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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

#151

Post by abz10 »

chimeracoder wrote: post #145
abz10 wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 rea…

> It was not ahead of its time, it was poorly executed. People didn't know what to make of it. Eh, the biggest problem with using Wave was that it was only just barely usable on top-tier hardware of the time. So, for most people, it was impossible to run on their own hardware (especially on their laptops). I think that if the performance hadn't been an issue (ie, the average hardware in 2009 had been capable of what…

The ideas behind Google Wave are very very old, like Lotus Notes old. I worked on plugins Lotus Notes to do all sorts of Google Wave stuff. There is nothing new there. These ideas pop up on a regular basis and fail for the same reasons. My plugin took a week of training by very motivated users and they still struggled with all of the freedom. It was domain specialized, which helps, and all these years later it is still in use and they love it.

Google Docs and Google Calendar are very restricted in comparison. Gmail is as well. And search - type some words get an ordered list. If you don't get what you want try some different words. Pretty damn simple to use and explain.

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

#152

Post by jgalt212 »

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…

> whose attempts to monetize users through advertising have correlated strongly with loss of users.

I don't know if that's true, or how strong the correlation is, but if it's there and you as a founder can detect it before others, that's a good sign you should sell the company rather than stay independent.

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

#153

Post by newscracker »

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…

> As evidence their real name policy is still active.

The real name policy was revoked a couple of years ago. [1] I can only find some help pages on how often one can change the name and what to do if one wants to use a "first name" alone (the answer is to use a "." in the last name field and it won't be shown anywhere). Where does Google or Google+ require real names and since when? Do you have links to a re-reversal of that policy? I searched again, but couldn't find any.

[1]: https://plus.google.com/+googleplus/posts/V5XkYQYYJqy

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

#154

Post by vthallam »

jlebrech wrote: post #117
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?

So that they can take the dollar and go back to twitter to tweet "how the new company is making a fool of itself?" :)

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

#155

Post by chimeracoder »

abz10 wrote: post #151
chimeracoder wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It was not ahead of its time, it was poorly executed. People didn't know what to make of it. Eh, the biggest problem with using Wave was that it was only just barely usable on top-tier hardware of the time. So, for most people, it was impossible to run on their own hardware (especially on their laptops). I think that if the performance hadn't been an issue (ie, the average hardware in 2009 had been capable of what…

The ideas behind Google Wave are very very old, like Lotus Notes old. I worked on plugins Lotus Notes to do all sorts of Google Wave stuff. There is nothing new there. These ideas pop up on a regular basis and fail for the same reasons. My plugin took a week of training by very motivated users and they still struggled with all of the freedom. It was domain specialized, which helps, and all these years later it is sti…

> The ideas behind Google Wave are very very old, like Lotus Notes old.

The ideas behind Slack are very old. Doesn't stop Slack from being incredibly valuable as both a product and a company.

In many ways, Slack is trying to become what Google Wave tried to be at the beginning (a tool for real-time communication with, not just in chat/text form, but with other embedded forms of media as well).

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

#156

Post by emodendroket »

allemagne wrote: post #147
pc86 wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are plenty of people who use Facebook and don't use Twitter. Facebook is certainly more ubiquitous, it's just not quite as easy to tell you where someone's FB page is the way you can just have "@BarackObama" in the ticker.

A (somewhat less significant) number of people use Twitter and not Facebook. Facebook seems to have a reputation of being more ubiquitous, yet creepier than Twitter.

It's a lot more than "somewhat" less significant.

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

#157

Post by emodendroket »

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...

The first two sentences of your link: "The role played by social media during the Arab Spring as a revolutionary wave of demonstrations and protests (both non-violent and violent), riots, and civil wars in the Arab world represents a highly controversial issue. The impact of social media on the events in the Middle East and North Africa as a factor of political uprising and turmoil is highly debatable and fostered both criticism and approval."

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

#159

Post by maxander »

_kyran wrote: post #112

Just going to leave this here (from last month): http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/downloadthissho... "Twitter will be sold in six months - Kara Swisher"

I'd be curious to see a statistical analysis of how unlikely it is for there to be predictions of something like this on any given timeframe. Whenever Twitter got sold (or didn't), what are the odds that some vaguely recognizable name would have "predicted" it?

To do this analysis we would need some kind of easily searchable corpus of simply-worded predictions, issued by a sizable fraction of public personalities. Hmm...

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