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Twitter Is Betting Everything on Jack Dorsey

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Re: Twitter Is Betting Everything on Jack Dorsey

#41

Post by reitanqild »

wslh wrote: post #23
prawn wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You might be copping downvotes because people think your arguments that he's "not very capable" and "is bad at business execution" don't hold up?

Business capabilities are judged by $$$ even when chance plays a big role. There is no signal of turn around.

Well well. Who knows where twitter would have been now if it wasn't for Jack Dorsey.

With a product so boring (IMO) that the only two interesting things about it (again IMO) are the massive hype and the resulting massive scale, just keeping the hype machine running is quite a feat IMO ;-)

(Yeah, when I first saw it I saw massive potential: kind of a giant global event/message bus with a mix of more or less personal text messages, machine2machine communications etc etc. I thought the first thing they would do would be adding channels so you could separate various topics, paid subscriptions for internal company discussions etc etc. Instead they doubled down on efficient distribution of spam and drivel :-/)

Re: Twitter Is Betting Everything on Jack Dorsey

#42

Post by hackaflocka »

pi-err wrote: post #6

Twitter has an incredibly powerful brand and appeal. How many companies can say they triggered revolutions? Yet it's puzzling how much it fails to improve its basic product, 1 year in Dorsey's comeback. On mobile, the search/explore screens are mostly irrelevant. On desktop, they could position themselves as quasi TV channels with live content update. Yes, they lost the social wars and that's fine. They won the media…

To me, the most interesting and fun thing about Twitter is its "Trending Hashtags". Always good for a laugh.

Yet, in the last year, it's become more and more difficult to find the damn list of trending hashtags. Currently, one has to click on the magnifying glass to find it. It should be front and center, and have a top-level tab of its own (next to Home and Moments). Personally, I'd prefer it if every time I opened Twitter, the first thing it showed me was the trending hashtags.

Re: Twitter Is Betting Everything on Jack Dorsey

#43

Post by wslh »

reitanqild wrote: post #41
wslh wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Business capabilities are judged by $$$ even when chance plays a big role. There is no signal of turn around.

Well well. Who knows where twitter would have been now if it wasn't for Jack Dorsey. With a product so boring (IMO) that the only two interesting things about it (again IMO) are the massive hype and the resulting massive scale, just keeping the hype machine running is quite a feat IMO ;-) (Yeah, when I first saw it I saw massive potential: kind of a giant global event/message bus with a mix of more or less personal t…

> Well well. Who knows where twitter would have been now if it wasn't for Jack Dorsey.

100% agree but now the company is in another stage, it is a public company and it is scrutinized with different standards.

Re: Twitter Is Betting Everything on Jack Dorsey

#44

Post by ZanyProgrammer »

simonswords82 wrote: post #40
ZanyProgrammer wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've always thought that overtime, gradually, they should've expanded their character limit to something reasonable like 200-300 chars. Are they that Microsoft like tied to being backwards compatible with SMS?

I'm not sure about that, but they definitely should have taken a move fast break things style approach a la Facebook. New features on Twitter seem to take forever to be decided upon and rolled out. I often wonder if their architecture is stifling them in some way. If I were Jack I'd want to set up a large opt in beta group to trial new features.

So why can't they integrate Periscope directly with Twitter? Instead of posting a Tweet, just press a button to live stream to my feed with Periscope.

Re: Twitter Is Betting Everything on Jack Dorsey

#45

Post by FilterSweep »

wslh wrote: post #30
FilterSweep wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Parent does have some validity related to their API...and how they've scorned developers - but the API, and all of Developers in the "Twitter Sphere", are such a small portion of what Twitter "does" it would be out of scope for their investors to bank on TwitterAPI to reach projections. I don't think Dorsey is as bad as you claim, but this example does reflect an (IMO) systemic problem of treating the CEO of large co…

> but the API, and all of Developers in the "Twitter Sphere", are such a small portion of what Twitter "does" it would be out of scope for their investors to bank on TwitterAPI to reach projections. I don't think so. The development ecosystem is (or was) a way to reinforce the platform, it is a kind of partnership where you stimulate Twitter use because you can build or take value on top of it. Many startups or busin…

We're saying the same thing here, in premise. There is some value to be gained from a development ecosystem, undeniably.

The difference between what I'm saying is that the sheer magnitude of unmonetized Twitter Web users makes whatever small fish monetization increasing Twitter use with their integration look like chump change.

Now, there are several big players such as Periscope, Vine, Meerkat, that could have benefitted Twitter greatly from offering a development ecosystem. But there are two reasons why they wouldn't:

1) Twitter, like Facebook, is big enough - or, more accurately, are expected to be big enough - to be in the "acquirer" phase where they derive more value competing against and acquiring than playing with these popular new services. However, we've seen much of the industry being overvalued and some of us believe a small company can do more, faster, on a technical level than a big company due to bureaucracy, so expectations aren't always matching up to reality.

Vine and Periscope were eventually acquired by Twitter. And Meerkat was forced to pivot.

2) There are cost-benefit analyses that neither you, nor I, are privy to which found developing and maintaining an API by relatively highly-paid employees not worth the benefits seen by its integration by other companies.

> Many startups or businesses in general look elsewhere for the information that is available on Twitter.

Are you sure of this? Businesses and other startups alike still use Twitter for engagement, and there is great information to be pulled from Twitter, assuming they have the ability to act on the metrics available.

Re: Twitter Is Betting Everything on Jack Dorsey

#47

Post by imron »

simonswords82 wrote: post #25

Twitter's product is broken in more ways than I care to recount. End users and developers are constantly complaining about it - and they're the power users who see the value in it! Everybody else is "meh" about Twitter despite the potential. Add Jack in to that mix, a guy who who has a lot of passion and intelligence but is split across Square and Walt Disney and I have to say the answer is 'no', betting on him to si…

Interestingly, when you do put Facebook in as a term, it also starts to trend downwards at about the same time Twitter does.

Re: Twitter Is Betting Everything on Jack Dorsey

#48

Post by rwmj »

blowski wrote: post #2

> And, by nearly every metric, he had achieved remarkable success. Under his tenure, the company had grown from 300 employees to around 4,100. Eurgh. I never understand how the number of employees you have can be a success metric. By that logic, becoming more efficient would be a bad thing.

What do 4,100 employees even do at Twitter? It's not that complicated.

Re: Twitter Is Betting Everything on Jack Dorsey

#49

Post by imron »

blowski wrote: post #2

> And, by nearly every metric, he had achieved remarkable success. Under his tenure, the company had grown from 300 employees to around 4,100. Eurgh. I never understand how the number of employees you have can be a success metric. By that logic, becoming more efficient would be a bad thing.

How many employees did WhatsApp have when it was bought for $19 billion? Signficantly less than 4,100.
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