Twilio looks better from afar | Hacker News Reader

Twilio looks better from afar

diggz.org

33 pointsaaronpk39 comments

Yet another terrible assassination piece by Johnny Diggz, the CEO of Tropo, a quickly failing Twilio competitor. He has been a real dick since the early days and spreads lies and rumors about Twilio.

They're not all lies per se. Tropo/Voxeo also isn't failing :/, they just won Deutsche Telekom's Euro business.

Voxeo doesn't always have the best marketing team, but they do have a lot of technical expertise. Their CTO Jose is one of the funniest people I've ever seen on a panel and he's a delight to converse with.

I don't think any of the metaphors at play here hit the nail on the head.

Voxeo is a large, lumbering enterprise fighting its way into the Carrier world by virtue of erosion. Twilio is the nimble web-focused startup burning the candle at both ends trying to fight the night away.

It's not yet clear which strategy will prevail, but I don't think the mudslinging is the right course either.

Disclaimer: I'm the community manager at 2600hz, which is innovating on the application switching layer of voice communications. We're also full open-source.

I say "Tropo is failing" and I mean that their adoption rate is much lower then Twilio is. I'm sure Voxeo has tons of money to throw at Tropo until they run out.

I haven't heard of 2600hz before, great name. I'll check it out!

Thanks! We're total phreaks over here :D.

Here's the Git link for our Kazoo project: https://github.com/2600hz/kazoo

Here's one of our APIs (conferencing): https://2600hz.atlassian.net/wiki/display/docs/Conferences+A...

We've got a client doing a very large number of simultaneous participants in a conference using this stack (in excess of 10k concurrent), so there's a lot of firepower here.

Also of interest to this community: the logic is written in Erlang :).

Let me know if you have any questions, we're in freenode at #2600hz

I am curious here. Is there any place to check Twilio or Tropo adoption rate? I'd love to get some numbers.

Twilio has like ~150,000 devs in ~4 years, Tropo has like ~300,000 devs in ~16 years. Those are the numbers I hear thrown out, but I'd love to get some harder details.

One correction, for others reading the comments - Diggz isn't the "CEO of Tropo", his title is Chief Evangelist for Voxeo Labs.

My apologies

Hello,

So I have a slightly different take on this. (Disclaimer: I'm the community manager for 2600hz).

I've always thought Twilio was trying to get acquired (their deals with AT&T and Microsoft seemed to imply a conversation was happening in this regard at the very least) but for a valuation north of $1B. My personal feeling is that you can't get a $1B valuation without Mobile and Twilio doesn't really do mobile in the same way 2600hz doesn't really do mobile (at least not yet).

The walled Garden that is Carrier-land prevents native dialing (dialing through the handset dialer instead of a native app/web app/plugin). Becoming an MVNO is super risky, but I was really encouraged by Twilio's announcement with AT&T and even more so by Voxeo's announcement with Deutsche.

This is a big world and the clear winner of the voice API war will be crowned in the mid 20-teen's not now. If your argument is that Twilio will burn out before their acquired, my reply is: Maybe. That's the risk they took, and it's similar to the risk Square took (see this leaked chart: http://i.imgur.com/b1Sm9.png).

I admire Twilio because they're the best developer evangelism team I've ever seen. Yes they spend a ton on marketing and they might be the Groupon of Voice APIs, but the fact is that they're doing it, and if they get acquired all of the Voice API companies will benefit from their success.

In short, Twilio doing well actually benefits Voxeo and so I don't understand the worst girlfriend analogy. I'm by no means in love with Twilio, but you have to admire them for what they do: they're hands-down the best evangelists for any platform out there. Their developer engagement is nothing short of awesome.

Cheers,

Joshua

Is that chart leaked? Looks like just an outside estimate by Business Insider:

http://articles.businessinsider.com/2012-03-06/research/3112...

That's what I get for assuming blogs are correct. Thank you for posting the original article, I'll edit my post above to reflect this.

Thanks!!

Oops, too late to edit, guess my mistake has to rest in stone :/.

No problem, I only found the original because I was googling around trying to find some interesting commentary on the "leak". In particular, why do transaction costs grow so much faster than revenue? That almost implies that they're going to be processing many more transactions at lower average cost per transaction, so they'll end up paying a higher percentage of the total in fees?

My theory is that the additional distribution from their deals with Visa and Starbucks didn't come with the same business terms they're able to negotiate independently.

One small biz negotiating with Square versus the gigantic morass that is Visa. Chances are Visa will have a more dominant negotiating position.

Still waiting to find the connection in the article about how Twilio is like the worst girlfriend you've ever had. Just seems like a jaded bias article from a competitor. :-/

Even if you take out the competitor factor the article was really about their opinion on Twilio's status as a company.

I expected an article talking about supposedly bad cancelation or privacy policies, something like that. Pretty bad headline.

I see he changed the headline. Pretty funny. Not sure how this person has any insight on Twilio financials. It'd be interesting to get this person's own background posted on this space. I think it would pull back the veil of ignorance displayed in his blog post.

