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.
Aren't bots in channels a 1990s IRC feature?
Twitter may receive formal bid, suitors said to include Salesforce and Google
221–230 of 361 posts
Re: Twitter may receive formal bid, suitors said to include Salesforce and Google
#222Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I can't imagine politicians funding Twitter.
It's true, the money only ever goes in.
Re: Twitter may receive formal bid, suitors said to include Salesforce and Google
#223Google 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…
Twitter is not as big as Facebook, but it is not a niche service in the sense that Reader was. Twitter has 300M worldwide users and can count as users most global celebrities, politicians, artists, and journalists. People that make news. Reader is not a good comparison at all.
Re: Twitter may receive formal bid, suitors said to include Salesforce and Google
#224Re: Twitter may receive formal bid, suitors said to include Salesforce and Google
#225Google 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 has developed a brand problem, similar that Microsoft. I'm positive that many would stop using Twitter if they bought it.
Google has 7 different products with over 1 billion users [1]. This "brand problem" you speak of, if it exists at all, doesn't seem to have slowed them down much.
[1] http://www.popsci.com/google-has-7-products-with-1-billion-u...
Re: Twitter may receive formal bid, suitors said to include Salesforce and Google
#226By any normal metric, Twitter is a huge success. 300 million people find their service useful.
But it was already huge success when it had no business model. Moreover, what is fundamentally valuable about Twitter to its users--sharing and discovering little bits of textual expression over a publicly visible social network--is not very expensive.
From the perspective of the users who find it valuable, why does it need a for-profit model at all? Why can't we just subsidize it as a non-profit via grants and donations, a la Wikipedia? I'm pretty sure you could do the important thing that Twitter does--ignoring all the extras devoted to figuring out how to extract more money from the data--at a small fraction of its $2 billion in revenue.
I'm not being naive here--it's quite obvious why things are the way they are. But there many examples out there of making a big impact while making a decent living (just without anyone trying to become a billionaire). Social networking is ripe for more of this approach. The attempts so far have failed not because of their business model, but because of the usual reason: poor execution.
Re: Twitter may receive formal bid, suitors said to include Salesforce and Google
#227Earlier 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…
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.
[deleted]
Re: Twitter may receive formal bid, suitors said to include Salesforce and Google
#228IMO, 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…
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…
And yet they still can't make money. They aren't growing either.
Re: Twitter may receive formal bid, suitors said to include Salesforce and Google
#229By any normal metric, Twitter is a huge success. 300 million people find their service useful. But it was already huge success when it had no business model. Moreover, what is fundamentally valuable about Twitter to its users--sharing and discovering little bits of textual expression over a publicly visible social network--is not very expensive. From the perspective of the users who find it valuable, why does it need…
>>By any normal metric, Twitter is a huge success
Revenue - Cost is perhaps the most normal metric
Re: Twitter may receive formal bid, suitors said to include Salesforce and Google
#230IMO, 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…
Be careful conflating "never made a profit" with not having a business. They made $710M in revenue last quarter, up 48% yoy. Their expenses might be high, but they can address that. Companies like Amazon didn't make a profit for years, and are rightfully quite valuable in the eyes of the market. A $29 valuation per MAU is low if anything. Facebook is almost 10x that (and deserves to be). Early stage startups often ge…
Can we agree as a community to stop comparing every company that is losing money year after year to Amazon.
Amazon was pouring money into infrastructure while growing a massive retail business.
Worlds different than some company that's trying to figure out how to sell ads better.