What Twitter and the NYT have in common | Hacker News Reader

What Twitter and the NYT have in common

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25 pointsaaw8 comments

I understand why Winer says that "each is the solution to the other's problem" (referring to Twitter and the NYT). It is a reasonable assumption to come to, but I have to admit: I suspect its wrong. I don't think the primary reason why most "normal" people use Twitter is to share news links. I think Dave Winer uses it that way, but I feel like he has a tendency to assume that his way is the only way. It isn't.

I also understand Winer's objection to the 140-character limit. I really do. I personally think that it breaks Twitter for me and others who primarily access it via the web or the data connection on our smartphones.

However, I don't think Winer understands that for people who don't access Twitter in this way, anything more that 140 characters completely breaks the service. My wife used to have a "dumb" phone and thus access Twitter entirely through SMS. Had the service broken the 140-character limit, she would not have been able to use it.

I don't know how many people use Twitter in this manner. I don't know if anyone but Twitter does. I suspect, though, that Twitter doesn't change this because they know it will negatively impact enough of their userbase that it isn't worth dealing with.

I was going to say that the 140 character limit is what separates twitter from every other blog+rss feed combination - but now that I think about it, that's only partially true.

Twitter's appeal is that it is a blog+rss feed combination and is probably the only one of it's kind. The technologies existed as separate entities - you post your thoughts on your own page - you use a separate tool to read an aggregated list of other's thoughts. Twitter combined the two into a dead simple interface.

The 140 character limit - initially an artifact left over from the days when sms was the primary means of using it - is now more of a practicality issue.

You can't show a steady stream of other's thoughts if they all extend to multiple pages.

I've never found a use for Twitter until I use it as a news ticker across my devices.

Here is an idea for Twitter: they could open source their server infrastructure and make it distributed, thereby massively reducing their operating costs. Then they could offer paid hosting of Twitter streams for people who are too lazy to host their own Twitter servers (the Wordpress model).

One can dream, no? :-)

They've taken too much investment for that to be seen as a success. They need the control because they need 9-figure revenues, and that don't come easy for social web services. It's a shame really because twitter as a federated protocol would undoubtedly create more true value in the long term, and potentially join the ranks of ftp, smtp, and http as fundamental tools. I'm sure that would have appealed to Evan and Biz, but such things are impossible unless set in motion before the business people get their skin in the game.

If what he's saying is right (and he very well could be) that's actually kind of bad for everyone. If The New York Times can't figure out how to make money then they will simply go out of business and we lose one of the more respected newspapers in the world.

I'm less concerned about Twitter but I can understand that it brings enough value to people's daily lives that not having it would be a net loss.

At least in the case of NYT, they're at least making an attempt to monetize their business in a reasonable way - you pay us money and we give you content.

Disagree. The NYT can make money by changing their cost structure to one more conducive to distributing news via the internet. The old rule of thumb for newspapers is that the "cover price" essentially covers distribution, and advertising pays for everything else. Advertising should end up being the same or larger, but the cost of distribution should be significantly less.

They'll end up there anyway, but executives tend to fight tooth and nail against lower cost structures, because it also means lower salaries for executives (smaller company means that fewer of them are needed and there's less room for featherbedding).

Having some optional for-pay features seems like the no-brainer way for almost of these "give service away for free, get huge if popular" web businesses to get revenue. It should work for NYT, Facebook, Reddit, Twitter, etc. Essentially, freemium bolted on late. Even if not all users would be willing to buy anything, there will always be some folks that do. Find out what those folks want and are willing to pay, and make that happen. Done.

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