341–350 of 414 posts
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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.
So... don't?
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I'm sorry but I'm not quite sure what you mean by this? In 2011, 96% of Google's revenue was from AdWords -- in recent years that has lowered slightly due to their diversification and cloud services, but it's still at least a 70% share of their gross revenues. Facebook is currently ~80%. The money is in the ads.
You and I agree. The original poster is talking about queries in a difference sense than a Google query - he's referring to it as an API call in a "firehose" sense - so I'm buying access to the Twitter data for my application. I'm suggesting that the number of people who will pay for those API calls is limited. But no doubt that money is in the ads - that's why I suggested that they should turn the API back on, but r…
[edit] and perhaps that was a poor choice of words. as a developer of high-volume low-latency exchange feeds, "query" has a bit of a different meaning to me.
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I'm sorry but I'm not quite sure what you mean by this? In 2011, 96% of Google's revenue was from AdWords -- in recent years that has lowered slightly due to their diversification and cloud services, but it's still at least a 70% share of their gross revenues. Facebook is currently ~80%. The money is in the ads.
You and I agree. The original poster is talking about queries in a difference sense than a Google query - he's referring to it as an API call in a "firehose" sense - so I'm buying access to the Twitter data for my application. I'm suggesting that the number of people who will pay for those API calls is limited. But no doubt that money is in the ads - that's why I suggested that they should turn the API back on, but r…
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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 quer…
"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." Well, maybe, but you can't save your way to $2b in revenue. Stock prices don't generally go up on cost savings, they go up because of future revenue AND…
This is from their Q1 2015 report, so data licensing and other revenue is probably $200M ARR now. Clearly people are willing to pay for access. If they improve the way they provide that, it just might be bigger than a $1B opp.
I would be willing to pay for on demand abilities to control who I follow and unfollow without being throttled.
"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.
Completely agree. "Moments" just has that damn indicator showing stuff is unread on it and it drives me nuts but NOTHING is EVER relevant to any of my interests or even the people I follow. I don't even understand what the point of it is; shouldn't it just be displaying things it thinks I want to look at? At least that makes the most sense to me... Oh well, I don't think Twitter is going away any time soon but I don'…
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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.
I'm not getting why you think this data is so valuable or who you think the audience is - are you suggesting that millions of people would pay for the feed and it is just a problem of being able to pay?
The desire by some individuals to make insane amounts of money on an idea are directly responsible for a massive SUCK experience for the end users of the software because those users are then forced to use the software in a way that makes the revenue predictable. I used to love to use Twitter because of all the wide variety of apps and things I could do with it with code. Now it's just unusable and dying. I would pay to make that different, but there isn't anything they offer that's worth my time and effort, so I'll go elsewhere.
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.
This is probably a very wise move. 4000 employees is just insane for what they do. Grow wisely.
Not happy to see any company have to cut its staff but Twitter is in trouble and some big changes need to be made. Twitter's IPO stock price reflected the promise that the service previously showed. The company was drowning in the possibilities provided by the incredibly valuable real time data it holds. It's not an easy task but what they've failed to do is organise and deliver all that data in a way that provides v…
The twitter feed reminds me of when GMail did away with colors and made it hard to tell at a glance when one message ended and a new one began. It's difficult to parse tweets vs retweets vs replies at a glance. The UI is somehow both cluttered and a huge waste of space, at the same time.
My feed was boring, so I added people I wanted to follow; race drivers and commentators, tech commentators, etc. Now it's just a firehose of junk.
Yes, if I tried harder, I could make it work. But that's not my problem -- I don't make money from my Twitter use. That's Twitter's problem to solve if it wants to attract more growth.
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.
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500M tweets per day, not 500B: http://www.internetlivestats.com/twitter-statistics/ Assuming 100 Bytes per message gives 50GB of messages per day.
Thanks. I wrote 500B, but I did do the calculation with 500M; I used much larger estimates (as is always recommended in back-of-the-envelope calculation) - namely, 256 bytes per tweet - which, in addition to 140 bytes of text[0], leaves e.g. 8 bytes for user id (2 billion uids for every living person on earth), 8 bytes for microsecond timestamp, and 80 more bytes for pointers/caching/stats/whatever. (Those 16 bytes,…