Twitter's debt assigned 'junk' status

Interesting. I had not thought about that aspect before. When I think of it, Facebook’s UI is probably a lot more easy to use for most people. And even then some still struggle :)

This is an insightful comment, and the takeaway discussion is: is Twitter a product for just "quite a lot of people", or can they bend it to a product for everyone?

I think what investors are looking for is a move towards a product that is for everyone. But given that Twitter's core business / USP is precisely that it is not like "everything everyone else is using", could the conclusion thus be that investors had too high an expectation of what Twitter has to offer the world?

Yea, I know it's a really tired subject, but twitter really needs a major overhaul from a usability perspective. I think they should keep the 140 characters as a limit for what is shown in peoples feeds, but the character limit should be much higher. This is particularly important when you get into a conversation with many people, and the handles start taking up most of your 140 characters (as Marc Andreessen recently pointed out). It's also really hard to follow conversations, and they get separated somewhat arbitrarily. You might scoff and say that this would basically facebook-ize twitter, but honestly I don't think that's a bad thing. Facebook is moving into twitter's space, so twitter shouldn't be be so slow to act or it will get eaten, IMHO.

Also, I use twitter to keep up to date on some of the industries I'm interested in, and while it's a great tool it's still frustrating sometimes, since there is a flood of info throughout the day. TweetDeck makes it better since I can group things by interest and triage depending on how much time I have. I guess you can do that with the web interface but I have never found it as natural as with Tweetdeck.

Well, take the wired telephone (please!) Of course, "everyone can use it" but I bet since its invention, a few power users have made 100x as many calls per week as the average person has. They're the real benefactors. The only difference is that on Twitter you get to see who is doing this.

>recently their monetization offering (advertising platform) has become far more impressive.

I wonder whether a saturation point will be reached with regard to our willingness to view ads in general. More specifically, might this happen in a way that impacts the viability of ad-supported models that rely on the "build an audience, then ad them to death" approach?

Google Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, and others all command a great share of our attention and rely largely on the model. Youtube also seems to be showing more ads. I have also noticed that some sites which feature, say 1 minute or less news clip videos, show 15-30 second ads before each one. Personally, I have stopped using these because I find it obnoxious. I get that they need to make money, but at some point, they crossed my personal threshold.

The net is that we are more and more inundated with ads, and I wonder if the effectiveness of those ads will wane to a point where their value can no longer deliver the massive value upon which so many companies rely.

I think the reason why Twitter is not an "everyone" product (even though it's marketed as such) is not the interface, but something way more essential: most people simply have no use for it.

Twitter is good for people who are not only interested in constantly sharing their thoughts, but also have something interesting to say, otherwise they'd find no audience. In addition, they must be good at doing it in 140 characters. Even the ones who are strictly consumers on Twitter fit a niche - they're usually interested in some subject X which is tweeted about by certain people of note.

My grandma doesn't have witty things to say all day, and any interest she might have on what other people say is supplied by Facebook. There is no way she'd ever do anything on Twitter besides signing up and immediately forgetting about it. The best UX in the world couldn't save Twitter for her.

Twitter was able to find an active userbase because even if only 1% of people find it useful, that's plenty of people if you consider the human population. But it should never be seen as something that is useful for people in general. Regular people sign up because of marketing, but they never stay.

"A lot of people find it difficult to figure out what they should say, how to keep track of who they follow and simply how to engage with it."

I have been using online messaging and chat since ... 1991 ? BBS forums, irc, unix talk, MUD/MOO, ICQ, classic mailing lists and thousands of web forums.

I still find it hard to view a conversation thread on twitter.

If I see a comment that is interesting, and is obviously part of a thread or conversation, it's still non-obvious how to view that entire conversation or respond to specific parts of it in any way that resembles a thread.

Well it is also the difference between bonds and equities. You might value a company on users if you think it could monetise them down the line for equities as you will share in that.

Bonds however just rely on the company having cashflow to pay the interest and then repay the capital. Number of users, future profit etc are much less meaningful compared to whether you will get your money back as promised.

It's not hypothetical. Twitter has significant revenue. When revenue is generated from eyeballs (ads), then yes, number of users and engagement is a valuable metric (yet not the only one).

Twitter's valuation isn't based on users - the stock is down ~35% this year despite user growth being 22% and revenue more than doubling.

The stock is being trashed because they missed earnings.

The S&P report itself said Twitter is experiencing very strong growth and little competitive pressure. It was downgraded because Twitter are investing their cash rather than hoarding it. Bond holders want companies to hold cash. What is good for bond holders is usually different to what is good for stock holders.

The long case on Twitter is that the fundamentals are good, the company is growing like crazy and that the market is undervaluing based on earnings which mostly missed because of one-off employee option and other writedowns as well as reinvestment.

The math goes something like 'expected customer lifetime value * number of customers'. Where the lifetime value is based on either some base assumptions about conversion to a premium product or some base assumptions about what they feel they can make of their users in terms of ad impressions or some other relatively low yield income stream. If this yields a huge number then everybody is happy.

This is further inflated by exits such as whatsapp and instagram, after all if they are worth that much then surely this other non-related product will be worth at least as much or more.

In the end, valuations have a pretty high random component and the perceived market can push that up or down tremendously.

Who even knows what drove this company to issue a warning like this, maybe one of their bigger customers is planning a take-over bid. It wouldn't be the first time something like that happened either.