I don't think anyone would try to argue that Twilio is profitable. They spend a lot of money and while they're going to move 500M minutes this year, those minutes are not free.

The author makes several valid points but undermines the overall critical nature with what appear to be non-sequiturs. If this article was a frank accounting of Twilio's position with some postulative math about their sustainability, I don't think anyone would've objected. The issue was the accusations, most of the content is factually correct (Twilio did raise a lot of money and continues to spend a lot of money).

What we have are two different world views, and it's not clear yet who is correct.

Don't get me wrong I think every company has it's issues. Some of the companies you would think are the most stable are some of the most chaotic. However, there aren't too many instances where an article is taken seriously when it's written by a competitor. The fact that Johnny is writing this article while still working at a competitor means this article is meaningless. It holds no water. It comes off as someone who just wants to slam his competitor. If he wants to legitimize this article, talk about the challenges they face. Talk about the problems they've had in the past. Without it, it's a puff piece. He might as well have published this in the Sun.

Twilio is losing money, talent, and you can't even provision a phone with it. You know, just like the worst girlfriend you ever had.

Cached version at https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:www.di...

"Twiliots" Really?

Voxeo Prophecy is really nice (except for configuration which can be a bit of a quagmire) and their service is good but Twilio is very, very easy to use. This piece reminds me that I need to look at Twilio for more than SMS.

Interesting (if painful) space. I've played with the Twilio API and for what we wanted (SMS to any phone, ability to dial/talk to a phone and take a response) it seems to be fine.

That my 'phone' service doesn't offer this as part of the package is what I find actually broken. For years and years the answer the question "How can I use my phone?" was "Pick it up, dial, talk." which was fine when it was a person to person communication device. But when it become a 'computer to person' communication device it needed a computer friendly API. Had the phone companies provided that, folks like Voxeo and Twilio and eFax wouldn't exist.

I friggin hate Twilio, and I kick myself for ever getting suckered into using it. I'm down to a single account and a single line in, but I need to port it off, and Google doesn't care to port Twilio numbers off to GV. If Twilio could do something other than drop calls to PSTN (I mean here, make a fuggin VoIP call), I'd be singing a totally different song, but it's a one-trick pony.

You hate Twilio because you tried to use it for something that it isn't? I don't see what you're saying here.

You registered a new account for this comment?

Try Plivo.com, we allow VoIP/SIP Calls. I am one of the founders of Plivo. Drop us a note at support@plivo.com and we will help you out.

I'm looking at Twillio for a possible future project and this just prompted me to look at Voxeo which I hadn't heard of. The Voxeo website just doesn't work for me like the Twilio one does, it lacks an pricing information (that I could find quickly) and even the developer section is mostly buzzword filled non-information. The Twilio site gives you pricing information up front and the developer pages show you the APIs and give some examples so that you can really see what can be done with it.

This doesn't necessarily mean that Twilio will survive or not have to raise prices but they make me want to use it more than Voxeo even if it has the same capabilities.

I really do hate sites that hide the pricing and documentation or require registration to get them although maybe A-B testing shows that gives better results.

Were you looking at voxeo.com or tropo.com? tropo.com is the site for the developer API similar to Twilio, and has a documentation and pricing page linked right on the front page.

That looks much more like it! Will look further.

The gist of the post is that Twilio is losing money, losing talent, and getting desperate. I don't see why the author couldn't have just said that instead of picking a sexist blog post title -- he didn't even use the girlfriend metaphor beyond the headline.

Edit: They've changed the title. Cool!

What was the title?

"Why Twilio is like like your worst girlfriend" or something along those lines.

I really want to like twilio but it's MADNESS that you can't terminate calls over the internet. So you're saying EVERYONE in the company has to have skype numbers just so we can terminate calls?! I would love it if twilio client actually worked but the sound quality makes it worthless. Hopefully WebRTC will fix that but who knows how many more years that will be. Please please, just bite the bullet and build a desktop app that has decent sound quality, supports multiple accounts and can punch through firewalls. It's stunning to me that Google Voice, Skype, and Twilio are so poor at serving business customers.

Twilio just added SIP support in beta. Also, they do have Twilio Client which would let you accept calls and make them via browser

We also just launched WebRTC in beta. Sign up here: http://www.twilio.com/beta/webrtc or ping me - my email is in my profile.

If you haven't tried Twilio Client in a while I would encourage you to try again - the call quality has improved dramatically over the past nine months.

While I don't 100% agree with the piece, our team just stopped using Twilio and is migrating over to MoGreet beacuse of their MMS capabilities. We already miss Twilio's strong community, but MoGreet has been incredibly responsive and supportive.

Seen them before. What made you go with them? Their lack of disclosed pricing threw me off... I couldn't seem to find any info on their cost structures.

They are a much smaller operation, which means you'll get the personal touch. On the minus side the API is less robust and there is little to no documentation when you need it, I'd give it a stab if I were you, they made it very easy to migrate over!

We know it's a terribly devastating "assassination piece by Johnny Diggz". That's why I fucking wrote it, asshat!

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