Twitter Is Expected to Field Bids This Week
wsj.com
wsj.com
They chose the latter and rewrote their TOS to effectively eliminate 3rd party development on their platform. An entire ecosystem of companies, products and tools was destroyed because Twitter couldn't imagine or articulate the value of powering this backbone.
It reminds me of Sun and Java. Sun built a really useful product, used by hundreds of thousands of developers, but it didn't make enough money to sustain the company. They tried opening it up and that just hurt them commercially.
Edit: which is my slightly harsh way of saying dreams are easy, but doing is what counts.
The ecosystem would be a loss leader, simply for the purpose of having lots of market share.
They would make money on their main product.
Same as how google runs all sorts of services without making money on them, simply for the purpose of expanding online usage.
It's basically a variant of the Freemium model.
Who is going to step up? What kind of institution could deliver something like that, while remaining open and accountable? A Wikipedia style foundation?
My guess is that it needn't be (too) expensive to run, especially if you hand over responsibility for long term storage of the messages to third parties.
My PhD (in progress) is based on the public utility of Twitter data. I'm deeply sad about this.
The problem is precisely that people keep re-inventing the wheel here. We don't need Facebook Chat and all the other deliberately-incompatible protocols that keep getting built out, we just need people to implement XMPP.
As soon as a user has to understand federation - at all - I believe the proposition is dead to most people. For example Diaspora's 'pods' are, I think, fatally confusing. (I think Zuckerberg realised this, which is why he donated money to Diaspora - a project he could see would fail, but might also crowd out other OS alternatives to Facebook.)
For sure, XMPP can be part of the tech solution, in fact I suspect there are really excellent open source tools to address many of the inherent issues (perhaps Apache Cassandra can be Twitter's contribution to democracy) but I think the real problem is a social one.
You need an institution that can credibly promise to provide a platform in the long run and which can also get critical mass in at least one community. I believe the critical mass might well follow if the institution is widely perceived as reliable and legitimate in the way a foundation like Wikimedia is.
I went into some more detail on this in a blogpost: http://jimmytidey.co.uk/blog/building-a-better-twitter/
I don't see why not. Is the problem fundamentally different than SMS messaging or email?
- How would users know which nodes they could trust?
I think email and Sms are pretty weird user experiences that have succeeded in part because there was no alternative.
That is what search engines are for. The whole point of the Internet is that you can build businesses on top of open protocols with interoperable implementations. Giving up on open protocols and control of data (you can't even save images on Instagram...) "because hashtags" is incredibly shortsighted.
Perhaps I was wrong to say that federation is in principle ruled out, but I do think that it must be invisible to users. - Including namespacing usernames to nodes within the federation as with the @ sign in email.
I believe this is true in spite of the technical beauty of federated solutions, and it's exactly that beauty that's lured so many onto the rocks.
Isn't the meme that XMPP is horribly complex and the support for various sub-standards varies hugely?
Which is funny because Facebook Chat also used to be powered by XMPP
Yeah, I was pretty sure that Facebook was just using straight-up XMPP at one point in time. They have been actively trying to drive traffic to their Facebook Messenger app - first by shutting down their XMPP interface, then blocking applications that talk to their web interface, and finally by removing Facebook Messenger functionality from their mobile website.
Come to think of it, it's surprising that spamming is not more prevalent on SMS networks, because it's the same kind of federated system. But I guess access may be gated well enough and enforcement strong enough to prevent that.
[0]http://daltoncaldwell.com/an-audacious-proposal [1]http://daltoncaldwell.com/what-twitter-could-have-been
First was the great apps, and the features that continued to roll out for users. Unfortunately it was under appreciated.
So effectively development stopped in 2014 and it's on maintenance mode since then.
But in terms of having any sort of meaningful discussion on Twitter or the sharing of anything approaching deep thought or analysis, forget it. To me, there is close to nothing of value that can be added by the ordinary individual except perhaps links to other sites.
