How Twitter Can Avoid Becoming the Next AOL | Hacker News Reader

How Twitter Can Avoid Becoming the Next AOL

wired.com

25 pointssmacktoward19 comments

This article really fails to answer the question its headline poses.

It's Wired. What'd you expect?

Gonzo journalism targeting a tech audience.

Turning back to Twitter, I like the service, and find 140 characters refreshingly brief. I don't know how to preserve it, but they've got huge mindshare and should be able to leverage that profitably.

Indeed, I feared they suggested something viable, but luckily, nothing of the sort.

A proprietary, centralized communication service is about the last thing the world needs, ripe for monopolistic abuse due to its network effect based lock-in, and at a high risk of attracting attention from all kinds of unwelcome organizations (intelligence agencies and the like), for no sensible reason at all, given that the transport layer below allows direct communication for federated and peer-to-peer services.

indeed. Actually this article is nothing but a waste of characters ... and waste of my and anybody' time. HN needs vote-down-feature!

> Cashing out by the people who understand Twitter’s prospects best is an ominous sign for the company and adds to the very long list of concerns about its future.

When you make many, many millions of dollars, you need to pay tax on it. Where do you think you get the money to pay the tax for it? You sell shares.

Someone would only pay taxes on the stocks if they sold it, via capital gains. If they're just being taxed on income, they can use that income to pay their taxes. Or am I misunderstanding you?

You're misunderstanding how and when vested RSUs get taxed. Capital gains is the tax you pay on your profit from owning a stock (after owning it for over a year). When a company gives you shares/RSUs, that is income and you must pay income tax on that right when it vests and the company has IPO'd.

See: http://business.time.com/2013/11/07/twitter-employees-will-o...

Ah, sorry, I was misunderstanding the rules. Thanks!

The guy sold $60,000 worth of shares. Hardly a 'cashing out' in a big way.

>In my view, the company has two options: find new sources of traffic, or evolve the product.

It seems we've omitted their purchase of MoPub, the world's largest mediator of mobile ads.

I don't think Twitter has a had a quarter in the black yet. It's a bit premature to say it is a success, nevertheless compare it to the monster AOL was.

I truly think a redesign is the only thing keeping from Twitter today to Twitter 10x. It is too cluttered and they are innovating their design too slowly. Remember how fast Facebook released changes (albeit facing massive protest)? People got over it and they are still growing. Twitter needs more contextual filters!

I don't see the comparison to Twitter at all.

Diskettes!

AOL's Q4 2013 revenue was $656 million. True, they aren't part of a hipster tech elite, but with money like that who fucking cares ?

Sometimes I forget that AOL seems to be doing fine, the question is though How? Is it by social inertia?

They appear to be doing more than fine:

http://www.google.com/finance?q=NYSE:AOL

Although, should note... a quarter's revenue of $656 million is a far cry from major tech companies, and that is revenue, not profit.

They own several media companies, including Engadget. Likely where they make majority of their revenue now days.

(that and the old people who still think they must pay AOL $10 a month for their email and the AOL web browser... yes, it's still a thing... and people do still pay for it... sigh)

Engaged is barely profitable and even the revenue is not that big. Majority of their money (profit and revenue) comes from subscriptions. Some from ads on aol.com other properties (but AOLtech is pretty weak)

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