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

cnbc.com

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

#111

Post by gaius »

dominotw wrote: post #97
imagist wrote: post #85

IMO, Twitter is the poster child for the tech bubble. They have users, which is their only claim to viability, but notably, they have never made a profit. Currently valued at around $10 billion with 350 million active users, that's about $29 per user. You'd be hard-pressed to find an investor so foolish that they would invest $29 in each of their users and hope to make it back if it were stated in those terms, but pe…

> If you find yourself thinking that Twitter is a company with any real value What about non-monetary value like playing a key role in 'Arab Spring'[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_media_and_the_Arab_Spri...

If they showed a single ad to anyone during that, then they lose the moral high ground.

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

#113

Post by gaius »

trentmb wrote: post #108
aresant wrote: post #88

Salesforce feels like a bizarre choice, although I agree with their digital chief that "I love Twitter" personally. I use twitter every day as my primary method of content discovery. So at their core the BUSINESS should revolve around monetizing my eyeballs, eg advertising. So to me it's Facebook or Google that should grab it, w/FB at the lead considering their relatively smooth / unhurried / and successful takeovers…

Perhaps there's some back end tech, talent that would be useful for tackling Salesforces problems.

Salesforce's back end is AWS. They ran their own cloud for a while, but ditched it.

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

#114

Post by SixSigma »

nvk wrote: post #6

Twitter should be a public utility.

Not with these guys in charge I hope :

“I believe we need to build a platform that respects and amplifies every voice in a way that the world needs to hear it. I trust that the world will amplify and retweet and have conversations where appropriate.” [1]

Which means "Kill the cops" is ok but "#StopEnslavingSaudiWomen" gets your account banned. [2]

[1] http://www.breitbart.com/tech/2016/06/02/jack-dorsey-blms-de...

[2] http://www.breitbart.com/tech/2016/09/21/twitter-suspends-wo...

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

#115

Post by _kyran »

dcosson wrote: post #91
hornbaker wrote: post #13

My bet is GOOG. They need a streaming newsfeed product in which to insert ads.

This could be pretty cool. There are times when I search for something that happened recently (say, 20 minutes ago in a live sports game, or if I see 6 police cars blocking off the street out my window) and google has no record of it, or sometimes the news tab stories are now wrong/obsolete. In these cases I'd love to see twitter results, particularly from "trusted" sources like reporters or news orgs or even just fr…

Google already pays Twitter for access to the firehose and does display recent tweets that are relevant at the top of the search results page.

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

#116

Post by [deleted] »

icebraining wrote: post #101
wlesieutre wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bought Orkut, killed it, tried Google Plus, went nowhere > Don't forget Buzz! That time when they default opted-in Gmail users into publishing a list of frequently contacted users on their google profile. Auto-follow was a terrible terrible idea.

Orkut wasn't bought, it was created by an employee as a 20%-time project.

[deleted]

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

#117

Post by jlebrech »

imagist wrote: post #85

IMO, Twitter is the poster child for the tech bubble. They have users, which is their only claim to viability, but notably, they have never made a profit. Currently valued at around $10 billion with 350 million active users, that's about $29 per user. You'd be hard-pressed to find an investor so foolish that they would invest $29 in each of their users and hope to make it back if it were stated in those terms, but pe…

at $29 per user, wouldn't it be better to spend $1 Billion creating a replacement for twitter and then giving each new user a dollar or something?

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

#118

Post by Pxtl »

gxs wrote: post #95
imagist wrote: post #85

IMO, Twitter is the poster child for the tech bubble. They have users, which is their only claim to viability, but notably, they have never made a profit. Currently valued at around $10 billion with 350 million active users, that's about $29 per user. You'd be hard-pressed to find an investor so foolish that they would invest $29 in each of their users and hope to make it back if it were stated in those terms, but pe…

People always write them off, but I do wonder if it's more of an emotional write off or the fact that as non twitter users, they refuse to see value because they personally don't see value. I'm not a twitter user or advocate but: 106.31M 316.93M 664.89M 1.4B 2.22B That's their revenue over the past 5 years. Their R&D cost last year was over 800M. I'm not saying they are Google, I'm not saying they are LinkedIn, but t…

Yes, I think a large part of the hate that Twitter gets is from people who see Twitter as a silly product, like Snapchat or something.

Yes, Twitter has challenges in monetizing, and yes, Twitter is weird, and yes, Twitter hasn't made a profit yet. But fundamentally, Twitter is still the preferred platform for following media, celebrities, politicians, internet-famous-people, and quick ad-hoc public communication with those people. And just like how Facebook's success is that all your friends are there, Twitter's success is that every public figure you're interested in is there, even the geeky small nuts-and-bolts types like writers and programmers and artists.

It has become the public plaza of the Internet.

If I want to post pictures of my kids, I'll do it on Facebook. If I want to pick a fight with my city councillor about a decision he made or get in touch with a script-writer of my favourite movie, I'll do it on Twitter.

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

#119

Post by iampims »

gxs wrote: post #95
imagist wrote: post #85

IMO, Twitter is the poster child for the tech bubble. They have users, which is their only claim to viability, but notably, they have never made a profit. Currently valued at around $10 billion with 350 million active users, that's about $29 per user. You'd be hard-pressed to find an investor so foolish that they would invest $29 in each of their users and hope to make it back if it were stated in those terms, but pe…

People always write them off, but I do wonder if it's more of an emotional write off or the fact that as non twitter users, they refuse to see value because they personally don't see value. I'm not a twitter user or advocate but: 106.31M 316.93M 664.89M 1.4B 2.22B That's their revenue over the past 5 years. Their R&D cost last year was over 800M. I'm not saying they are Google, I'm not saying they are LinkedIn, but t…

You make a great point, Twitter's revenue has been growing for the last five years. The market cap of Twitter is supposed to reflect its future value and this is where things get complicated. With a no longer growing user base, limited additional real estate to show ads, strong 3rd party ecosystem which doesn't display ads, they're in a much tougher position than they were 3 years ago.

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

#120

Post by bitmapbrother »

bad_user wrote: post #54
owenwil wrote: 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…

>Google has learned nothing from their mistakes. As evidence their real name policy is still active.

No it's not. There's no requirement to use your real name in Google+ or YouTube. And if you don't like Google+ you can even delete it from your account.

>Also the Google+ API is still read-only. Which means you can only use Google's official tools for posting content.

So what? There's a good reason it's read only and that's to avoid the flood of spam that would flow in.

>Oh and Google Reader is still dead.

Yeah, like you ever used Google Reader. It was a seldomly used service that has now become the poster child for people looking to criticize all Google product announcements.

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