Personally, I despise Twitter. I do not use it. Never had an account, and never will. I don't know what the future is for the company and the service, but I can only hope that if they are purchased the acquirer does it purely to remove competition from the market and has a celebratory dumpster fire with the servers. If only I was so lucky. Twitter is part of the ego machine that feeds the narcissists that pervade social media.
I personally could never have imagined that Twitter would become so popular. I'm still surprised that people are using it (the whole thing doesn't make any sense to me).
Unlike Facebook, where I feel beholden to follow the people I know, Twitter is different. I can follow the thoughts of people I've never met, but greatly respect. There are tons of great designers, writers and journalists that make my Twitter feed entertaining and informative. Not everyone is interested in design or media and it can be difficult to discover accounts.
The other (previous) issue for Twitter is the feed. If you follow 1,000 people it will can be overwhelming. I was hesitant about the "You might have missed" section, but think it is a step in the right direction.
I can follow the thoughts of people without having to see most or all of their thoughts. I can follow people without becoming committed to their antics.
Twitter is the best platform for discussion of a "live" event as it unfolds. These events include TV epidoes, news conferences, policitcal debates, games, etc. A user can see what a famous person thinks or follow other hardcore fans who have great knowledge of what they are watching. I have become friends with several people due to twitter and sports.
Facebook, Instagram, SnapChat, etc are not great for discussing something that is ongoing over the course of multiple hours. Twitter is. The ability to mute words and hashtags to avoid spoilers or certain subjects is super handy. In addition, one can follow multiple live events in a singular, timeline fashion. Twitter is very good at getting people to talk about live events. Its problem is that it is hard to see a place for it outside that, and it is hard to monotize that.
Twitter = people you want to know
The focus on 3rd party api's hindered that and would have hurt their growth in that regard maybe?
Journalism happens on twitter first, it's where famous people talk to each other, not facebook, yeah?
I think the appeal of Twitter is feeling "in the loop" due to the real-time nature of the service. But in reality most of the content is just meaningless noise. It's hard to find any signal on that platform.
It's true that it's a poor platform for adversarial conversation or debate, but that's no reason to dismiss the whole thing.
I've been on Twitter for seven years and in that time I've curated a timeline which is, bar none, the most entertaining and informative web destination available to me, specifically tailored to my interests and disposition.
Meanwhile, every app or website with a messaging or notification function could have been using (and paying for) Twitter's API and infrastructure underneath. And all using a single Twitter account, so that every subscription to any of their customers' services would be a new account for them.
It could have been a great business model, but their leadership did have the imagination to try anything other than keyword advertising.
It's also good as a breaking news medium.
Even our political campaigns are now reduced to tweet wars, and platforms seem to need to be (lossy) compressed into 140 characters, or maybe 3 if it's very important. If you have a string of longer than 3 tweets, you lose a majority of your audience.
Twitter is a good tool, but simply should not be the de facto anything other than short messaging, in my opinion.
Twitter has expanded the boundaries of politically correct / acceptable speech, by enabling that brown nosing and echo chamber re-enforcement and not cracking down further on what's acceptable speech on their medium.
Twitter is probably the best thing that has happened to low-quality journalism over the past 15 years.
I've always view Twitter as the commerical break and news teasers for the internet. I rarely see good thorough discussions on Twitter especially anything expected to last more than 30 hours of relevance.
This is an extremely dubious claim and I don't see why everyone is so eager to support it.
What exactly makes Twitter valuable infrastructure? What compelling service does it offer to people and society? What other things would stop working if Twitter were shut down?
All I see is a bunch of people shouting at each other. Most people do not and will never use Twitter.
I think another solution is for the state to force the operator of the social network to keep its APIs open. (It's anti-competitive to do otherwise, would be the argument.)
I think it's interesting that there's a Wiki page about this issue.[0]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_media_as_a_public_utili...
Good systems for public debate are the precondition for democracy.
In a democracy they are the infrastructure on which all other infrastructure depends. Every subsequent spending decision is influenced by them.
If you turn off public debate nothing will break the next day, but in a decade most people's lives will be misery.
