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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

#321

Post by kordless »

jeff_marshall wrote: post #141
kordless wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Note I said "or" there. Decentralizing the infrastructure would make things cheaper and might give you revenue opportunity (and growth) that you wouldn't have otherwise. For example, perhaps you get into the business of aggregating ad sales to downstream providers.

As for directly monetizing the APIs, one thought that springs to mind is charging for the firehose in a federated way. You could, for example, have a query endpoint that looks like this to guarantee standard issuance of data, identity and payment:

  GET /api/v1/status/access
  { 
    "payment_address": "13kU1qPtM3WWXrNugWfRPNM1BniMQDw9Ds",
    "rate_bytes_sec": 50000000, 
    "ask_expires_at": 1444492687, 
    "access_token": "h458Yf301",
    "ask_in_satoshis": 1000000,
    "ask_window_secs": 3600
  }
Make a payment to the address, then start querying at 50MB/sec for the duration of your valid token (in this example, 2 hours):

  GET /api/v1/status/h458Yf301
  { 
    "payment_address": "13kU1qPtM3WWXrNugWfRPNM1BniMQDw9Ds",
    "payment_received_address": "13kU1qPtM3WWXrNugWfRPNM1BniMQDw9Ds",
    "payment_received": 2000000,
    "access_expires_at": 1444499887,
    "identity_screenname": "kordless",
    "status_data_begins": [
    ]
  }
And yes, I'm proposing Twitter should use Bitcoin to monetize query traffic. Even better, charge people for posting lots of statuses, or following and unfollowing lots of people. Link ask price to signal/noise ratio.

Re: Twitter Expected to Begin Layoffs and Stop Headquarters Expansion

#322

Post by mnutt »

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....

Scale RSS up to Twitter's size, interleave a user's subscribed feeds together, centralize it, and you have Twitter's scaling challenges.

Re: Twitter Expected to Begin Layoffs and Stop Headquarters Expansion

#323

Post by whatsthat »

amix wrote: post #206

I think the general market could learn a thing or two from WhatsApp: 55 people powering a platform used by 800 million _active_ users across many different platforms. And WhatsApp has innovated, e.g. the new video and calling system works very well. I have often wondered what thousands of Twitter employees are doing all day long? Their platform and apps have been stale for a long time.

800 million users where? I've never seen anyone using it.

Re: Twitter Expected to Begin Layoffs and Stop Headquarters Expansion

#324

Post by kordless »

inthewoods wrote: post #283
j42 wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Monetization of the queries doesn't appear to be a significant revenue opportunity for either Google or Facebook - why would this be different for Twitter? Not that this can't be a revenue source, but how big is it? An alternative: I agree with everyone that they should have turned the APIs back on - they just should have made it mandatory to carry advertising as part of the feeds in order to access the feeds. They c…

Monetization of the queries isn't a significant revenue opportunity because of scaling payment issues. Solve that, and you solve getting paid for doing something you are good at, which is throwing millions of statuses at millions of users.

Re: Twitter Expected to Begin Layoffs and Stop Headquarters Expansion

#325

Post by scottu »

TheBlueDot wrote: post #223

Well, there goes my weekend/week. As someone who joined Twitter recently this sucks. I left a great job to come work at Twitter because I believe in what they're building and now a few months in I might be looking again. :-( To be fair, the first week I was asking myself what all of these people do. I wish the company had been more transparent with this but I understand why they can't start telling people there will…

Is there enough demand in the San Francisco area to absorb say 20% of Twitter employees? It always feels like everyone is hiring out there.

Re: Twitter Expected to Begin Layoffs and Stop Headquarters Expansion

#327

Post by rabite »

whatsthat wrote: post #323
amix wrote: post #206

I think the general market could learn a thing or two from WhatsApp: 55 people powering a platform used by 800 million _active_ users across many different platforms. And WhatsApp has innovated, e.g. the new video and calling system works very well. I have often wondered what thousands of Twitter employees are doing all day long? Their platform and apps have been stale for a long time.

800 million users where? I've never seen anyone using it.

Every single Arab I know uses Whatsapp. Everyone in Lebanon, Kuwait, Libya, Syria, etc. Shittons of users in those areas, because phone services are so ludicrously expensive due to state-imposed telecommunications monopolies.

Re: Twitter Expected to Begin Layoffs and Stop Headquarters Expansion

#328

Post by kordless »

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…

Trust initially makes you decide to use something (marketing) and trust also makes decide to stay with it (loyalty). Marketing itself is mostly related to raising interest, but it frequently 'hacks' trust by using biases to establish quick and cheap trust with consumers. If a company's product is trustworthy (real trust, not biased trust) then the loyalty becomes strong with the customer. Companies who acquire other companies regularly have identified their bad habits of using too much marketing to try to get more customers and instead focus on buying loyalty through an acquisition.

Re: Twitter Expected to Begin Layoffs and Stop Headquarters Expansion

#329

Post by oldmanjay »

jacquesm wrote: post #267
rjberry wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hubris, much?

He's actually dead on. After that it's a 'mere matter of programming', so there's plenty of work to be done but that's the exact way how you tackle this particular problem.

so in order to do what Twitter has done it is a mere matter of doing what Twitter has done, plus handwaving. how useful!

Re: Twitter Expected to Begin Layoffs and Stop Headquarters Expansion

#330

Post by pessimizer »

gaius wrote: post #265
beagle3 wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Note that it is "if", and not "if and only if". Basically, if you can be tracked or advertised to ("advertracked"), you ARE the product whether you pay or not. Money has to come from somewhere; if it is not from you, it is by monetizing you. But ... why not monetize the user even when they did pay? It's a whole new revenue stream, that's often orthogonal to the payment stream. Paid Hulu has ads. Windows Solitaire has…

You pay for your ticket, you pay for your popcorn, and yet the cinema still shows you ads before the main feature.

I remember the outrage the first time they did it. After about 10 years, it crossed the lagging edge of the Overton window.
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