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Twitter may receive formal bid, suitors said to include Salesforce and Google

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Re: Twitter may receive formal bid, suitors said to include Salesforce and Google

#71
Twitter's real value to Google is real-time search, in my opinion. They already license results from Twitter for search results, but having access to all of that sweet, sweet real-time data is nice.

The social graph is nice, but between Chrome and Gmail, Google already knows quite a bit about everyone.

Re: Twitter may receive formal bid, suitors said to include Salesforce and Google

#73
post #23

Google acquiring Twitter is actually the best end result here. Salesforce is probably the worst. Lots of people hate the idea of a Google acquisition, but I think it's well suited because: - Google learnt from its mistakes with Google+ and is eager to not repeat them - The company is a very different one now from years ago - Google doesn't want to mess up identity again, so that wouldn't be an issue - Google mostly j…

> Google learnt from its mistakes with Google+ and is eager to not repeat them Google has learned nothing from their mistakes. As evidence their real name policy is still active. Contrast with Twitter where a lot of users have fake names. And yes, you can find hateful users on Twitter and I know of some folks that have been harassed, but the community I'm active in is very professional and civilized and the conversat…

> As evidence their real name policy is still active. Contrast with Twitter where a lot of users have fake names.

Now contrast Twitter's earnings per share with Facebook's, which does have a real name policy. This policy is 1 percent about harassment, and 99 percent about building an advertising market to sustain the thing once built.

Same logic applies to the read-only APIs. Unless you know a way to embed ads into the APIs, apps like Tweetdeck directly reduce income. This is why Twitter tried to lock down and revoke API access.

If anyone has been making mistakes here, it's been Twitter, who is now in such a poor financial position that, despite laying off a huge number of engineers, their best hope of avoiding Google Reader's fate is to be acquired.

Re: Twitter may receive formal bid, suitors said to include Salesforce and Google

#74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Google learnt from its mistakes with Google+ and is eager to not repeat them Google has learned nothing from their mistakes. As evidence their real name policy is still active. Contrast with Twitter where a lot of users have fake names. And yes, you can find hateful users on Twitter and I know of some folks that have been harassed, but the community I'm active in is very professional and civilized and the conversat…

> Also the Google+ API is still read-only. Which means you can only use Google's official tools for posting content. There's no way for example to cross-post on both Twitter and Google+. Apps like TweetDeck aren't possible for Google+. Is this true? Buffer allows you to cross-post to Facebook, Twitter and Google+.

I don't know what Buffer is, but if they can post to Google+ it only means they have a private deal with Google.

The Google+ API is read-only, it says so in their own docs: https://developers.google.com/+/web/api/rest/

And if you want a service that has integration with everything except for Google+, there's IFTTT.

Re: Twitter may receive formal bid, suitors said to include Salesforce and Google

#75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why? The only thing twitter does better than basically anything is: Has a giant userbase containing many influential Internet celebrities. Except for that it is inferior in almost every single way, starting with the ridiculously low character limit, continuing with the spam everyone all the time etc the list goes on. Hey, even google+ is better in several ways, except for the part about Internet celebrities.

That ridiculously low character limit is one of the reasons I'm active on Twitter much more than anywhere else, as it forces people to be concise. And for everything else, like complex thoughts that can't be expressed as tweets, there are always blogs, whose URLs you can also distribute via Twitter. Twitter basically works like your personal aggregator of interesting stuff. And I freaking hate people using Facebook o…

Counterpoint on the spam thing: I get a noticeable amount -- one a day or so -- of spam followers. That is, accounts that follow me entirely so I'll see their name in the notification email, and then unfollow me within a day.

It's an interesting form of spam, which isn't trackable by observing Twitter message traffic as it lives entirely in account metadata.

Re: Twitter may receive formal bid, suitors said to include Salesforce and Google

#76
post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's copious evidence that's public, look for how it's talked about externally. I think you're substituting a particular group of Twitter users for the public - the general perception is Twitter is full of hateful trolls and management can't be bothered to control them.

I would have said that the de-integration of Google+ from YouTube was a good example of them learning from their mistakes, except fucking Allo shows that they're still rather clueless about a lot of things related to people communicating online.

I still get prompted to "upgrade" to Google+ every time I launch a game on my phone.

Re: Twitter may receive formal bid, suitors said to include Salesforce and Google

#77
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And Wave.

Wave was too ahead of its time. Bots in channels that could translate and issue arbitrary actions? In 2009? Nonsense.

It was not ahead of its time, it was poorly executed. People didn't know what to make of it. That is the designers fault. They needed to relate it to existing ideas and beat those ideas at their own game, even if that mean restricting what it can do to familiar domains. Then over time they can evolve it while taking the users along with them. Instead people bounced off it and decided to wait it out to see if they really needed it and it turns out they didn't.

Spereately, I think it's hilarious that many websites pester hard for emails, making them effectively pamphlets for their email content. If only there was a way that I could subscribe (and unsubscribe) to a stream of short notifications from content creators and be confident that I see all of them in a timeline order. Like what Twitter used to be before they screwed with the timeline. They're going to lose to email, and not for being ahead of their time.

Re: Twitter may receive formal bid, suitors said to include Salesforce and Google

#78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Google learnt from its mistakes with Google+ and is eager to not repeat them Google has learned nothing from their mistakes. As evidence their real name policy is still active. Contrast with Twitter where a lot of users have fake names. And yes, you can find hateful users on Twitter and I know of some folks that have been harassed, but the community I'm active in is very professional and civilized and the conversat…

> As evidence their real name policy is still active. Contrast with Twitter where a lot of users have fake names. Now contrast Twitter's earnings per share with Facebook's, which does have a real name policy. This policy is 1 percent about harassment, and 99 percent about building an advertising market to sustain the thing once built. Same logic applies to the read-only APIs. Unless you know a way to embed ads into t…

Facebook's revenue has nothing to do with their real names policy. Unless you use those real names to tie them to a bank account or some other database, their value is zero. And I don't think Facebook is doing it, or sharing those names with advertisers, because they have other much more valuable signals and ads platforms in general don't actually want to share their data with advertisers, because that's their secret sauce, preferring to do the targeting by themselves.

I've worked on an advertising platform. This idea that those real names have value is basically a myth.

And speaking of Twitter's API, trying to revoke access is one of those decisions that irrevocably hurt them. The big reason for why Facebook succeeded while Google+ miserably failed is that Facebook is a platform.

Re: Twitter may receive formal bid, suitors said to include Salesforce and Google

#80
post #23

Google acquiring Twitter is actually the best end result here. Salesforce is probably the worst. Lots of people hate the idea of a Google acquisition, but I think it's well suited because: - Google learnt from its mistakes with Google+ and is eager to not repeat them - The company is a very different one now from years ago - Google doesn't want to mess up identity again, so that wouldn't be an issue - Google mostly j…

For Google to buy Twitter would be a reversal of a very entrenched strategy that can be summed up as "No niches!". That's why they scrapped Google Reader. There are very few exceptions to this strategy (Google apps for work and some cloud offerings)

Twitter is not for everybody and never will be. Twitter is for those who publish information and for those who are interested in shaping their own information consumption beyond the daily headlines plus family and friends spam.

If Google buys Twitter in the hope of creating a realtime Google for everybody they will fail.

I hope they decide to reverse their "no niches" strategy, because that strategy has been very damaging indeed.

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