[0] You might claim that Twitter is superior to other forms of public debate, but then I'd ask if you're really happy with the way politics are going.
What's next? A well designed debate platform that allows only emojis? A well designed debate platform that allows only meme pictures?
I am saying that for millions of people Twitter is a unique way to join public debate. Personally, I have interacted with several public individuals who I couldn't conceive of contacting any other way. This is an example of two politics professors taking the time to explain something apparently well known in their circle to me:
https://twitter.com/Jimmytidey/status/757494127537905664
Where else would that happen?
If it does not suit you, fair enough. I find newspapers disinteresting, but I would prefer to live in a society that has them to one that does not. I would also prefer, as with Twitter, that their ownership structure was a little different (I'm in the UK).
I agree that Twitter has design flaws as a medium for public discussion, and I also believe that some of them could be alleviated if Twitter was run was by people with different incentives.
I myself am very happy with the character count, the truth is that the limiting factor is not how long a message you are permitted to write, but how long a message others will be inclined to read. I suspect Twitter is just being honest with us in this regard.
Certainly it is not the place to articulate a nuanced view. It is a place where you can find a unique audience.
https://techcrunch.com/2016/09/19/twitters-new-simpler-rules...
"SIMPLE".
New York City's subway system is one example. It started out in the 1900s as a couple of private companies, Interborough Rapid Transit (IRT) and Brooklyn Rapid Transit (BRT). The lines these two companies operated suffered more and more over time from overcrowding, leading the city to establish a third, public system in the '30s, and then in 1940 to just buy out IRT and BRT and merge all three systems into the single, publicly-operated network that serves NYC today. (See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_New_York_City_S... for more on this.)
It can happen, co-operatives are a viable business model. My bank is a co-operative and they work for their member-owners.
I'm not going to defend Twitter being a utility (which the parent comment also doesn't mention) but I will say that in general, it's very clear to me we haven't worked out what kind of institutions can best deliver services in the digital age.
It's profoundly dubious that Twitter - a defacto 'town square' for public discussion - is owned by an institution that, at best, has few incentives to make it effective for the purpose which it is widely used.
This is significant in democracies, where the quality of national decision making will be directly linked to the design of the channels in which public debate happens.
The idea that we can take full and fair advantage of the opportunities the web offers exclusively through profit-motivated corporations is flatly wrong.
The fact that as Twitter users we agreed to some T&Cs doesn't mean we can't also wish for a more democratic digital public space - which I assume is what the parent comment is really getting at.
I'm told that in Afghanistan it played (plays?) a key role in for aid agencies.
Twitter will never realistically be a utility. But there can be an open and distributed replacement for it that will meet the same goals, with fewer corporate restrictions and a more fractured government intervention.
GNUSocial is a great replacement for Twitter. With multiple hosts, your data is yours, you can move data between hosts and you can even choose to host it for yourself to control your own data.
That said, I thought about this recently when @pmarca took a break from twitter and all of his tweets disappeared, and I figured, "Well, yes, I follow him and enjoy his tweets...but I never planned to go back and read the old ones." It is a fleeting and temporary medium, like a conversation rather than an article or book.
Nonetheless, I really doubt storage is anywhere near the majority of the cost of running Twitter. It takes a lot of 140 character tweets to fill up a terabyte.
Tweets contain photos, videos, gifs, etc. Text is far from the only things that would need to be stored.
I've been saying for a while now that my cofounder and I add more functionality to our startup every two weeks than Twitter's 4,000 employees add to theirs in an entire year. Now this is obviously an apples-and-oranges comparison for all sorts of reasons, yet all caveats aside I think it's still pretty telling.
There was just a discussion of a closely related topic a few days ago:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12626314
> I think it's still pretty telling
Huh? Telling of what? That you don't have a good grasp on what's going on at Twitter?
I think Twitter didn't want to deal with small customers, indeed nobody wants to operate small accounts but if AdWords did it several years before Twitter, why did they never learn?
