten years to give that indication.
Those companies already have those same users.
Also, WhatsApp was strong in some parts of the globe where Facebook was weaker. In particular, WhatsApp was used in mainland China where Facebook was banned.
> Twitter just doesn't have an idea about where to evolve.
My feeling is the secret sauce was "being cool and disruptive". /s
To secure that position they have, IMO, spent the last few years painting themselves into a corner.
You can have a public platform, using an identity you choose for yourself, to broadcast snippets of information.
Where do you evolve this? Blogger, Blogspot, Livejournal, Tumblr, Medium, they're all in this same space, except they focus on traditional, long-form content. I don't see Twitter as a social network (although many do, that's okay). I see it as a broadcast medium, a soapbox, a blogging platform.
But if you see Twitter as a social network, you're subject to a different set of pressures than a blogging platform.
Also, Twitter holds no value to FB, Google, MS, or Yahoo. They all have subsumed parts of its core functionality into their offerings. If they ever get acquired, it's by some 'outsider' that wants to enter this space, like Verizon or Yandex.
A few years back Peter Kafka wrote an article [1] about how joe/joan-shmoe twitter user will probably never have their tweets read by anybody at all. It was astonishingly small number of folks who broke 500 followers (writing 3/4 years ago)
ex. “The median Twitter account has a single follower. Among the much smaller subset of accounts that have posted in the last 30 days, the median account has just 61 followers.”
It is from a few years ago, maybe things have changed but if that's the experience of the average person why invest time in it?
[1] http://allthingsd.com/20131223/almost-no-one-is-reading-your...
Half of Facebook's users have fewer than 200 friends on it.
Twitter gets a lot of love from journalists and people with a profile, who write the articles about twitter and control public perception. They have an interest in maintaining a personal brand and have enough visibility that Twitter works for them.
If you listened to those people, Twitter's biggest problem would be trolls writing mean (and often abusive) tweets about them.
Most twitterers would be lucky to be threatened with the rape and murder of their families, frankly.
Which is why Twitter is dying-- there are so, so, so many news curation and aggregation sources. Twitter isn't even all that good, frankly. Reddit does the job way better. (Still a lot of folks that want to fuck my mom though.)
As a social network, it's crap, has been crap and likely will remain crap. The time-based feed tends towards livelock from professional content producers. Their curation mostly suggests people I can follow who would generally prefer I do not engage with them beyond promotion of their brands and gentle applause.
I think warcher has a very good point about vocal people from other platforms (e.g journalists) giving a massive misconception over Twitters actual appeal and reach.
There is a huge difference between a platform where you shout in to the void and people have to choose to listen and a platform where you shout into the void and people can overhear you. One of those systems favours the popular, the other favours the average person.
Some people have split accounts that you can choose to follow to receive different kind of status updates from them, so an example of this is a person with a 'oh look this interesting thing happened in my life' account, and a separate account for 'oh jeez I'm really angry and need to vent about this to a subset of people I know in relative privacy'. Because of the nature of twitter it feels easier to throw away or make lots of accounts than, say, facebok.
The real connection comes not when you follow celebrities, but when you're a creator (Or a budding creator), and you interact with other people who are creating things for support or advice; or you have an interest in what your friends are posting and doing, and like viewing their traveling posts and their reactions to things. If you have those sorts of relationships twitter helps facilitate them extremely well, and if you don't, or the people you interact with in that way don't use twitter, then it won't have that value for you.
If most accounts aren't people, then what most people do on the service is likely to have nothing in common with what most accounts do on the service.
There is also the orphan account situation. My twitter and facebook and linkedin accounts are unused but not deleted. I would theorize that's yet another problem, once you cross off the list of bots, if the majority of remaining accounts are unused, that means what the majority of accounts do has little to no relationship to what actual active users do. For marketing and PR purposes I'm sure my unused accounts are being monetized and proudly being counted as a "user", which is a whole nother problem.
There is an even deeper reason the analysis is wrong. Inspired by writing this post I logged into facebook for the first time in months. My kids stopped using it years ago and now posting is very power law distribution where virtually all my timeline posts are now from exactly two people who post or repost something roughly every waking hour and nobody else can keep up with their meme-stream which floods everything else out. When a sample is power law skewed like facebook, words like average and median are irrelevant and meaningless. Power law distributions have other ways to analyze them like half life / doubling intervals and talking about the actual exponent of the distribution and stuff like that. The average post "on facebook" comes from precisely two meme-crazy shitposters I feel familial / workplace obligation or peer pressure to friend, but the average user's post is an entirely different phenomena and is a perhaps annual event at most. Oh look its been a year since my last summer vacation, here's my annual summer vacation post.
There is a similar problem with email, yes 99.9% of email sent is spam no one reads. No that does not mean no one uses email or there are no important emails.
