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

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

#171

Post by prawn »

interpol_p wrote: post #166
prawn wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree, but one point against that is that the web experience with Twitter is probably the worst - it's clunky. I hate using it. I use the phone app (simple, OK) and the OS X app (neglected, but a great way to use Twitter IMO). In those two apps, there isn't a logged out front page. They could improve both to create a useful equivalent though.

Have you used Tweetbot? I find it to be an incredible desktop (and mobile) twitter client. Even syncs your scroll position between the two.

No, I haven't. Probably the sort of thing Twitter should have in their own stable though.

They should have better app options for content creators IMO. Not every user in a news-dominated social network is going to be a passive reader.

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

#172

Post by sirbetsalot »

Twitter is the Ganges River of Social Media. Filled to the brim with garbage, everyone who floats in it drinks the water, dies and joins the floating corpse pile at the end of the data funnel. you can't have a fresh mountain spring of great data when you let people pollute constantly with their verbal offal.

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

#173

Post by prawn »

MichaelGG wrote: post #140
prawn wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree, but one point against that is that the web experience with Twitter is probably the worst - it's clunky. I hate using it. I use the phone app (simple, OK) and the OS X app (neglected, but a great way to use Twitter IMO). In those two apps, there isn't a logged out front page. They could improve both to create a useful equivalent though.

It's terrible. I recently started to use it and I'm shocked at how poor it is. Scroll down, see something interesting. Click. Now I've lost where I was, no way back. Going back reloads the entire page (slow) then, since content is loaded in after scrolling, scrolls one page down and stops. They're basically saying "don't engage too long with Twitter, just keep it quick and then stop". How they have 3000 employees and…

If it was the only way to access Twitter, I would've given up. And Twitter is my favoured social network - just so frustrating to see how they're flailing around. Yet to see a single ad that was remotely relevant to me. Keep quitting the "While you were away" and acknowledging that I don't like it, but they keep showing it. Insane.

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

#174

Post by xentronium »

criddell wrote: post #162

Time to open up their (very nice) API to third party clients again. I think there's still a lot of room for innovation on the Twitter platform and it isn't going to come from Twitter themselves.

Once bitten, twice shy. I'd never built my business around twitter api however nice it is. It's just not worth it to close shop after twitter blocks your token for superficial reasons.

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

#175

Post by tcdent »

mikegioia wrote: post #29

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.…

> Why is logged-out Twitter not a search engine?

From my perspective (a developer who has leveraged the API from 1.0 on), search has always been 'different'.

At first, it didn't exist. So some company (Summize) created it. Then, Twitter acquired them (actually their first acquisition).

Some time later the search method was absorbed into the Twitter API. The syntax hasn't changed since.

It always felt like they just re-deployed the Summize app and proxied an API path to it. Though it's quite likely it's been rewritten many times by now.

Farfetched, but I guess I'm saying it may be a cultural thing.

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

#176

Post by kriro »

vacri wrote: post #115
shostack wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've long wondered this. I haven't followed the evolution of Twitter's homepage, but I'd be really shocked if they hadn't tested this to death. The thing is, this keeps causing me to miss moments to engage with them. Someone posts a link, I find something on a website, etc. that go to Twitter? BAM! SIGN-UP NOW OR LEAVE! While I do of course have an account, if I were a non-user, I'd keep thinking "why would I sign-up…

> Someone posts a link, I find something on a website, etc. that go to Twitter? BAM! SIGN-UP NOW OR LEAVE! If they force you to sign up, they get more user data for the pool. I don't think that the slice of their market they're losing out on by this is very big. > Lowering the barrier to entry for that is critical. The barrier to entry for content creation on twitter is absurdly low. It's not the login process. It's…

I think one of the mistakes may be that they focus on a wrong metric. I alway read signups/users as a cited metric. It would be way wiser to focus on improving more active metrics (engagement stuff). The start page is a good example...sure right now it seems to optimize for account creation but I'd say it would be more of a win if users actually engaged with the twitter stream. If it's useful they'll sign up.