It lets you pay a specific amount per month (IIRC from $2 to $15 or so) that you use to "bid" for ads spots just like the advertisers. If you win, then you'll see whatever you choose in place of the ad. Any money left over at the end of the month is refunded.
It won't help you in the twitter case, but it does remove a good amount of ads across the net, and it even has controls that you can go in and whitelist/blacklist some websites from receiving contributions, as well as a full breakdown of where your money is going.
I've removed 16,000 ads since I signed up in april 2015
Perhaps Twitter as a utility could be just as valuable. Maybe it doesn't need to be monetized.
FWIW, I believe GPS costs the US on the order of $1 per user per month.
If you charge per user, it's unaffordable for small developers (unless they push the cost on to their users).
If you charge per app, you won't make enough money for it to be worthwhile.
I've just googled, looks like they're making $0.55/user/month [1]
I would have totally paid $7-$10/yr for no-bullshit version without ads, focused on user experience instead of manipulating my attention. I bet many other people would too. And I would use it way more actively as a result.
Why do neither twitter nor facebook offer premium/business accounts? It's not like it would cost them users, many people can still use the free ad-supported version....
Because it will cause their ad revenue to plummet. The users with money are the ones advertisers actually want to reach, so if you let them opt out of seeing advertising you'll just be left with an exclusive pool of users who won't buy anything. And no advertiser wants that.
Up to this point, the counter to this argument was basically "Well, what Twitter's doing is obviously working for them". But that's not quite as strong as it used to be now. How much money did Twitter leave on the table? It is, sure, possible that it would have been a net loss for them. But now I think a fresh look must be taken at the possibility that it would have been enough of a net gain to ensure their indepedence.
Plus one must consider the second-order effects of receiving subscription revenue. Might they have created a different and more valuable service to their customers and made even more as a result? Advertising-based businesses face the intrinsic paradox of trying to serve two customer bases at once who have somewhat opposed interests. (Even ignoring the socially corrosive influence of advertising incentivizing our smartest people to build the most powerful spying networks in history.) It is still not determined to my satisfaction that that is a stable business plan in the modern era.
One possible salutatory effect of Twitter's demise could be making the idea of subscriptions reasonable again. If even Twitter can't monetize entirely on advertising, who else can? Even Google and Facebook may be surprisingly fragile to a disruption in the advertising space, which is nominally not actually their business (even though of course it is). (The most likely disruption would be the continuing growth of ad-blocking software, but there's also the black swan possibilities as well.)
$0.55/month is the mean for the entire userbase. The actual amount for any particular user can be far more or far less (well up to .55 less) than that.
Users who are more likely to pay 4.95/month are much more likely to be worth more than 4.95/month in advertising revenue.
Given the paucity of people I know who've made a purchasing decision based off of an ad on Twitter, I seriously doubt that.
... which is plagued with spam and fraud. Victims are both the advertisers (who pay for ad slots that are viewed/clicked by bots) and the consumers (who suffer from malware ads, un-usable websites because there are 30+ trackers, ad brokers etc. on one single site, and higher product prices because the vendors have to pay for ads). The only ones who profits are the countless middle men - ad brokers and "big data analysis/retargeting" companies which kill user privacy on a global scale while providing next to zero value.
We should, once and for all, simply massively regulate advertising and re-think about how we as a society fund the services currently funded by ads. Especially in media, where "real" journalism had to step back in favor of ever more clickbait crap...
A good distinction but even if you assume a power-law/Pareto distribution for the revenue per customer, it would be roughly ~$2.20/user/month.
Hypothetically speaking, allowing those users to opt out would mean Twitter makes $0.20/month from the remaining users, rather than $0.55/month. Will enough users buy a premium subscription to make up that loss? I don't see the evidence that they would.
Of course, it's all hypothetical and none of us know the actual numbers involved. But I'd wager Twitter has looked at it at least once and decided it was not a good idea.
It can't work worse than operating at a loss until they go out of business, which is Twitter's current trajectory.