They usually apply basic criteria such as monthly active users (MAUs) here when promoting such stats. Your account likely wouldn't meet the criteria. In the case of bots, being "active" can be programmatically achieved, however.
So why does Twitter need 3,800 employees? Why does it need 1,500 technical employees?
Sure, it gets more traffic than any of those other sites, but growth has slowed and the traffic is more or less stable. The core product hasn't changed significantly. Their most ambitious innovation in recent years (Periscope) was an acquisition. What do the bulk of these engineers work on, day to day? It seems like Twitter is optimally set up to burn money.
Not the Mac app that's for sure.
[1] Fabric, an SDK for mobile apps - https://docs.fabric.io/android/fabric/overview.html
[2] Heron, a realtime, distributed, fault-tolerant stream processing engine - https://github.com/twitter/heron
[3] Finagle, a fault tolerant, protocol-agnostic RPC system - https://github.com/twitter/finagle/
[4] FlockDB, a distributed, fault-tolerant graph database - https://github.com/twitter/flockdb
[5] Ruby implementation of the ICU (International Components for Unicode - https://github.com/twitter/twitter-cldr-rb
[6] Clockwork Raven, Human-Powered Data Analysis with Mechanical Turk - https://github.com/twitter/clockworkraven
[7] Gizzard, a flexible sharding framework for creating eventually-consistent distributed datastores - https://github.com/twitter/gizzard
[8] Twemcache, a Twitter fork of Memcached - https://github.com/twitter/twemcache
[9] Twemproxy, a fast, light-weight proxy for memcached and redis - https://github.com/twitter/twemproxy
[10] Iago, a webapp load tester - https://github.com/twitter/iago
[11] Ospriet, a bestof/voting app - https://github.com/twitter/ospriet
Parent means their secret, money-making sauce. Not just what makes it appealing to some people.
>Where do you evolve this? Blogger, Blogspot, Livejournal, Tumblr, Medium, they're all in this same space
And 90% of them are almost dead.
They uses to have tons of ideas and innovation until they locked the API in preparation for the IPO, but the ways they expected that to generate revenue obviously haven't happened at the scale they hoped for.
Their quarterly reports consistently show that the losses are caused by stock-based compensation and simply having staffed for a much larger business.
That may be a good direction for them to pair with their platform.
Facebook already has a huge advantage with 10x the active users of Twitter, AND they integrated live video directly into the app that many of those users already have, rather than a separate app most of them don't.
"App constellations" may be a better user experience... if you bother to download the whole constellation... but I think a similar principle to "the best camera is one you have with you" applies.
> "App constellations" may be a better user experience... if you bother to download the whole constellation... but I think a similar principle to "the best camera is one you have with you" applies.
I agree. Why does Facebook insist on Messages being a separate app then? They should re-integrate it into the main app for all the reasons you wrote.
I imagine, once live streaming gets a sufficient enough user base, it'll have its own application experience.
WeChat has been successful with the model that you talk though .... Never say never ...
A few years ago Facebook Groups were popular at my school but now only a few of the largest ones are active. When I transferred in to finish my undergrad, the groups were essential to meeting people. Now I think it would be much harder to meet like-minded students online because all of the genuine conversation is in semi-private group chats.
Between Facebook, Instagram, and Messenger, I wouldn't be surprised if Facebook's apps occupy 30% of most top-10 lists.
Well for one, you can use it now without having a Facebook account at all, and it can also be used as your SMS app (at least the latest version on Android).
It's a case where disaggregation helps the user experience.
EDIT: 'is' to 'are'
> It's such a shame, really; arguably Twitter, much more so
> than their competitors, tries to stick as close to the
> original form of their product as they can. I admire that.
[0] http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2011/03/twitte...
How not to product manage 101.
And I hope they stay that way. Despite reports on twitter's dropping valuation, I find it as an immensely valuable tool for staying up to date. I'd pay to use twitter.
I thought the original point of Twitter – it's entire raison d'être – was that you could broadcast messages via SMS.
I think the communities are the most important part of these networks, and even if they all have feature parity, it's 100% fine for them to still exist independently.
I think Facebook and LinkedIn are a good example. You could basically do everything you do on LinkedIn on FB, but the communities are different so they stay different. Of course, LinkedIn accentuates different features, but both are mainly "Walls" with some messaging features and community building.
Though, I think you're very right in that Twitter is its own beast. Namely for the semi-public nature of it all.
It's disappointing because they have such a natural starting base for generating revenue: collecting neighborhood dues. It provides a useful service, would likely increase dues participation, fits within the value-proposition of the product. Lots of opportunities for premium features paid for by neighborhood associations, too.
That's why it's sad to see NextDoor chasing the same ad revenue of every other social network.
Their services didn't change much, but their philosophy changed drastically.
