Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Twitter Falls Below IPO Price as Concerns Mount Over CEO, Growth

bloomberg.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 207 posts

Re: Twitter Falls Below IPO Price as Concerns Mount Over CEO, Growth

#21

Post by fitchjo »

ryanSrich wrote: post #16
hyperbovine wrote: post #9

Twitter was the first in a long list of current (i.e. post-2000) startups where I thought to myself, Really? That's a $X0 billion business? I wonder if this is just the tip of the iceberg.

Their revenue exceeds 1bn per year so...yeah. They are a billion dollar company.

I would say normally when you are using monetary value as an adjective for a company, you are describing how much it is worth, not in relation to revenues. Most companies do tend to have Revenue/EV multiples greater than 1.0, so more times than not, that would be correct. However, I would not say that would always be the case.

Re: Twitter Falls Below IPO Price as Concerns Mount Over CEO, Growth

#22

Post by rezashirazian »

Twitter hasn't focused on anything else besides twitter. Facebook is taking on the mission of "connecting the world". Google has gone well beyond being only a search engine. Amazon has expanded into mobile, AWS and ...

Twitter, on the other hand, is still pushing the same product.

Re: Twitter Falls Below IPO Price as Concerns Mount Over CEO, Growth

#24

Post by fauigerzigerk »

Twitter should do group messaging and structured tags. I want to do things like:

@friends Don't forget my birthday party on #(Aug 20, 8pm) at #SomePub

or

@friends Don't forget my birthday party! #invitation(Aug 20, 8pm, SomePub)

And I want to be able to create a list where all invitations from people in the @friends group go

And finance people could do things like

Twitter has bottomed #buy(TWTR)

And I want to be able to specify a rule that makes these messages go to my stock trading list

Re: Twitter Falls Below IPO Price as Concerns Mount Over CEO, Growth

#25

Post by Aleman360 »

rezashirazian wrote: post #22

Twitter hasn't focused on anything else besides twitter. Facebook is taking on the mission of "connecting the world". Google has gone well beyond being only a search engine. Amazon has expanded into mobile, AWS and ... Twitter, on the other hand, is still pushing the same product.

Taking a step back, what's the advantage to society of every company growing into a conglomerate? Why not just let a company live and die on its core business?

Do we really want to allow all that power to be consolidated into company boards and executives?

Re: Twitter Falls Below IPO Price as Concerns Mount Over CEO, Growth

#26

Post by teaneedz »

Greenisus wrote: post #3

"At stake is whether Twitter [...] can become a mainstream platform instead of a niche forum favored by journalists and celebrities." I found that line interesting, because I often think of Twitter as a niche forum favored by technology workers and celebrities.

Twitter has appeal and reach, but it seriously needs to get it UX in order and focus on being great at simplicity. The official app is a jumbled mess. Instead of trying to be Facebook it needs to be Twitter. I think the advertisers and many of the investors are placing too much pressure on Twitter to become more like Facebook. I'd wager that Twitter's userbase and power-user is more influential and savvier than the typical FB user. We don't want another Facebook experience.

Re: Twitter Falls Below IPO Price as Concerns Mount Over CEO, Growth

#27

Post by busterarm »

I've been short on Twitter from the get-go, I just didn't think it would take this long. This doesn't mean I'm anti-Twitter - I would actually prefer that it stay the niche platform for journalists/celebrities/activists.

I don't know the business strategy to make sure that is viable, but I don't want it to be a mass-market product (except in terms of consumption)...the signal to noise ratio is so much better than other social platforms.

Twitter, quite bizarrely, is filling a void no longer filled by newspapers (wow, what that says about our attention spans). It's only peripherally mainstream but incredibly useful as a _tool_ to a small group of people. It's not any one thing: it's different depending on who you are.

Re: Twitter Falls Below IPO Price as Concerns Mount Over CEO, Growth

#28

Post by Zigurd »

mmahemoff wrote: post #13
freehunter wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I think of twitter I think nothing but mainstream. There are two platforms that anyone who is anyone (celebrity or business or politician) needs to have: either Facebook or Twitter. Niche is Instragram. Niche is Snapchat. But when Kardashian is on CNN once an hour because of a tweet, it's not niche. App.Net is niche. Twitter is the epitome of mainstream.

Part of Twitter's challenge is that it's mainstream, but in a "write-only" way. Every celebrity, politician, religious leader, and journalist may be tweeting 24-7, but their followers aren't engaging in the same way they do on Facebook. A lot of users don't login, tweet, or spend much time on the site/app according to various reports. Chris Sacca said a lot about this recently. http://lowercasecapital.com/2015/06/03/…

Google will buy it because Google+ is Twitter minus the people.

Re: Twitter Falls Below IPO Price as Concerns Mount Over CEO, Growth

#29

Post by mikegioia »

To me the problem with Twitter lies solely with what Twitter's logged-out homepage looks like. I don't know what it's trying to be but asking me to sign up, browse categories (?), and read top celebrity posts is not it.

Why is logged-out Twitter not a search engine? They have up-to-the-second thoughts from their users about everything and it's the first place I go when a site is down, or some news story is breaking. They're sitting on a search goldmine yet they're trying to convert signups and popular celebrity post clickthroughs.

Re: Twitter Falls Below IPO Price as Concerns Mount Over CEO, Growth

#30

Post by Gladdyu »

hyperbovine wrote: post #9

Twitter was the first in a long list of current (i.e. post-2000) startups where I thought to myself, Really? That's a $X0 billion business? I wonder if this is just the tip of the iceberg.

Twitter is like a car in first gear: loads of noise, loads of turnover (rpm) but profit (speed), not so much yet.

However if you want to get somewhere you actually need to shift up at some point: growth numbers start to decline so they'll have to, before investors lose their faith even more and they end up in a downward spiral.

Post reply on HN