Investors Grumbling, Twitter CEO Struggles to Define Vision | Hacker News Reader

Investors Grumbling, Twitter CEO Struggles to Define Vision

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40 pointsatupem32 comments

Twitter's best feature is 140 characters of content. Also, Twitter has always amazed me by being the first place that I discover breaking and often historic news - an experience that has never been replicated on Facebook or elsewhere. The signs though seem to indicate that it struggles with product vision and leadership. Seriously, "to build the world’s largest audience" is not product or user centric thinking and is a step toward failure in my opinion. I think core users can still find value and a unique experience on Twitter, but Twitter needs to better understand and articulate what makes it so great. Yes, it is still great in my eyes.

Personally, I think Twitter is struggling because they're married to the greatest short coming of the product: the 120 character statically allocated array. Sure they've tried to shoehorn other things into it (photos, replies, tags), but always at the expense of these precious characters -- a product decision that came from aping SMS. The updates are often frustratingly limiting. As long as you artificially limit yourself, you're stuck and can't innovate.

I use Twitter, but I don't know what I exactly get out of it. I guess I use it out of habit more than anything.

I think the fact that Twitter is overwhelming a negative place is a bigger issue.

I think Twitter's overwhelming negativity is strongly related to it's character limit.

I spend a lot of time on Facebook and the ability to back-up one's opinions in greater detail with (relatively) longer arguments is pretty crucial tool for having constructive interaction.

I don't think it's the character limit, it's the fact that the stream moves so quickly that unless you tweet loudly more than likely no one will read what you write (unless you happen to be a celebrity).

While that's true, I think it's possible to find your own corner of the world that's not obsessing over the issues du jour and generally worrying themselves to death.

After trying many time to cull the people I follow to create a more positive space, I ended up starting a new account and only following people whose positive:negative content is really high. So far it's working well.

I've dropped Twitter. Their iOS client regularly pushed so many ads down my throat (in stream) that (a) I noticed and (b) I noticed it every day.

When I got to the point of blocking every advertiser (confirmed views +1!) but they popped back up under different special handles I resigned myself to defeat.

I will miss the serendipitous discovery of tidbits of information that it enabled, but the signal/noise (or rather, content/ads) ratio was overpowering. It needs to make money, but I think it's killing itself or at least transforming itself into the equivalent of TV -- content producers broadcasting to a largely passive audience.

They've made it increasingly annoying to use their site, particularly as a logged out user.

Their mobile site on android breaks -- forwarding me to an error page -- about 1/3 times I attempt to use it. This is the stock os and browser on a nexus 5.

The desktop site no longer allows me to view sensitive content by clicking the button: not on chrome w/ ghostery, not on ff with no plugins, and not on safari with no plugins.

I'm prompted to login at least 1x day, and you can't see who someone follows without creating an account.

I haven't dropped it 100% but I've turned off all notifications. I've even unfollowed some users and brands that I got push notifications from where I wasn't even @mentioneded. The iOS app is getting really spammy now.

I'm once again flagging an article because of a registration/paywall.

this sounds rough:

   Last week, he named Twitter’s fifth head of product in as many years. Its 
   most recent vice president of product, Daniel Graf, who came from Google 
   Maps and was handpicked by Mr. Costolo, lasted less than six months in the 
   post.

What was Daniel supposed to accomplish in 6 months? That's barely 1-2 months of strategizing then a 3 month dev cycle worth of work...

Six months is hardly a fair shake for anyone, let alone someone in such a crucial role. That said, six months is two quarters on Wall Street's clock. That can feel like a lifetime for an embattled CEO. When CEOs come under fire from investors, they like to shuffle around the executive deck.

Six months is not much for a product head to do if they company itself has no clue what it really wants to do or become.

Twitter has already built the most important audience on the internet - the news media and news makers. The only missing link is a strategy that caters to this audience with active sourcing of news worthy content and additional mediums for short burst one-to-many real-time broadcasting. Tools that let media and news makers exploit the stream are monetizable. Ad carry-through is entirely unexplored ad revenue awaiting Twitter. Mesh networking solutions are monetizable as are private and encrypted sub-networks. Twitter's chief problem is a lack of identity. It will never be Reddit, Facebook or Instagram - mercifully.

