Twitter is not dying. It’s on the cusp of getting much bigger

Very unlikely to happen. Traction is such a huge factor why people use social networks that outweighs all the features such as ad-free or better usability by the amount of 10 probably.

Twitter needs to f up big time to lose its current popularity.

I disagree. Most of the pros are pros at finance, but not in the industries they actually invest in. By having expertise in a particular industry, you may be able to recognize disconnects between most pros and reality. Case in point, if you recognized that traditional hard drives weren't really going to be displaced by SSD's back in 2011, and saw the major players start to consolidate through M&A thus reducing competition, and bought Seagate and Western Digital stocks then at mid single digit P/E's, you'd have done pretty well with a 3-4x return in as many years. All the pros seem to love these stocks now, but certainly didn't back then. Now that may have been an extreme case, but a clear example of how financial analysts speculate based on very shallow understanding of the companies they make bold predictions about. Any time they get it wrong, which is not uncommon, there is an investment opportunity. Perusing financial news of the industries you have expertise in for a few minutes a day is sufficient for spotting such opportunities. Or to look at it a another way, consider the 80 hours a week you already put into your own industry as investment research.

With that said, it's good to mix in some fundamentals with your contrarianism to reduce risk, and investing in companies that are actually making money. Twitter is not one of these companies. That's not to say that I'm bearish on Twitter, I just think it's far too risky to invest in or against given that its price is more affected by rampant speculation than economic realities.

That's true, but the point the article makes is that Twitter is not primarily a tool for talking to people you already know, but instead for publishers/content creators to broadcast their material. These sorts of things change much less frequently: I never got an ICQ message from the New York Times, but I sure get a lot of tweets from them.

I thought Facebook was in-app accidental click advertising? ;)

People love a bargain :)

I did the same thing with FB a while back, someone made a similar comment, and my FB holdings are now up 150% in aggregate ;)

These things do not just happen, there is usually a good PR firm behind these types of coincidences, probably pitching it as "everyone loves contrarian articles and don't I have a good one for you."

I'm pretty sure having the stock priced lower than the strike price for the options would pretty effectively "make" people hold onto their stock.

Related: I'll sell you this dollar for $2.50. ;)

You assume those people have stock. That is very unlikely to be true. Most of those people have stock options. Very different.

An option means that I can buy a share of stock at some guaranteed price (strike price). So, I would actually have to cough up the money to buy the share. Only after that, do I now own a share of stock that I can transact as such.

If the strike price is above what the stock currently sells for, I probably do not want to exercise the option. If the strike price is close to the option price, I probably would rather hang on to the option until the price rises some more. The option doesn't cost anything until I exercise it (or lose it, most options have a time limit) so I mitigate risk by waiting.

So, unless the stock price is above the option strike price+some margin, people won't transact.

My uncharitable speculation was: What better way to keep everybody from flooding the market with Twitter shares than to drive the price down enough to keep people from wanting to cash out their current options.

To be fair, the depression in Twitter is probably just everybody getting a shock that "Gee, Internet companies can actually saturate a market and run out of growth."

Amazon got zapped recently (imagine, adding sales tax to their prices dropped their sales). Google and Apple are showing some signs of deceleration (ad revenue is slipping because smartphones have saturated all markets with real money--so now everybody is actually chasing a competitor's customer rather than bringing in new users).

In my experience, "sign in with Twitter" acts as a significant barrier because people don't actually know their Twitter password.

I hadn't actually seen Facebooks numbers, but that impressive. You're right, they don't fit in then :-)

Much like Google, Facebook has been squeezing the advertisers rather than generating more/better impressions.

Revenue from advertising numbers for the endpoints (company with product to end consumer) are down across the industry, and everybody is trying to hide it. Once it becomes general knowledge, the advertising spend is going to drop and take the numbers from both Google and Facebook with it.

From my personal experience: I always run AdBlock/NoScript. I am APPALLED by web surfing when I don't have those. If I'm stuck on an iPad or my Galaxy, I want to hurl the pad across the room after 15 minutes. I have uninstalled apps just because the advertising was so intrusive (to be fair--those app developers don't want me either--I'm not the fish that will make their revenue).

So, now, I absolutely will not use web browsers on phones/pads unless I'm desperate (at which point ads will actively piss me off instead of get me to buy). Good job, advertisers. You've now ensured that you absolutely cannot reach me.