Makes sense, Instagram has essentially beat them at their own game.
What game is that? "Collecting zero revenue until you're somehow bought by Facebook"?
The short video game. Literally the only thing Vine does.
Vine isn’t growing and most of its top executives have left
131–140 of 172 posts
Re: Vine isn’t growing and most of its top executives have left
#132Earlier quoted context omitted.
> (roughly) reverse-chronological list of text-message length posts'. Twitter went algorithmic timeline not too long ago, sadly. Fortunately, it can still be turned off - but is on by default.
> it can still be turned off Where? I unchecked every setting that I found, but I still get that "While you were away" and "#something is currently trending" bullshit.
You can't get rid of the dumb "while you were away" thing, but you can block it. With ublock origin, add this to your "My Filters" settings:
twitter.com##has-recapRe: Vine isn’t growing and most of its top executives have left
#133Earlier quoted context omitted.
Twitter (the service, not the company's) secret sauce is: You can have a public platform, using an identity you choose for yourself, to broadcast snippets of information. Where do you evolve this? Blogger, Blogspot, Livejournal, Tumblr, Medium, they're all in this same space, except they focus on traditional, long-form content. I don't see Twitter as a social network (although many do, that's okay). I see it as a bro…
>> I don't see Twitter as a social network (although many do, that's okay). I see it as a broadcast medium, a soapbox, a blogging platform. A few years back Peter Kafka wrote an article [1] about how joe/joan-shmoe twitter user will probably never have their tweets read by anybody at all. It was astonishingly small number of folks who broke 500 followers (writing 3/4 years ago) ex. “The median Twitter account has a s…
Carefully note he's talking about accounts, and accounts are probably over 90% bots for "pay $50 for 10000 followers" marketing scams. In comparison you're talking about "average person"
If most accounts aren't people, then what most people do on the service is likely to have nothing in common with what most accounts do on the service.
There is also the orphan account situation. My twitter and facebook and linkedin accounts are unused but not deleted. I would theorize that's yet another problem, once you cross off the list of bots, if the majority of remaining accounts are unused, that means what the majority of accounts do has little to no relationship to what actual active users do. For marketing and PR purposes I'm sure my unused accounts are being monetized and proudly being counted as a "user", which is a whole nother problem.
There is an even deeper reason the analysis is wrong. Inspired by writing this post I logged into facebook for the first time in months. My kids stopped using it years ago and now posting is very power law distribution where virtually all my timeline posts are now from exactly two people who post or repost something roughly every waking hour and nobody else can keep up with their meme-stream which floods everything else out. When a sample is power law skewed like facebook, words like average and median are irrelevant and meaningless. Power law distributions have other ways to analyze them like half life / doubling intervals and talking about the actual exponent of the distribution and stuff like that. The average post "on facebook" comes from precisely two meme-crazy shitposters I feel familial / workplace obligation or peer pressure to friend, but the average user's post is an entirely different phenomena and is a perhaps annual event at most. Oh look its been a year since my last summer vacation, here's my annual summer vacation post.
There is a similar problem with email, yes 99.9% of email sent is spam no one reads. No that does not mean no one uses email or there are no important emails.
Re: Vine isn’t growing and most of its top executives have left
#134Earlier quoted context omitted.
It can be pretty useful for sentiment analysis across large populations - for a lot of different purposes/clients
Do we have sentiment analysis techniques that actually work now? Last I checked they weren't so great.
It is insightful to point out the widely held belief that Google Reader would never be cancelled because its an incredibly tightly curated data set of what real humans actively seek out and hard working devoted humans actively filtered the wheat from the chaff. All for free, for google to monetize.
Everyone knows, that everyone knows, that its a very valuable dataset. But nobody is apparently interested in paying for it or otherwise monetizing it. Shades of "emperor has no clothes". The end result is Google Reader got cancelled.
If twitter was not standalone and was a mere subproject of a real company, it would likewise be long gone. They have no plan B so they'll have to keep doing what they're doing until they run out of money or are purchased, pretty much a Yahoo situation. Its like a decades old portapottie at a concert venue, everyone goes there does not mean its worth anything to anyone.
It would be a nice, cool world to live in where sentiment analysis is a thing. Its such an obvious and tasty idea, that unfortunately is completely wrong.
Re: Vine isn’t growing and most of its top executives have left
#135Earlier quoted context omitted.