I agree. Their best route is to position increasingly as a tool for media and those reacting to it or sharing it. Instagram and Facebook have them beaten for personal updates. But tweets are still being shared on TV broadcasts, and Twitter handles are accompanying TV and newspaper profiles.

I wonder if they've considered making available something beyond 140 characters to media partners. Like nested tweets, or chained tweets, or interactive tweets, or better galleries or listicles. Or tried revenue sharing as a trial with particular partners?

There's a company working on this: https://grasswire.com/. Their goal is to democratize the news by adding things like fact checks to tweets. I know the guys running it and I've seen previews for their next release. It's gonna be killer!

Remember when Gmail used to have that ticker for how much space you get that would update live? You'd watch for a few seconds, and instead of 3.104649 GB of free email storage you'd have 3.104672 GB!

I think what Twitter needs is a similar ticker indicating the maximum number of characters in a tweet. I can scarcely imagine the excitement of watching it slowly creep upwards. Think of the celebratory triumph we can all share when, after months of build-up, it finally crosses over to 141 and everyone gets another character to use!

No more worries about vision after that.

I was on a Twitter Singapore office visit once, and asked the panel "what's next after hash tags?", the hall fell silent.their panel stunned. Granted this isn't where their product strategy discussions take place but somebody should know.

The panel avoided answering. This question should be keeping Dick up at night.

Twitter's a $25B company with $4B cash in the bank and is at revenue run rate of more than $1B/year. There are some existential questions about whether or not they could be doing more with their reach and influence, but it seems decently managed from my perspective.

Twitter has a $25B market capitalization which is not the same as saying that the company is worth $25B. $4B ($3B, actually) cash in the bank are not so cool if they're loaned and you have to pay them back eventually, with interest. And finally, having revenue does not imply being profitable.

> Twitter has a $25B market capitalization which is not the same as saying that the company is worth $25B.

Tautologically, that's exactly what it means.

> $4B ($3B, actually) cash in the bank are not so cool if they're loaned and you have to pay them back eventually, with interest

$3.6B with $350M in receivables actually. Their debt is convertible debt (which won't impact their cash) at 0.25% and 1%.

> And finally, having revenue does not imply being profitable.

It certainly doesn't but Twitter has positive Operating Cash Flows and the market thinks they'll return $25B in PV to equity, so I think I'll side with the market on this one.

Ok you win, haha. Still, I believe that Twitter will not make it. We'll see what happens.

Where did all that cash come from?

From their SCFs, they raised $2.1B in last year's IPO, $300M in follow-on equity sales and $1.7B in convertible debt. They had great timing on the debt though, it's price basis was at a stock price of $75 (It closed today at $41).[1]

http://www.forbes.com/sites/steveschaefer/2014/09/12/twitter...

It's so obvious what Costolo should do that I feel shame of Twitter: sell the firehose data to small and medium size companies! There are a lot of companies who want to analyze data from the firehose but can't afford the entry price.

Google revolutionized the advertisement world in this way. Before Google the entry level for putting ads in Yahoo was very high and involved human assistance.

Seach the article title on Google and click on the first result to read it without an account.

I have never believed in the twitter idea. Time will kill it.

a website for posting small snippets of text is not a business

A website for posting small snippets of text that makes over $1B/year is certainly a business though.

A website for posting small snippets of text that makes $1/year and yet still isn't able to generate profits out of that billion is a bit of a different story.

Has there ever been a service with 250M MAUs that couldn't make a profit? Twitter's been focusing on growth (+100M users in past 1.5 years) and increasing margins (they're strongly operating cash flow positive). I don't have a position in the stock but it seems like they're going to be just fine.

Twitter is already the premier platform for cyberstalking and harassment. The question they're struggling with is, how do they monetize that?

Maybe if they charged for rape threats. Perhaps use something like the Facebook model, and charge a fee that scales based on the number of the target's followers to make a "Featured Rape Threat" that appears more prominently on the feed.

Or they could actually make a real effort to do something to stop the harassment, but obviously there's no money or "Big Vision" in that.

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