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Vine isn’t growing and most of its top executives have left

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Re: Vine isn’t growing and most of its top executives have left

#21

Post by philsnow »

dasil003 wrote: post #6
ceejayoz wrote: post #2

I have no idea why it wasn't just a minor product feature in the main Twitter app.

Because it had the potential to create a community around it. If they just wanted the feature they could easily have built it into Twitter for less than $30M. What made Vine work is the same thing that made Instagram work: a killer app. If Viners had to compete with everyone else on Twitter their work would have been too diluted to get traction, and you wouldn't have seen the same creativity and commitment.

Critically, the vine community is a younger demographic. Maybe Twitter wanted to keep them separate because they didn't want an eternal September killing the "bird in the hand" Twitter community.

Re: Vine isn’t growing and most of its top executives have left

#23

Post by andyjdavis »

dkarapetyan wrote: post #17
matt_wulfeck wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Twitter's firehose is extremely valuable data, just not at the lofty valuations the company was given.

What exactly is valuable about it? I keep hearing this but it is just a jumble of collective stream of consciousness. Has anyone that has read Ulysses actually made any sense of it? Twitter is the collective analog of Ulysses.

>it is just a jumble of collective stream of consciousness

Much of it isn't even that. A huge proportion are not even real humans but are instead accounts being operated by one of the myriad of pieces of software that enable automatic posting on behalf of a human.

Perhaps my view is skewed as we have a travel blog and know many other travel bloggers but a vanishingly small percentage are real humans actually typing their own tweets in real time.

Re: Vine isn’t growing and most of its top executives have left

#24

Post by ajmurmann »

dkarapetyan wrote: post #14

I've seen this cycle a few times now. Just give it a merciful death (vine and twitter). Some things are meant to be ephemeral. I think vine and twitter are in that category. Just like a forest needs fires to be a healthy ecosystem. People should be more willing to let go of business ideas that see explosive growth but lack the business fundamentals to be sustainable. Instead what's gonna happen is that it is going to…

As a Twitter user I wouldn't like to see that happen. What other platform do you suggest I use instead?

Re: Vine isn’t growing and most of its top executives have left

#25

Post by niftich »

It's such a shame, really; arguably Twitter, much more so than their competitors, tries to stick as close to the original form of their product as they can. I admire that.

Facebook (and Instagram) and Snapchat have both transformed from their original incarnations, in ways that have improved the companies' valuation, but have not always improved the experience of users. It seems every single social network is trending towards feature parity with each other -- Facebook now has streaming video, Snapchat now has a decent text chat with messages that need not disappear, Instagram has an algorithmic no-longer-timeline wall and private messaging, they all have ads, even Tumblr now has IM and livestreaming. Some (important) differences remain, but from an observer time-travelling forward from 2012, the social networks of today would appear nearly interchangeable.

But there's Twitter. All these years, it has stayed remarkably close to the original concept of microblogging. Instead, it developed (or acquired) other formats and cultivated them as separate services, separate communities. It's unfortunate that not even wide societal impact can make a service profitable, or at least quell the pressure to feature-creep outside of your original scope.

Re: Vine isn’t growing and most of its top executives have left

#27

Post by dkarapetyan »

ajmurmann wrote: post #24
dkarapetyan wrote: post #14

I've seen this cycle a few times now. Just give it a merciful death (vine and twitter). Some things are meant to be ephemeral. I think vine and twitter are in that category. Just like a forest needs fires to be a healthy ecosystem. People should be more willing to let go of business ideas that see explosive growth but lack the business fundamentals to be sustainable. Instead what's gonna happen is that it is going to…

As a Twitter user I wouldn't like to see that happen. What other platform do you suggest I use instead?

I don't know. I think RSS aggregation with some extra bells and whistles is a perfectly good alternative but then again I don't think I'm the target demographic of twitter.

Re: Vine isn’t growing and most of its top executives have left

#28

Post by niftich »

ajmurmann wrote: post #24
dkarapetyan wrote: post #14

I've seen this cycle a few times now. Just give it a merciful death (vine and twitter). Some things are meant to be ephemeral. I think vine and twitter are in that category. Just like a forest needs fires to be a healthy ecosystem. People should be more willing to let go of business ideas that see explosive growth but lack the business fundamentals to be sustainable. Instead what's gonna happen is that it is going to…

As a Twitter user I wouldn't like to see that happen. What other platform do you suggest I use instead?

Most power users who command an engaged audience ('influencers' or 'VIPs' or 'celebrities' or 'streamers' or insert-your-noun-here) already cross-post on every single service. Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Twitter, Youtube, Tumblr, Twitch...

Staying exclusive to a particular platform only pays if the platform literally pays you for your content. Otherwise you want to reach as wide of an audience as possible.

Re: Vine isn’t growing and most of its top executives have left

#30

Post by s3r3nity »

niftich wrote: post #25

It's such a shame, really; arguably Twitter, much more so than their competitors, tries to stick as close to the original form of their product as they can. I admire that. Facebook (and Instagram) and Snapchat have both transformed from their original incarnations, in ways that have improved the companies' valuation, but have not always improved the experience of users. It seems every single social network is trendin…

Shouldn't this data be a validation of Facebook's/Instagram's/Snapchat's growth model?

Maybe you _need_ to iterate and change up the game a bit if you're to continue growing, expanding into new markets, etc. ("There are no sacred cows.")

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