Then you have them temp banning people for political speech (and I'm not talking about harassment here, which is different.)
As for Vine, that is one that they should have evolved. Vine could have easily been more like SnapChat is now, but instead Jack and company sat on their thumbs.
Twitter is a remarkable case of mismanagement. I think in about 5 years hopefully someone write a book about how Twitter has constantly shot itself in the foot.
Oh how I wish this was true but sadly this is usually never the case. If it was Facebook would be long dead by now.
Part of me is seeing shades of the browser wars in these social network wars, and even though there were years of pain in the middle, we're all better off nowadays.
It's sort of shocking that after Jack left but hailed back to save Twitter, that the board didn't have more wherewithal to retain the founding team of Vine. Textbook post-acquisition problem.
I agree with other commenters that they should integrate Vine into Twitter. Like Instagram and video (or Facebook and Facebook Live), there's really no reason for it to be separate. Twitter needs better content generation tools at it's core. It's really starting to feel like a washed up RSS aggregator and nothing more.
Twitter already does video better than vine though, whats the point?
Everyone knows, that everyone knows, that its a very valuable dataset. But nobody is apparently interested in paying for it or otherwise monetizing it. Shades of "emperor has no clothes". The end result is Google Reader got cancelled.
If twitter was not standalone and was a mere subproject of a real company, it would likewise be long gone. They have no plan B so they'll have to keep doing what they're doing until they run out of money or are purchased, pretty much a Yahoo situation. Its like a decades old portapottie at a concert venue, everyone goes there does not mean its worth anything to anyone.
It would be a nice, cool world to live in where sentiment analysis is a thing. Its such an obvious and tasty idea, that unfortunately is completely wrong.
1. As another user mentioned, more tweets are from bots.
2. Lots of sarcasm and rhetorical questions in tweets.
3. Nobody tweets about their hemorrhoids. Or abortion. Unless you're GoPro, good luck finding insights.
There's an informal support group that tweets about perinatal depression, OCD, and psychosis. This includes people who've taken the choice to have abortion (or even sterilisation) rather than go through what they went through before. ((Watch out, this is just an informal group and there's not much in the way of clinical or data governance.))
Here's a british men's health magazine advertising itself with advice about hemorrhoid prevention: https://twitter.com/MensHealthMag/status/752076400102895616
I pretty much only tweet about treatment for mental illness.
I'm not sure how useful this kind of stuff is to other people.
Shazam [1], a company that makes an app to identify songs recorded through the microphone, makes money off of figuring out which songs get a lot of interest. Twitter can do something similar, if they don't already.
Much of it isn't even that. A huge proportion are not even real humans but are instead accounts being operated by one of the myriad of pieces of software that enable automatic posting on behalf of a human.
Perhaps my view is skewed as we have a travel blog and know many other travel bloggers but a vanishingly small percentage are real humans actually typing their own tweets in real time.
What exactly _is_ required for “running something at the scale of Vine”? Yes, they have/had a lot of traffic, but traffic in and of itself does not require a large staff to manage.
However, let's do some rough numbers. It says they had 3 product managers. I would guess this means 8-10 engineers. 3 QA folks would be a decent enough ratio. You've then got a GM, a head of product, head of UX, head of data science, head of BD, editorial lead, and head of engineering who all just left. We're up to 26 people already. Now we've got some HR staff, maybe a recruiter or two, finance team, people underneath the UX, editorial, data science and BD teams (let's generously assume 1-2 hires each), and we're over 40 people easily. We haven't even discussed marketing, help centre and customer support, a DBA, ops, or IT support.
Does that all make sense now? It's a company within Twitter and there are a lot of specialized roles to keep something with 25-30 million active users a month running smoothly. I'm not then going to go into what each person does each day, but with a product that you're trying to drive growth and new features for, while supporting existing customers, and just generally running a company, that takes a lot of bodies if you want to do it effectively and not cut corners.
All which presumably can be filled by pre-existing Twitter people. In the M&A world these are called "synergies".
Regardless, the point is whether 50 people is reasonable to run something like Vine.
Good thing I didn't ask you to.
> It says they had 3 product managers
Seems like a lot of product managers for a company with one product which isn't especially complicated. Smells like a sign of hiring really fast to try to grow.
> I would guess this means 8-10 engineers
The fuck do they even do? You don't need that many people to make something like Vine. Unless I'm missing something and there's more to the service than the video-related social CRUD app?
> You've then got a [bunch of dept heads]
Eh, I can see those I guess.
> Now we've got […snip handwaving about team sizes and numbers…] over 40 people easily.
OK.
> help centre and customer support
Yeah pretty sure Vine doesn't have a custom support team.
> ops [and] IT support
If they're managing their own servers that would add a lot of overhead I suppose. If they're just running off EC2 or Linode or whatever then there's not a whole lot of staff there.
