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Comment by Touche | Hacker News Reader

I doubt it. Twitter is fundamentally flawed in a way that I'm not sure is fixable. The fact is that the vast majority of people on Twitter get no feedback at all when they post something. This is a combination of 2 things:

1) Tweets disappear quickly from a user's timeline 2) Most people have few active followers

1 and 2 work against each other to form a negative feedback loop. The result is the vast majority of users use it passively to read celebrity tweets, nothing more.

Twitter must know this as their growth is already peaking and they're not making much money. Expect to see more drastic measures to try and turn what they already have into something profitable. They've peaked.

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Twitter can have value to people that post nothing. (This is the case for a number of my friends on Twitter.) And what you're describing has existed since Twitter was created as Twttr.

Right, it has value, but that value is not going to go up, is my point. Twitter users don't become more engaged over time because only a small percentage of users can use it the way it is intended.

Seems to me most of the value in Twitter is as a broadcast medium for established media entities.

500 million tweets a day means that users are getting some kind of positive reinforcement for posting, and that it's more than celebrities.

How many are retweets rather than original tweets?

How many are spam?

How many are shady i.e. pay folk in the Philippines or Pakistan to send out tweets all day, to boost the numbers?

500m tweets a day is nothing.

That's only 5,700 tweets a second.

An average IRC network for example does more than that.

The number your comparison is missing, and one that happens to be crucial to both business and technical differences, is that you should be looking at tweet impressions, not tweets.

Also interesting is if impressions should be counting followers of the tweet author or only if the follower reads it.

Many users are following so many accounts that they can only read only a small subset of their timeline. I wonder if Twitter's apps and services also have to evolve substantially like Facebook's did to include more elaborate filtering and ranking options.

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