Consider that two major newsworthy events in the US in the past week (Philando Castillo killing and Dallas attack) were live-streamed on Facebook rather than Periscope. Facebook already has a huge advantage with 10x the active users of Twitter, AND they integrated live video directly into the app that many of those users already have, rather than a separate app most of them don't. "App constellations" may be a better…
> AND they integrated live video directly into the app that many of those users already have, rather than a separate app most of them don't. > "App constellations" may be a better user experience... if you bother to download the whole constellation... but I think a similar principle to "the best camera is one you have with you" applies. I agree. Why does Facebook insist on Messages being a separate app then? They sho…
> Why does Facebook insist on Messages being a separate app then?
Well for one, you can use it now without having a Facebook account at all, and it can also be used as your SMS app (at least the latest version on Android).
Re: Vine isn’t growing and most of its top executives have left
#136Earlier quoted context omitted.
Consider that two major newsworthy events in the US in the past week (Philando Castillo killing and Dallas attack) were live-streamed on Facebook rather than Periscope. Facebook already has a huge advantage with 10x the active users of Twitter, AND they integrated live video directly into the app that many of those users already have, rather than a separate app most of them don't. "App constellations" may be a better…
> AND they integrated live video directly into the app that many of those users already have, rather than a separate app most of them don't. > "App constellations" may be a better user experience... if you bother to download the whole constellation... but I think a similar principle to "the best camera is one you have with you" applies. I agree. Why does Facebook insist on Messages being a separate app then? They sho…
One reason they did it was to make Facebook messages feel more important. Before Facebook messages were like eMail, you felt like you could reply whenever at a later time. Now you feel like you have to respond immediately, like SMS.
Re: Vine isn’t growing and most of its top executives have left
#137It'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…
I think this is a fundamental truth that is rarely acknowledged by the creators of "free" services. Delivering value to your users and increasing profit for the company are almost always in direct conflict. Large groups of users are drawn in by a free product which will ultimately be unsustainable. The companies which succeed after this initial period are the ones who are willing to degrade their original product, and manage to do so gradually enough that it doesn't draw too much backlash from their existing users.
Re: Vine isn’t growing and most of its top executives have left
#138It'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…
Twitter just doesn't have an idea about where to evolve. They've tried small changes, and nothing helped their bottom line. Rumors are that part of the reason is that they are not sure what their "secret sauce" is, so they are reluctant to change anything in fear of harming it. Also, they are dying. They have never turned a profit. Facebook or Google or Microsoft will eventually buy them, because of the users - but t…
What I think is interesting is their direction towards streaming. For instance, they struck a deal to stream NFL games and they will being streaming the RNC and DNC conventions.
That may be a good direction for them to pair with their platform.
Re: Vine isn’t growing and most of its top executives have left
#139It'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…
I don't think that's true. Twitter has stuck to the original 140 character format...true. Honestly I think they should stick to that. The reason why Twitter has took a turn over the years is because of their treatment of developers and their murdering of top apps instead of letting them flourish. Look at TweetDeck, it hasn't improved in years, and you could argue it has gotten much worse. They dropped the Windows client support for one.
Their services didn't change much, but their philosophy changed drastically.
Then you have them temp banning people for political speech (and I'm not talking about harassment here, which is different.)
As for Vine, that is one that they should have evolved. Vine could have easily been more like SnapChat is now, but instead Jack and company sat on their thumbs.
Twitter is a remarkable case of mismanagement. I think in about 5 years hopefully someone write a book about how Twitter has constantly shot itself in the foot.
Re: Vine isn’t growing and most of its top executives have left
#140Earlier quoted context omitted.
Consider that two major newsworthy events in the US in the past week (Philando Castillo killing and Dallas attack) were live-streamed on Facebook rather than Periscope. Facebook already has a huge advantage with 10x the active users of Twitter, AND they integrated live video directly into the app that many of those users already have, rather than a separate app most of them don't. "App constellations" may be a better…
> AND they integrated live video directly into the app that many of those users already have, rather than a separate app most of them don't. > "App constellations" may be a better user experience... if you bother to download the whole constellation... but I think a similar principle to "the best camera is one you have with you" applies. I agree. Why does Facebook insist on Messages being a separate app then? They sho…
I am often in and out of the messenger app without being interrupted by the clutter of FB itself. I look at FB when I have some time (maybe waiting in line or whatever) while I actually use messenger for, you know, messaging. The app has its own message count badge, for instance, while FB's badge includes both contact requests and updates.
It's a case where disaggregation helps the user experience.