> Does that all make sense now?
No.
> there are a lot of specialized roles to keep something with 25-30 million active users a month running smoothly
I think it takes more people to work out a revenue model for Vine than to sustain 25-30 million active users.
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Basically, bullshit. In Vine's case, you really don't need a big engineering team, which means you don't need a lot of people to manage your engineering team. I find it much more likely that Vine hired a bunch of people (engineers and otherwise) with VC money when they were growing fast.
If you want to make an effective point with sarcasm, you need to stay a bit more grounded.
I believe they are perfectly normal, and if anything are slightly on the leaner side of average.
If PeCaN is right, and I'm wrong, then he/she should be starting a company much more efficient than the average, and benefiting from being that much more effective than his/her competition. There are plenty of opportunities out there - if someone like Vine is bloated, then surely PeCaN could be a consultant and not deal with barriers to entry, and still be wildly successful. There was no sarcasm.
I'm not personally interested in Silicon Valley brogramming for social video sharing sites, but thanks for your confidence that I could dominate the market.
The needed headcount in both cases is nearly identical as well as quite significant at Vine's scale and with their type of product, and your assumption otherwise is a pretty clear indicator that you don't have much experience managing an operations team. That's okay, not everyone does, but you should listen to those around you rather than assume you know best in this case.
In operations it gets pretty tiring having engineers explain our role, strategy, and headcount to us, most particularly when this takes the form of criticism such as "you don't need a lot of [or have too many] people to do that," which comes off extraordinarily condescending and diminutive. The one thing that does not exist in all of computing, ever, from Joe's Web Design through Twitter and beyond, is a perfectly-staffed operations team. There is always more work than operators, and always "there are too many of you" sentiment. Always.
Sizing operations is an inexact science but one which yields "too many operators" approximately 0% of the time. When your operators propose dropping GPUs in the fleet to mine cryptocurrency as an additional revenue stream, you might (might) have too many. But not until then.
I'm trying to give you credit here that you mean well but the rest of your comment is somewhat suggesting that I shouldn't, so take it as you will, I suppose.
(Also, stuff like this: https://www.reddit.com/r/Buttcoin/comments/2u7ddq/the_real_r...)
I guess serving video is somewhat more complicated than delivering text messages (although texts need to be delivered in nearly real-time).
Maybe staff size follows a logistic curve w/r/t traffic?
It seems to me that WhatsApp and Vine have a similar staff to user to ratio.
Instead what's gonna happen is that it is going to be a slow and steady march of attrition until only the husk is left and people just feel sad every time either twitter and vine are mentioned.
Staying exclusive to a particular platform only pays if the platform literally pays you for your content. Otherwise you want to reach as wide of an audience as possible.
In other words, maybe you don't actually understand why people like Twitter. Which is fine--not everyone needs to like Twitter--but if that's true, you're probably not the best person to point Twitter fans toward good alternatives.
Vine on the other hand I agree with, the business model is doomed to fail. Instagram already has a huge userbase, and all it has to do is implement a video feature to kill Vine.
Maybe a virtual variant of that can be profitable but IMO it's doubtful. Elitism works best with real-life meetings. Same with snobism.
...Then again, I heard there are people sinking thousands of dollars each month into the dying game named e.Republic just so they can be shown in top-50 charts.
TL;DR: Humans love to pay so they can feel special. Go figure.
"Instagram will surpass Google, Twitter in US mobile display ad revenues by 2017" http://www.emarketer.com/Article/Instagram-Mobile-Ad-Revenue...
Not to mention a lot of the funny vines get posted onto a youtube compilation anyways, so in the end youtube is profiting from vine's success. Vine's business model was just doomed to fail.
Every time I click a vine video it takes ages to load. I can't remember a similar service with a crappier user experience
The Vine app lasted less than a week on my phone, because it was pretty much unusable. Yes, please, let me play a series of videos with sound while scrolling.
Half the time periscope videos won't even load for me over the web. No matter how long I wait.
Twitter Co.'s infrastructure seems to have only ever gotten marginally better since the fail whale days!
Twitter et al. should really become the blockquote service for the internet.
How is "having the potential to create a community around it" (and failing) more valuable than catering to the actually existing Twitter community?
I'm not saying I agree with the strategy, but you can't really say it failed. For a $30M acquisition it was quite a value as it exploded in subsequent years, it would have easily been approaching a $1B valuation at its peak, it only petered out in the last couple years. I really can't see how building a looping video feature into Twitter would have achieved that kind of reach (of course it would also have been hard to measure)
What do top executives do for these types of companies. It seems like a joke.
"Retweet with Comment" are not showing up as Retweets: https://medium.com/@Maver1ck/is-twitter-unreasonably-broken-...