Twitter solves a "real problem". Relatively convenient 1:N communication, where N is the number of twitter users and at the same time a method to selectively subscribe to some of those messages by certain criteria (hashtags, selection of users). There is a reason why Television channels love Twitter, it has essentially the same characteristics as traditional broadcast television, plus some form of interactive feedback. That the system is centralised and has few message types is purely coincidental.

You are mixing together vastly different companies (public, private, mature, start-ups), and then ignoring companies that did make the transition to profit. So yeah, seems a bit like a rant.

If companies get swallowed up by the Google/Facebook behemoths like so many do then investors usually get their exit, to make an example of 2 from your list Tumblr was bought for $1bn by Yahoo and Snapchat allegedly had multibillion dollar acquisition offers from Facebook and Google. Apparently the megacompanies don't buy these smaller companies for the value that could be generated by revenue streams from them(when and if), but more a combo of the "strategic advantage" - so their competitors don't snap them up first, or out of a fear that one of them could end up being a direct competitor to them one day, as is the case with the Facebook Instagram acquisition and attempted Snapchat acquisition.

>It's sort of funny that, as long as the investor community all agree on $X valuation -- you NEVER need to make a single dollar in profit because the next guy in line will cover your "loss." Or finally some giant will buy you out to acquihire or get rid of competition.

This only works until March 10th, 2000.

Precedence.

Facebook, Google and LinkedIn already proved it. No investor wants to feel dumb that they didn't invest their money in the "thing that looks just like FB and Google" even if the business model isn't a complete 1:1.

One of the worst aspects is they'll close any issue referring to now-deleted tweets without any action.

I'm quite certain tweets are soft-deleted and accessible by the abuse team (if the Secret Service wanted one they'd get it) so it comes across as callous indifference.

When they rate a bond as junk yes. We can be suspicious when they rate some garbage as AAA, but given the economics of the ratings business when they tell you something is junk then it probably is.

There is no _the_ way to use it. But I can tell you about how I use it:

- I follow a couple of industry professionals and companies to stay up to date with their updates. As a MSFT developer I follow MSDN, the .NET team, but also important players like Scott Hanselman and Scott Guthrie. By doing this I always get the latest updates.

- I never follow more than 50 people and unfollow everyone who posts too much... If there are so many tweets that you don't have time to read them, you're not being effective. Be picky about who you follow. You don't have to follow your followers in return.

- I use Twitter a LOT to communicate with people I'd otherwise have no access to, because I don't have their email or they are too busy answering me through the company mailbox. Twitter makes everyone (except for celebs) reachable. If I need some guy at Google who write library X, I just send him a tweet.

- I use the search to find what people are saying about my product, but sometimes I also use it to engage with people who are talking about a subject I'm interested in.

Sign up and follow people with similar interests. I follow very few people (approx 80) and remove anyone who starts tweeting things that's no longer relevant to me.

Within that timeline I get a decent amount of tech info from respected people in the industry and other small snippets from friends.

If you do as most people seem to and follow 500+ people you're never going to be able to keep up with the noise and to me it loses its value.

I used some library, something didn't work, asked a question on Stackoverflow, didn't get an answer. What to do?

Twittered the author, he twittered back, telling me that there's a bug, and here's the workaround, and invited me (and all his followers) to try that new product that replaces the thing I was using.

So it's a unique communication tool which found a sweet spot with opt-in, brevity, low involvement, and publicity.

(It's can also be anywhere from crappy to decent as a social network, a news aggregator, a blog site ... but I wouldn't bother with these aspects)

What proportion of Twitter users access it through the browser, though? I suspect a lot of users (especially heavy ones) don't use it all that much.

That means ads need to be inserted into the stream, which is much more annoying. I'd argue that there are already too many, myself…

How many people run ad block plus already? I feel like overwhelming people with ads would just push more to block them entirely.

I doubt ratings agencies care what Peter Thiel says about anything.

Does ANYONE care what peter thiel thinks of twitter?

It doesn't even really work well for that, what with its max 2k following limit. :(

> Twitter is an elegant and open platform.

It's not open. After killing off lots of development happening in their platform with the token limit decision, they effectively shut off that avenue. No sane developer will base his bread and butter on Twitter now.

Some effects of that decision were positive, like increasing engagement with advertising. Lots were negative, namely non competition on mobile app space, or lack of innovation in the use of the platform.

I personally think it was a short term vision move, that effectively killed twitter in the long term. It'll never evolve as much as it needs to survive, now that it lost its developer ecosystem.

Don't be fooled! I doubt the many developers of third party clients were happy to be surprise informed overnight that their apps would all be banned or limited to 100k users.

Aren't cards available to everyone, not just partnered brands? Do they get different, more powerful cards?

> Its shares have lost 37% so far this year.

I think they simply meant 2014, and then it is more or less accurate.

Jan 1st to now is not a pretty comparison. Whichever way you interpret the figures they definitely not look good.

> Even if I was confused and picked their performance as a "year to date" it would be 23% down.

You seem indeed confused. "Year to date" is the only reasonable way to understand "so far this year" and the stock is down $23 (37%). From the all-time high closing price, it has lost $33 (45%).

> Basically. I think this is biased junk or a financially literate reporter.

I guess you meant illiterate, but actually you got it right...

What an awful comment

I get plenty of use out of twitter, I'm sure all the millions of users also get use out of it or they wouldn't use it.