Twitter's IPO Roadshow | Hacker News Reader

Twitter's IPO Roadshow

twitteripo.retailroadshow.com

34 pointsjmacd12 comments

Can't help but notice Costolo touting stuff that used to be good about Twitter but that they've since messed up.

"Users can follow only the things they want to follow."[1] But now the mobile app shows push notifications for irrelevant events, like 3 people you follow following another person. Can't turn it off. So no, users are no longer in full control of what they see.

"The 140 character limitation means information flows at a high velocity." Except now with auto-expanding pictures you only end up seeing like 2 tweets at a time on a phone screen. This change is a serious compromise to the core Twitter experience, giving images undue extra weight and making it harder to scan.

He even brags about having third-party clients! Yup, which they have deliberately forced into providing a second-rate experience[2], and sucked the oxygen out of that market completely by capping number of users.

What all these changes have in common is that they make Twitter more like Facebook. I understand the reasoning, of course: More events shoved in users' faces = more engagement. Auto-displayed pics = improved discoverability for new users. Killing third-party clients = can claim tweets look and work the same everywhere, as Costolo also mentions. But what does it all add up to? A streamlined, embeddable Facebook with a smaller length limit?

Maybe I'm too annoyed with Twitter's devolution to see this rationally as an investor. Or perhaps I'm reading too much into the first two changes I mentioned, which could, after all, be reverted. But to my jaundiced eye, they show the company's on a clear path of tossing out its unique strengths, becoming just another social network also-ran.

1. Quotes paraphrased since the video player won't let me rewind to check exact wording.

2. https://twitter.com/manny_neira/status/300437233993912320

I think the auto-expanding pictures have more to do with advertising than improved discoverability.

> rationally as an investor.

Shouldn't you just buy an index fund, as a rational investor?

Think about it, market actually would be very inefficient if everyone bought nothing but index funds it would be quite Harrison Bergeron like. You need speculators/investors.

That said, for those not willing to actively follow their investments, index funds are the rational choice.

I thought that story was the height of inanity, truth be told.

Turning to the question at hand, at some level, your argument is of course correct, but we're pretty far from it in practice.

It's hard to understand why Facebook, Twitter, etc have all used this "RetailRoadshow" video service. Perhaps someone here can enlighten me?

It's a specialised service and the guy that runs it knows everyone who's anyone in the biz.

http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2010/11/05/ex-banker-brings-road...

“The whole purpose of RetailRoadshow is compliance,” Mr. Hammond said. “The S.E.C. kind of said, ‘Hey, we need to do this, you need to do this.’ So we’re doing it. It’s not the bulk of the business.”

Mr. Hammond’s company is paid by an I.P.O.’s underwriters to record and host their roadshow — either by filming on location, say, or recording audio over the telephone. NetRoadshow charges around $10,000 to $20,000 for the average roadshow, which comes out of a given transaction’s marketing budget and is usually split among its underwriters.

== From the link.

If there is anything wrong with late 90's all Flash website design, I don't want to be right.

He talked about tv+twitter for almost 10mins, interesting...

Twitter is widely used by many people, but still for many people (investors included), it hasn't shaken the prevailing notion that it is useless. I think he's talking about TV which people understand better to suggest that Twitter is becoming as ubiquitous as TV.

I recently interviewed at Twitter, and one of the engineers I spoke to kept talking about Twitter+TV. It's something they're actively pushing for, as strange as that may sound.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com