Look at Twitter for a moment the way game designers look at free-to-play mobile games. Whittling Tweets down to 140 characters is the sort of un-fun, repetitive process that a game designer would describe as a "grind" (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grinding_(video_gaming)). And free-to-play games have established that letting players buy their way out of having to grind is a completely workable business model.
So just let Twitter power users skip their way out of grinding to get their Tweets under the 140 character limit by letting them buy bags of extra characters, preferably at low enough prices to be attractive as an impulse buy. If you spend all day on Twitter, and you're faced with the need spend five minutes editing a tweet to get it down under the limit, being able to just pay ten cents for a bag of ten extra characters and get that five minutes of your life back might be very attractive! And from Twitter's perspective, those ten cents are more or less pure profit, since the marginal cost of shipping 150 bytes over the wire instead of 140 is next to nothing. Free users can keep on using Twitter for free, power users can become the "whales" that provide the revenue that keeps the lights on, Twitter makes money. Everybody wins.
Also, it's a bit of support/maintenance/overhead for something that doesn't have as much support as you might think - otherwise tools like Google Contributor would be blowing up. I imagine like ~1% of users would actually opt to pay, maybe 2 or 3%, based upon my experience with freemium business models at a few different companies.
I think there's the hypothesis that these "pro subscribers" have higher incomes and are therefore better ripe for advertising demand. I would argue that Google has enough data and intelligence to internalize this hypothetical lifetime value from ad dollars into a reasonable price for a monthly subscription that would be roughly equivalent. If the counterpoint is that $7-10 / year doesn't quite equal how much Google could get for the same user through advertising (which could be substantially higher I think,) then it's hard to fault Sundar or Jack Dorsey or any other tech CEO in this space for going with what would provide better value to shareholders (which is ultimately their responsibility, for better or worse.)
Go ask any major affiliate marketing network how they feel about Twitter traffic. Many of them have an outright ban on it - meaning it actually has negative value to their advertisers. It simply doesn't monetize nearly as well as the traffic from other social networks. Much like the average Android user is worth far less to app developers than an iOS user is, the Twitter user base is simply not worth much to people looking to monetize it. That's a huge problem when asking someone to justify a $17B acquisition price.
Even if the average for Twitter users is low, there are probably pockets of value for particular services. These are potentially not the kinds of customers these affiliate networks are interested in.
Your Android point is rather different, given the wide disparity of Android devices.
If 80% of Android devices are worth less than $10 per year, while 20% are worth $100 per year, and all iPhones are worth $100 per year, you'll have a much lower mean value for Android while also having a subset of very profitable users.
As you may have noticed, I'm not a fans of means in the advertising world.
On your point on Twitter's value, I see a lot of missed opportunity.
It felt like they slowed down really early in terms of what they did (and specifically their success with their product changes). Their growth stalled at quite a low point (relative to other social networks/services), which made it hard for them to attract good people, which further compounded the effect.
But then, I never used Twitter (and maybe that's the problem).
I disagree that it's different. Of course there are pockets of both value and worthlessness everywhere, but overall the LTV of an Android user to developers and advertisers is a small fraction of that of an ioS user, and a Twitter user is worth (to advertisers) an even smaller fraction of the value of a Facebook user.
At scale, averages are what count.
>As you may have noticed, I'm not a fans of means in the advertising world.
I did notice that, and I cannot disagree with you there. But currently, for many advertisers, last-click based means is the most efficient available attribution model, even though I agree that it's far from perfect.
I think that its difficult to assess your premise under a last-click model, to be honest. When you look at the history of advertising, its very difficult to believe that a direct response (measurable by click) is actually the whole thing.
I'm pretty sure I've never clicked on a Coca-Cola ad, but I have bought a lot of their product over the years.
I mean, conditional on your experience with the value of Twitter users (for a particular set of clients/services) and a last-click model, I don't disagree with you, I just think that such a view of advertising leaves an awfully large amount of stuff out.
Full disclosure: mobile attribution is hard, there is not standard or even dominant way of tracking views there (i believe) and so for some mobile-heavy/only advertisers better attribution methods are just a pipe dream at this point.
