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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

#161

Post by bluthru »

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…

>The company is a very different one now from years ago

In what ways?

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

#162

Post by jmfayard »

speeder wrote: post #143
dominotw wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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...

You mean the same Arab Spring that sparked 4 or 5 civil wars (depending how you count), led to the rise of IS, and in the civil wars aftermaths caused more civil wars in neighbor countries that were invaded by foreign guerrilla fighters? When I made some napkin calculations some time ago, Arab Spring and its fallout so far killed about 300.000 people and displaced millions. Is the positive non monetary value enough t…

Sorry but I call bullshit on saying that "the arab spring" is the cause of ISIS and the syrian war.

The sectarian corrupt violent syrian state and the U.S. invasion of Irak are much better suspects

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

#163

Post by 8ytecoder »

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…

Personally, I have found the ads on Twitter to be the most relevant. (Google search is too. However, I prefer organic results while searching and I scroll through to the results almost always.)

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

#165

Post by vkou »

CM30 wrote: post #59
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…

Given what they've done with YouTube in the last few years or so, it doesn't seem quite like they've learned from their mistakes. I'm already seeing jokes about YouTube 'advertiser friendly' guidelines and 'YouTube Heroes' as we speak. Really, the one thing that keeps YouTube going is how expensive it is to compete with it. Twitter doesn't exactly have that luxury.

Youtube comments changes were the last dying breath of the Real Names policy. As of ~2015, it's been dead as a parrot.

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

#166

Post by icedchai »

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…

How many of these 350 million users are trolls and sock puppets? I know I have at least a half dozen Twitter accounts myself.

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

#167

Post by encoderer »

Anecdotally I use twitter to advertise my SaaS monitoring product, Cronitor, with far more success than we found with AdWords. The ad platform feels easier to use, and promoting content on Twitter is less of a time investment vs selecting, culling, and optimizing sets of keywords.

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

#168

Post by atombath »

lossolo wrote: post #139
dominotw wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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...

Twitter has its light side (Arab Spring) and dark side because Twitter is also number one platform on which spreading terrorism happen and for terrorist recruiting.

Twitter is also pretty heavy-handed on its censorship of US politics. For instance by blacklisting trending topics such as #WhichHillary when it had gained momentum. (when the protester went to her event with the quote about 'super predators' + #WhichHillary on a banner)

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

#169

Post by abc_lisper »

orblivion wrote: post #137
briholt wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed on poor finances. But Twitter has one thing that no one else has - they are in the center of the zeitgeist. Every political candidate is on Twitter. Every news network discusses Twitter happenings everyday. NFL broadcasts list players' Twitter handles. Half the commercials on TV advertise hashtags. South Park just did a whole episode about Twitter. The cost to embed your brand in the minds of Americans like th…

Oddball idea: If all these news outlets, and other organizations, benefit from it, maybe they could finance it. The same way the Linux Foundation is sponsored by large tech companies.

No shit! They should charge companies and news agencies, and anyone representing companies per tweet(1k per tweet or similar). They provide a valuable service - why should they give it to corporations for free?

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

#170

Post by abz10 »

chimeracoder wrote: post #155
abz10 wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

Lotus Notes was very successful. They were acquired for $3.5B in 1995, long before our current bubble economy. It's likely Slack will progress along the same path - except it will be much faster now. If they don't sell out soon enough they will ride it into the ground and a new fad will take over. Remember Yammer? I don't see Slack as being different to the others. They don't have the talent or motivation to fix their core issues (Facebook does). Bots are not a panacea. Anecdotally I've noticed lots of people have already abandoned Slack because it is distracting and doesn't provide enough value. I expect this to continue. Busy people with jobs and lives will be the first to go and it'll be left with the annoying people with nothing better to do, kinda like Twitter. I think Facebook can and will eventually do a better Slack than Slack.
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