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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

#141
post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not going to explain the individual job functions of 50 people, and for folks who work in the industry this should seem like a reasonable number just from their own experience. However, let's do some rough numbers. It says they had 3 product managers. I would guess this means 8-10 engineers. 3 QA folks would be a decent enough ratio. You've then got a GM, a head of product, head of UX, head of data science, head…

> I'm not going to explain the individual job functions of 50 people Good thing I didn't ask you to. > It says they had 3 product managers Seems like a lot of product managers for a company with one product which isn't especially complicated. Smells like a sign of hiring really fast to try to grow. > I would guess this means 8-10 engineers The fuck do they even do? You don't need that many people to make something li…

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

#142
post #129
post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most people use Facebook to communicate with their friends and family. With the regular Facebook platform everyone can see everything and your comment on a friends obnoxious photo might be posted on your moms news feed. Not so with Messenger. It's easy to have groups for friends, groups for family, groups for your Sunday football group etc. I bet most young people already are using Messenger a lot more than regular F…

Facebook is the last thing young people use.

According to something I read, young people (<22yo) use twitter & snapchat for on-going daily updates and reserve facebook for bigger events like a family get-together.

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

#143
post #133
post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> 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 a…

> 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.

They usually apply basic criteria such as monthly active users (MAUs) here when promoting such stats. Your account likely wouldn't meet the criteria. In the case of bots, being "active" can be programmatically achieved, however.

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

#144
The part that has impressed me about Twitter/Vine/etc over the past few years is their content embeds in other sites/services. Their main apps are so riddled with junk that I hardly use them. The real estate in their feeds devotes more to ad space than micro-blogging, and everyone knows that followers (/follow-for-followers) are a marketing cesspool.

Twitter et al. should really become the blockquote service for the internet.

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

#146
post #101
post #54

Earlier 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…

> Blogger, Blogspot, Livejournal, Tumblr, Medium, they're all in this same space So why does Twitter need 3,800 employees? Why does it need 1,500 technical employees? Sure, it gets more traffic than any of those other sites, but growth has slowed and the traffic is more or less stable. The core product hasn't changed significantly. Their most ambitious innovation in recent years (Periscope) was an acquisition. What d…

Twitter puts out a LOT of software, and open-sources a good portion. I don't know if this is smart in the sense of being overstaffed relative to their revenue, but they do it regardless. Some examples:

[1] Fabric, an SDK for mobile apps - https://docs.fabric.io/android/fabric/overview.html

[2] Heron, a realtime, distributed, fault-tolerant stream processing engine - https://github.com/twitter/heron

[3] Finagle, a fault tolerant, protocol-agnostic RPC system - https://github.com/twitter/finagle/

[4] FlockDB, a distributed, fault-tolerant graph database - https://github.com/twitter/flockdb

[5] Ruby implementation of the ICU (International Components for Unicode - https://github.com/twitter/twitter-cldr-rb

[6] Clockwork Raven, Human-Powered Data Analysis with Mechanical Turk - https://github.com/twitter/clockworkraven

[7] Gizzard, a flexible sharding framework for creating eventually-consistent distributed datastores - https://github.com/twitter/gizzard

[8] Twemcache, a Twitter fork of Memcached - https://github.com/twitter/twemcache

[9] Twemproxy, a fast, light-weight proxy for memcached and redis - https://github.com/twitter/twemproxy

[10] Iago, a webapp load tester - https://github.com/twitter/iago

[11] Ospriet, a bestof/voting app - https://github.com/twitter/ospriet

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

#147

Earlier 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…

Size. The FB app is at the very limit of the iOS app size.

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

#149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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, I imagine, Facebook made this choice as a company is to increase the amount of real estate their apps have on the app store and 'top 10 most popular apps' lists, similar to how companies strive for top listings and more real estate on search engine results pages. Between Facebook, Instagram, and Messenger, I wouldn't be surprised if Facebook's apps occupy 30% of most top-10 lists.

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

#150
post #129
post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most people use Facebook to communicate with their friends and family. With the regular Facebook platform everyone can see everything and your comment on a friends obnoxious photo might be posted on your moms news feed. Not so with Messenger. It's easy to have groups for friends, groups for family, groups for your Sunday football group etc. I bet most young people already are using Messenger a lot more than regular F…

Facebook is the last thing young people use.

I am not a young person but I am a graduate student with a lot of young friends. At my university, Facebook is primarily used as a carefully curated photo album and an event planner. The genuine social interactions on Facebook have moved into Messenger. Photos and videos that are not profession/parent friendly are only shared in group chats. Most people are in 3 to 10 active group chats.

A few years ago Facebook Groups were popular at my school but now only a few of the largest ones are active. When I transferred in to finish my undergrad, the groups were essential to meeting people. Now I think it would be much harder to meet like-minded students online because all of the genuine conversation is in semi-private group chats.

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