Why didn't they attempt to monetise journalism by providing users of Twitter with a subscription that allows them to skip the paywalls of big newspapers and that could automatically aggregate the individual micropayments into a revenue stream for the publishers that sign up? (This would make sense to me: often an individual interaction is worth very little, but the aggregate can find a buyer.)
Do massively funded startups get trapped into their original revenue-creation strategy due to the original vision they sold investors? It looks like that's the case, and if so that's terrible for manoeuvrability.
I've said before[1] that Twitter is the poster child for the tech bubble and that people's opinion of Twitter is a good litmus test for people's understanding of the industry. It sounds like Twitter's management understands their position and is looking to get out while there are still people who think Twitter has value.
It will be interesting to see the consequences of a major drop in twitters valuation.
Wonder what the DOJ and the anti-trust guys would think of this though.
Of course they are in the advertising market, but there are not dominant there.
It's pretty obvious that Twitter has access to tons of interesting data, I just question if it's anything more than simply "interesting". While Twitter is huge, it's not really ubiquitous enough that you can use it for measuring things like effectiveness of marketing campaigns.
1. Massive access to a social network that can better integrate all their products. 2. Integration with their ad platform (improving monetization enough to make it break-even). 3. They'd own one of the most influential social networks in the world. Google buzz, Google wave, Google + were all massive failures. 4. Integration with things like Google News. They'd be able to understand trends almost perfectly (from both news stories and users).
I think people on HN and the like sometimes massively underestimate why Twitter is so important. Twitter as a big social network like Facebook is never going to happen. Their decision to pursue that route seems foolish in retrospect. Instead, what Twitter has is a smaller group of users that are extremely influential. Moreover, they have the most effective fan-out messaging platform in existence.
I think focusing on monetization/user only makes sense while TWTR is an independent company. Companies like GOOG, MSFT, etc. benefit greatly from the externalities of owning TWTR more than the business itself (consider Youtube, for example).
I totally see someone famous buying Twitter just to own it, or another company like Disney who just wants it to break-even. It has cultural and influential value now separate from profit.
If the valley is an echo chamber (it is), then Twitter echoes louder than most things I can think of. Very few companies have the kind of reach and influence within the valley that Twitter has.
Perhaps the gossip magazines should pool their money and buy Twitter?
Right now you're suggesting that e.g. Disney is buying Twitter, for 17 billion dollars, to implement an untested business case. The cost of failure in that case is at least the purchase price of Twitter, that seems like a massive gamble.
I don't think Twitter is worth $17bn, but we live in an era of excessively hyped up and unrealistic valuations, so I have no idea what the correct price actually is. Yes, buying Twitter is a gamble, but many acquisitions are.
That power can be used to make massive amounts of money.
I don't understand why people keep saying this. Twitter has multiple billions of dollars in revenue from monetizing their users.
Profitable? No. They built out a massive organization planning for user growth comparable to how fast Facebook was growing, but user growth stalled. There is a profitable business within Twitter, but someone has to be willing to do the gut job.
But then again, Twitter itself has been a bad fit for Twitter, so maybe something will come out of this.
Any one paying 17 billion USD (or even between 5 and 10 billion) would need to be able to extract at least the same value from the purchase. If not, the buyers stock price is going to take a huge hit. It will anyway if the purchase of Twitter can't be rationalised from the start.
But pretty much anyone buying Twitter would have to kill it in its current form.
Best I could do.
* Edit removed the word "outsource"
It's illegal to replace a job of an american worker using H1b Visa's.
Maybe insourcing is a better word :)
Issue with Disney from a customer side is censorship.
It baffles me that they ever made it as far as going public. Its only avenues of monetization are advertisement and selling user data. What else could it charge for? Charging users a fee would kill it.
If only Twitter managed a small pie ...
Is there room for a similar service that charges a one-off fee, recurring monthly charge or fee per message?
Such are times.
Facebook is fundamentally better because you only get updates from people who you know in real life - When you post something on FB, those people actually care about what you have to say (interactions are bidirectional).