[alas I hope all of this was discussed and tested to death already]

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

#177

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

vezzy-fnord wrote: post #138
natecavanaugh wrote: post #83

Is there anyone else who hates Twitter because of its 140 character limit and overall focus on broadcasting rather than sharing? For the 140 character limit, I get the historical SMS reasons and that it helps you "focus" your content, but taking 10 minutes to squeeze a thought in that turns from something half interesting to "bc u r 4 the GPL" or whatever. Sure MAYBE I could reword things a little denser, but a tweet…

No, I agree. Twitter as a general-purpose communication platform is impractical. Yet a ton of industry figures have crowded into it for some reason. Twitter is the flashy, arbitrarily constrained version of what fingering other people's .plan files was in the 80s and 90s.

The 140 char limit turns it into a new journalistic form - almost anyway.

I have many issues with it, in addition to the sign-in page and general lack of access:

For non-celebs, the value of having tens of thousands of followers is often close to zero, so it's more vanity nano-press than useful communication channel.

For newsy events, real-time reporting is incredibly noisy and repetitive.

Retweet count isn't a good reader value marker. There should be some better way to find the best content.

Developer relationships aren't great, and unlimited access to the firehose would help create some innovation - which is badly needed at this point.

Handling multiple accounts is painful. If you want to use the same devices to tweet for a business and tweet as a person it's really not fun.

Twitter management history is uninspiring. No one seems to be in charge of thinking of cool new stuff, so Twitter is turning into formerly cool old stuff.

I'm guessing there will be a buyout soon.

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

#178

Post by panabee »

T2_t2 wrote: post #170
firebones wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Facebook fell out of favor after its IPO, so some of this seems like the periodicity for Twitter is similar, just stretched out much longer and more attenuated due to the lower market cap and lower rung on the ladder. Your comment that Twitter owns unique and compelling content: I view unique and compelling content as a scarce resource. Growth rate in the boring tail perhaps means less if they're cornering the market…

The problem is simpler: the cost of disintermediating their service, e.g. to go ahead and build your own feed, is just too high. And maintenance is just a pain. It is far better to view tweets other's tell you to, than use your own feed. What Twitter needs is better intermediation - they need better tools to tune in and tune out of streams. The need, for want of a better analogy, a way to change the channel from Elec…

Precisely. One strategy for addressing this in the near term is to create more tools and products for partners/distributors like Yahoo and HuffPo to find and present interesting tweets for their audiences. Twitter can't curate everything in house in the near term. Algorithms aren't reliable enough, so they need a mix of algorithms and people. Some of those people can be in-house, but the faster, more scalable way to reach every nook and cranny of the world is to outsource a bunch of the curation through distributors who understand different audiences. Users have proven they won't curate on their own. As a bonus, Twitter can analyze these curation strategies to refine its own machine-learning algorithms.

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

#179

Post by aleph4 »

brainflake wrote: post #131

From a product standpoint, I feel like Twitter has barely changed in 5 years. There's been some polish and redesign, sure, but the main dynamics are almost exactly the same. Facebook has features like intelligently improving the quality of your feed, being able to hide posts from certain people, prioritizing posts (not just stacking them based on their age), calendar/birthday stuff, events, chats, etc. Twitter is jus…

I agree. I use Nuzzel for this and its amazing to me this functionality is not built in to Twitter at all.

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

#180

Post by simonswords82 »

sirbetsalot wrote: post #172

Twitter is the Ganges River of Social Media. Filled to the brim with garbage, everyone who floats in it drinks the water, dies and joins the floating corpse pile at the end of the data funnel. you can't have a fresh mountain spring of great data when you let people pollute constantly with their verbal offal.

I'll be using "Twitter is the Ganges River of Social Media." in casual conversation from now on. Great analogy.
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