Twitter. To this day, I find it idiotic. I thought society reached rock bottom when politics started using it to convey their message (is there anything sadder than a political agenda that can be expressed in 140 characters?)
Current profitability is irrelevant. What matters is net future (discounted) profitability. People who malign companies for not currently being profitable apparently don't understand this, but investors do, and the market certainly does.
Many great companies are massively unprofitable while in their early growth stage, then become massively profitable in their later years, and are valued accordingly. If you can exchange $1B in profits this year for (say) $2B in profits next year, you'd be a fool (assuming current discount rates) not to make the trade.
Thanks, man. It was a brilliant call.
EDIT: It may be too late. It has already had major drops in the last quarter, and is down almost 50% off its highs from 2014.
I think it is a great way to stay up-to date on what happens in startup-land and in open source, the granularity with which you can follow people still fascinates me. Seeing that 95% of what active human accounts post is pretty useless, I don't see justification of a $20bn+ market cap, especially without growth.
PS: They've recently cranked up ads, next earnings report could surprise ...
Formerly respected news outlets reproducing others' 140 character comments as a substitute for actually asking subject experts specific questions.
I understand the rationale for reproducing Twitter comments when they come from someone directly connected with the story. I can even see how comments from people claiming to be involved or particularly pithy statements might make it into a "breaking news" feed. What I don't understand is why news outlets with loftier ambitions than Buzzfeed think tweets like these: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-33656579 is substantial enough to constitute a commentary piece.
(Or worse still, the obituary complete with "@randomdave said 'RIP U were a legend'")
Sadder? Or anger inducing? I'm convinced the reason twitter succeeded is that it wound up being an echo chamber for the outraged. A perfect platform for trolls. You can't explain anything sufficiently in 140 characters, so dialectic is out. The fallback is usually rhetoric (appeals to emotion), with anger being the most effective.
The end result is you have an internet shouting match where everybody is trying to piss off everyone else and nobody can clarify anything. It's the digital embodiment of CGP Grey's video "This video will make you angry[0]".
Well, at least it's a step up from bumper stickers.
Of course, more often they're boiling political agendas down to 140 characters, or worse, splitting a page-length message up into 17 chunks tagged (1/17). C'est la vie.