To the average user, Twitter is just a glorified RSS news feed. You read other people's tweets, but nobody actually reads your tweets. The interaction is mostly unidirectional.
I only got into twitter to follow people I knew in real life; I've ended up following a lot of strangers and public figures and I've made a few friends over it. My wife has made even more friends by tweeting along with TV, especially Eurovision.
Point being, people do read what you say and it's possible to get a lot of exposure. Maybe you're just not tweeting anything interesting.
On the flipside, how do you discover things?
[0] and valuation as a side-effect.
They have a product that is very valuable to many people, but those people are not enough, and the things Twitter tried just didn’t improve the situation. They could expand and try to compete with Facebook, but that’s not going to work and will alienate their current core users, they could reconsider the 140characters limit (ditto), they could just stick to offering the same service in perpetuity with minor changes here and there, and hope for the best, and that’s what they are doing. They need to expand their users base and by extension increase their profits (more users, more ads served, and there is this whole network effect to consider).
The fact is, potential buyers are aware of that implicit users-base wall Twitter has hit a long time ago, and are probably not interested that much in contributing their own ideas in order to succeed where Twitter’s many leaders in the past failed to do. They should know that significant changes to the product will morph Twitter into something else, it will no longer be Twitter, and like I suggested earlier, Twitter doesn’t stand a real chance as a competitor to Facebook and other emerging/established networks.
I love Twitter, I use it every day and it provides me with a lot of value. I suppose it’d be best for me and others like me if they stay the course, so that we can all use it like we do today, and hope one of their future ideas will work out, all the while they are losing market share, and then eventually, inevitably, agree to a sale. The alternative would be someone else buys it now and Twitter will soon become something, and that will undo the company.
Twitter may not be worth $17 billion but it certainly contains a viable business and even a few brilliant ideas waiting to escape and flourish.
When the CEO is not willing to put in 100% and ensure the success of the company, you really can't expect much from the rest of the company
there was talk back in the app.net days with lots of wonder for what developers would do with an open twitter-like system, with open clients, open data etc.
imo it would be quite cool to have an open source content system like twitter that actually maintains a live service, where the git project auto-magic manages the production pipeline to live.
but imagine a fully open system providing tweet streams with little direct corporate involvement.
(who knows how to fund the bandwidth etc)
On the other hand, if they work from the assumption that Twitter is done growing and now it's time to focus on existing users rather than potential users, they might do okay, depending on the purchase price.
Let's hope that something else emerges post-Twitter that is similarly broadcast-focused, not real-name oriented, and lightweight.
http://thehill.com/sites/default/files/a_hrc_32_l.20_english...
It's all about ethic and control of the source. If you can check the source, you can't tell if it's true or not and also access to information should not be limited by your money.
This make me sad the way Internet is turning to.
That's an analogue to saying that 'tools destroy everything'. Money is just a tool, you can use it for good and you can use it for bad.
The 'old' internet is still there, underneath all the ad-driven cruft, but for some reason the majority of the people active on the net prefer those ad driven services. I'm not one of them but It's hard to ignore the fact that you - and I - are not in the majority here.
As for being able to check the source, that hasn't been true in a very very long time except for scientific publications (and even there you have to check to see who funded the study).
https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-s5LeMVvmcJ0/V_UeJYgxG6I/A...
There's this and two more tweets, in rotation. They are three sports-related Tweets from two years ago, with that shit image quality, and what's even more amusing: since I'm based in Spain, they believe I'm interested in Argentinian football, probably because I speak the same language (but Spaniards usually know absolutely nothing about sports from South America, neither are they interested in that).
Even better, the cookie use banner moves the tweet down, making it overlap with the footer.
And this has been like this for two years already. I guess nobody ever logs in in the company?
My personal hypothesis is that Twitter is a ~500M user niche social network. Which sounds absurd to me, because when I started using the Internet there were ~15M people online, total. But there it is.
https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/sjFY1xcd8zjgSkpU_3AF1UP7vm...