Twitter’s First CTO Greg Pass Steps Down | Hacker News Reader

Twitter’s First CTO Greg Pass Steps Down

techcrunch.com

24 pointsankimal9 comments

When put next to how far Facebook has come in the same amount of time, Twitter really feels like a shadow of what it should be in terms of adding new feature sets and even stability. The potential to be great is still there, but they could also be the next MySpace if they don't start to play catch up.

Frankly, I believe that Twitter is already great. They have an enormous user base and the participation is off the charts.

The problem is, I cannot for the life of me see how this platform is able to monetize itself into a viable, hugely profitable business. Granted, Twitter now is a profitable business, but my understanding that a significant part of their revenue comes from search agreements from Google.

So, how does Twitter expect to drive significant PROFIT growth on a foundation defined by 160 character sentences?

Purchasing a 50% random sample of all tweets in real time is reported to be $360,000 per year [1]. Apparently you can get the 100% feed for a negotiated price. If they can sell many licenses for those feeds, which I think that they can, they have the potential for real profit growth. I too was very skeptical of Twitter's profit potential until this service launched.

1. http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/twitter_to_sell_50_of_a...

Do the math on this in your head --- many/most? of the Global 2k don't need a full Twitter feed; what's US Gypsum gonna do with it? --- and you're left with a total addressable market that doesn't come close to justifying their purported valuation.

I'm not being down on Twitter. Just, whatever the monetization plan is, this can't be it.

The real money is in targeted advertising — you could pitch ads based upon the keywords of the tweetstream. The trouble is that next to Facebook Twitter hasn't really worked at this. On facebook within 24 hours I can be running an ad campaign with highly sophisticated tools on a budget of $25. If I only have $25 Twitter doesn't seem to care that I exist, in fact they only start to care if you've got $60k a year to invest in ads: http://business.twitter.com/advertise/start

it may be just me, but I don't see how losing ev williams, jack dorsey is really at Square even though they say he's still there (I wonder what really his involvement at twitter is or more of a morale thing) and now loss of Greg Pass, is positive for twitter. For such a huge, emerging quasi startup/business, it smells like trouble to me when everyone responsible for building the site is jumping ship so early.

they are just now focusing on making money, and the man running twitter gave us the dickbar. Just none of this sounds promising to me.

Firstly, Jack is at Twitter every day.

Secondly, we're not just focused on making money. There are many teams at Twitter working on many amazing things unrelated to a financial goal.

There might be good work going on there, but, us users, see little progress in the last few years. Facebook is only two years older than twitter and, in addition to a basic status feed has added an amazing amount of functionality: photos, groups, apps, a very powerful ad system, etc. All the while, it's had a very high uptime and reliability.

Twitter solves an elementally different problem to Facebook, which may lead to the disparity in features that you see and has previously caused issues with scalability. The Twitter engineering blog (http://engineering.twitter.com/) details some of the fundamental systems development we've been doing to solve these issues and give us a better platform.

From this, we can launch better products. I can't go into specifics, but there's some really good stuff coming in the future.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com