181–190 of 414 posts
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Facebook is building the most sophisticated AI Research Lab in the world. I think they'll be okay.
No where near as sophisticated as Google's or IBM's. These companies were not founded by rebranding MySpace as Facebook did. Google was founded based on a sophisticated algorithm that had its roots in AI while facebook was copying and pasting text entry boxes.
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Not necessarily. They have 4000 employees, which probably has a number of non-revenue-generating positions that many SV companies are wont to have. Like Python API WebSockets Diversity Developer Envangelists with full travel budgets to go to 49 conferences a year. (I just made that up, but you get the idea)
Um, no. The OSS evangelism team is three people total.
Also, that was just an example I pulled out of the air. It could be middle management, or a documentation expert whose role is regulating font size. The point is that for a company with a simple product, an API and clients for that API, and monetization through advertising, that's a lot of employees. If the money's not there, cut the fat.
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Not necessarily. They have 4000 employees, which probably has a number of non-revenue-generating positions that many SV companies are wont to have. Like Python API WebSockets Diversity Developer Envangelists with full travel budgets to go to 49 conferences a year. (I just made that up, but you get the idea)
Maybe judging a boom by twitter layoff is a bit too soon. However, the underneath mindset rings a bell: people starts to realize winter is coming, but not sure when...
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> What is out of the ordinary is the public markets' reaction? But is it? Maybe the public is realizing that tweets were just a cool fad for a while. For twitter to be profitable, I am guessing, there has to be people that want to use it, and (very important) people believing that people want to use it (so they'd pay Twitter for advertising). Compare with Google. Google provides something momre back (gmail, search, c…
> Twitter provides 140 status messages. There is nothing wrong it, that is very cool. But I think there is a realization that it just isn't as cool as it was in 4 years ago. And it just became 3% less cool. I can't tell if you're being ironic or facile, but Twitter has become quite a bit more than "140 status messages"(sic). It's a medium where politicians, dissidents, celebrities, the hoi palloi, brands, and anarchi…
I'd heavily disagree with that. The fad's not over, but it is a fad. The reason it sticks around is that people have an easy way to communicate with celebrities/popular people, and that was certainly not twitter's goal. The moment something better for this comes along, the fad will quickly fade.
There's a popular meme "If you're not paying, then you're the product". I think an exception is " or they're just not making any money".
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> What is out of the ordinary is the public markets' reaction? But is it? Maybe the public is realizing that tweets were just a cool fad for a while. For twitter to be profitable, I am guessing, there has to be people that want to use it, and (very important) people believing that people want to use it (so they'd pay Twitter for advertising). Compare with Google. Google provides something momre back (gmail, search, c…
> Twitter provides 140 status messages. There is nothing wrong it, that is very cool. But I think there is a realization that it just isn't as cool as it was in 4 years ago. And it just became 3% less cool. I can't tell if you're being ironic or facile, but Twitter has become quite a bit more than "140 status messages"(sic). It's a medium where politicians, dissidents, celebrities, the hoi palloi, brands, and anarchi…
Their entire userbase could do a MySpace overnight.
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They turned off their APIs to application developers. What they should have done is ramp that shit up and figure out how to monetize the query traffic or figure out a way to decentralize their infrastructure to allow everyone to run Twitter together.
>What they should have done is ramp that shit up and figure out how to monetize the query traffic or figure out a way to decentralize their infrastructure to allow everyone to run Twitter together So, I'm genuienly curious. How do they make money by "ramping that shit up"? I've seen a lot of companies that have 'get users' as their M.O., but I have no insight into the "profit!!!" phase. Opening their user base seems…
4100 employees for a service dedicated to moving around 140 character messages? Yeah, there might be a little fat to trim there.
> 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…
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I'm not sure why you're being downvoted; their head count was absolutely insane. Yes Twitter has some insane needs for scaling but 4,100 employees for a 140 character service with some basic ads? Absolutely far too many.
Do you really think it's all just tweets and ads? Spoiler art: it's much, much, much more than that. Massive analytics stack, tons of distributed computing needs, lots of well-maintained OSS projects (Mesos, Aurora, Finagle, Pants, Bootstrap, Zipkin). I could name about 20 other things. The headcount may be a bit excessive but this is a caricature.
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Facebook has 3 properties which have more users than Twitter (Facebook, Whatsapp, Instagram). Facebook itself has more active users than Google and has another property, Whatapp which is also close to or just over that billion user mark. And they are already reporting profits. I doubt they will go the way of Twitter.
Nothing lasts forever in tech. How will they monetize Instagram and WhatsApp? Don't show me users. Show me profits from those users if you want to count them.
In terms of Whatsapp, micro-transaction maybe? That I am not quite sure, it is not going to be as straight-forward as Instagram.