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Twitter Expected to Begin Layoffs and Stop Headquarters Expansion

nytimes.com

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Re: Twitter Expected to Begin Layoffs and Stop Headquarters Expansion

#101

Post by scurvy »

wyclif wrote: post #11
swingbridge wrote: post #3

A sad day for Twitter, but a dose of reality for a lot of the fluffiness in the market at the moment. Companies need to have real revenue and produce real profit and then need a valuation based on sane multiples. Twitter got behind that curve badly and ultimately this is what happens.

Yes, it's sad for employees being let go, but it's good news for Twitter. I don't think Twitter is going anywhere; it has a huge user base and a lot of people think of it as a branch of the internet. By cutting surgically (removing, as you put it, the "fluffiness"), Jack might very well be able to bring some fighting spirit back.

Not trying to be snarky, but when have you ever seen a company do "surgical" layoffs? Anything across the board is not surgical by definition. This is just a plain, simple RIF to stem the losses. There's nothing surgical about it. Surgical would imply killing off specific teams and products. This is across the board.

Re: Twitter Expected to Begin Layoffs and Stop Headquarters Expansion

#102

Post by scurvy »

kzhahou wrote: post #58
yid wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 4100 employees for a service dedicated to moving around 140 character messages? Yeah, there might be a little fat to trim there. Absolutely! You could probably get a single rack to handle storage and broadcast of millions of tweets per minute, perhaps hook it up to a Teradata appliance to handle search and storage at that throughput. Throw it in a nice distributed database indexed by user. Then just another couple…

IIRC Instagram had ~13 employees when they were acquired by FB, and they were obviously already huge. WhatsApp had ~30 when they were acquired, and were also huge. ("Huuuuuge!", says The Trump) Those teams are gods of scalability. Twitter is.... kinda the opposite.

Did WhatsApp have much in the way of storage needs? I don't think that they did. This is where the cost goes, durability. They were basically just a giant switchboard with some buddy lists (aka glorified MSN Messenger with SMS gateways). It's no wonder they were able to keep costs down and grow. They didn't have a lot of storage and persistence needs, just passing datagrams around the Internet between phones.

Edit: My apologies if I've offended the HN mystique surrounding the god-like status of WhatsApp. Ask Jan yourself, they weren't geniuses. I know Jan. He won't claim to be this exalted persona.

Re: Twitter Expected to Begin Layoffs and Stop Headquarters Expansion

#103

Post by kkhire »

werber wrote: post #5

I don't use Twitter and don't have any friends that do. Am I just uncool, or is it super niche now?

I hated the idea of twitter for a long time because I thought it was the shitty part of facebook (incessant updates from people whom I don't care about) x 10, because it's just a feed.

But since I started really getting into it last year, I've become so much more knowledgeable by following the best entrepreneurs, VCs, anyone with interesting insight. It's a surprisingly pure channel of news/knowledge if you use it correctly and not go on a follow spree.

It's definitely not the place for social networking as far as communicating with friends/family goes.

Re: Twitter Expected to Begin Layoffs and Stop Headquarters Expansion

#104

Post by kkhire »

thrownaway2424 wrote: post #86
muzz wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is true if the layoff is specific to Twitter and not a harbinger of a general downturn

There is another bloated company with an unclear growth story right across the street from Twitter, and it happens share same CEO. How long can Square keep up its act?

What makes you say that? Last I saw they had great revenue/were filing for IPO. Just wondering.

Re: Twitter Expected to Begin Layoffs and Stop Headquarters Expansion

#105

Post by kkhire »

Apocryphon wrote: post #71
muzz wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True, but thus far Facebook has responded well to existential threats by buying companies like Instagram, WhatsApp, etc.

Is that how it works now? Companies with great products but not a sustainable long-term biz plan exit by getting bought out, and larger companies with a greater product but also no far-long-term biz plan buy those companies and survive by having them as fallback products?

That's how most industries are. Pharma/biotech is all about this

Re: Twitter Expected to Begin Layoffs and Stop Headquarters Expansion

#107

Post by joshgachnang »

xienze wrote: post #15
werber wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you get mostly opinions and reactions on Twitter or 140char reporting on breaking stories? I tried using it to follow the Arab spring and just couldn't.

Wish I could find it, but a couple weeks ago I saw someone posting a 20-ish part message on Twitter. At some point you've gotta think maybe this isn't the appropriate way to use the service.

@pmarca is famous for his multipart "tweet storms". Lots of others have followed suit (not sure if he started the trend, but was the first one I saw doing it).

Re: Twitter Expected to Begin Layoffs and Stop Headquarters Expansion

#108

Post by toomuchtodo »

lolive wrote: post #40

I used to be a Google Reader/Google Buzz addict. And was interacting with a very living community through those tools. I now use twitter as my exclusive medium for both mainstream and "niche" news. I appreciate the wide availability of content, but still think they are much too conservative with their user experience. The inability to browse tweets by topic is sometimes a pain. The inability to connect with the right…

So a more public/global Slack with recommendations and intelligently aggregating channels by hash tag?

Re: Twitter Expected to Begin Layoffs and Stop Headquarters Expansion

#110

Post by sirkneeland »

rboyd wrote: post #100
meeper16 wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I completely agree. Twitter was never really a technology company to me considering it was essentially just a mimic of a wrapper around an email list.

Any company that operates at web scale is a technology company. Besides that look at their opensource contributions. Twitter has/had some impressive engineering talent.

But is it "has" or is it already "had"?
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