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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

#291

Post by sbarre »

jalfresi wrote: post #272
petercooper wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think the final question is realistic. I have 20K followers (not huge, but far beyond who I could realistically ever "know") and get huge value from it as an individual, not as a business. It would be so boring (to me) to only be able to talk to people one knows closely. There are numerous non-company non-celebs-in-the-Hollywood-sense-of-the-word people who have huge followings on Twitter who get a lot of val…

Soooo... RSS? Isn't that what you've just described? You could run that on a pretty small web server....

That's ignoring the network effect and centralized environment that Twitter provides, without which GP might not have those 20k followers.

Re: Twitter Expected to Begin Layoffs and Stop Headquarters Expansion

#292

Post by TheBlueDot »

calibraxis wrote: post #285
TheBlueDot wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm talking about rude comments about the intelligent people that work there. Where do you work, lets compare products/people and the impact the product makes on the world shall we?

I would be grateful if people could now leak what's up with all the racist/misogynist terrorist bullying, which I constantly see when looking at Twitter responses. (I'm sure many would defend Twitter's actions despite getting fired, but there's gotta be a couple ethical people who wanted to seriously act.)

That's called life, it's not unique to Twitter. How would one "leak" such information?

Re: Twitter Expected to Begin Layoffs and Stop Headquarters Expansion

#293

Post by kelseydh »

j42 wrote: post #193
jeff_marshall wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

While not stated eloquently, I do think there's some truth in that. 1. Open API's, good documentation and community engagement goes a long way in establishing developer trust. I don't believe developer trust is correlated significantly with revenue (directly), but it's absolutely correlated with acquisition. I'd argue that Angular or React were partially successful because of the stickiness of their communities, and…

Facebook's token user API system has now created the billion dollar juggernaut that is Tinder. That app is now irrevocably linked to Facebook.

You are completely right, there is a huge strategic reason for promoting OAuth API's as a large company.

Re: Twitter Expected to Begin Layoffs and Stop Headquarters Expansion

#294

Post by kelseydh »

crashedsnow wrote: post #198
jeff_marshall wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

I think it's supposed to work like this: assuming more users == more revenue, then opening up and promoting the use of APIs creates alternative channels to acquire new users (partner apps have their own incentive to attract users etc). Where it can hurt is when the integrating apps either don't substantially move the needle on new user acquisition, or worse they cannibalize your user base by creating reasons for your…

Facebook's API gave birth to the billion dollar juggernaut that is Tinder.

Tinder piggybacked off of Facebook OAuth logins in a useful way, and now Facebook has further cemented their permanence as it will now be very difficult for that dating app to sever themselves from Facebook OAuth.

Re: Twitter Expected to Begin Layoffs and Stop Headquarters Expansion

#295

Post by jalfresi »

Ao7bei3s wrote: post #214
tedks wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Nothing inspires fighting spirit like layoffs.

What utter tosh! Layoffs just inspires the remaining staff to update their CV and start looking around.

Layoff are the result of incompetent management, and nobody wants to work for a company staffed with incompetent managers.

Re: Twitter Expected to Begin Layoffs and Stop Headquarters Expansion

#296

Post by kelseydh »

InclinedPlane wrote: post #147
smacktoward wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The truth is that with modern technology you can build a company that has hundreds of millions of high-volume users and yet is not very expensive to operate. Investors had to dump more than a billion dollars into Twitter to get it to where it is today.

And? Aside from the fact that that's not really true, what does it matter? Twitter already IPO'd, the original investors got their money back, now it's just owners. And it doesn't require a team of 4000 to operate twitter. It requires far fewer, and as time goes on twitter will generally just get cheaper to operate. Twitter can easily bring in enough revenue to keep doing what it's doing indefinitely. And that's tota…

That shows the company is stagnating.

Google's stock price would not be at where it is now if the company "just" stopped at search. It's everything else they kept pursuing that's allowed the company to reach stratospheric valuation heights relative to its real revenue.

Re: Twitter Expected to Begin Layoffs and Stop Headquarters Expansion

#297

Post by kelseydh »

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.

You're seeing this from the wrong angle. Twitter's problem is NOT the lack of "real revenue" or "real profit." This is the sort of thinking that stagnates the platform.

Google's original investors were FUMING that the company didn't pursue ads earlier, following with what Yahoo did. In retrospect we now see the insight of that approach.

Twitter's problem is one of product. It's not innovating, it hasn't changed it's core formula in many years. Compare that to Google and Facebook which both made many bold improvements to their platforms after booming into success. (Though facebook one could argue has slowed down in its innovation.)

Re: Twitter Expected to Begin Layoffs and Stop Headquarters Expansion

#298

Post by pinaceae »

biggest_lou wrote: post #172
BinaryIdiot wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

my guess this worldview on for-profit companies is google's fault.

google ads is funding the other google, which behaves like a non-profit. and it works, as their ad business is amazing.

but, it sets a really bad example to follow. twitter thought a long time they could operate like google it seems. time to bring back reality.

Re: Twitter Expected to Begin Layoffs and Stop Headquarters Expansion

#299

Post by kelseydh »

nosuchthing wrote: post #75

"Moments" tab gives a good indication that Twitter has no idea where to go and is the sum of boring meetings with marketing consultants. Twitter had potential, but it appears stagnate as all they've done is created a new version of an AOL instant messenger chatroom with hashtags and 128char limit. Limiting the API tokens for 3rd party developers was a really foolish move.

The most innovative technology to have come out of chat programs is Slack's feature that let's you EDIT chats in real time, and leave reactions.

This is such a crazy innovation to the structure of chat programs, that it blows my mind other real time communication platforms haven't incorporated it. Even Facebook Messenger and GChat feel inadequate now that I'm consciously aware that they don't let me edit my chat messages after sending them. It's such a no brainer innovation that nobody has ever done, likely because when you're building a chat program the idea of letting people edit chats after they send them makes the brain of any engineer hurt -- but there's an untapped value to allowing it that many products haven't realized yet.

Re: Twitter Expected to Begin Layoffs and Stop Headquarters Expansion

#300

Post by kelseydh »

irascible wrote: post #236

Oh.. Twitter who lobbied the crooked mayor of SF, Ed Lee, to kick the Chess Players out of Market and Powell? HOW THE WORM TURNS.

They kicked chess players out of Market and Powell? As a chess fan this interests me. Please link me to more info.
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