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

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231–240 of 361 posts

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

#231

By 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…

Look up "app.net". It's been tried. It failed.

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

#232
post #194
post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GNU social [1], Mastodon* [2] There is a set of standartized web protocols called Webfinger, ActivityStreams, Salmon and PubSubHubbub which allow websites to interact with each other as a sort of decentralized/federated Twitter (this is called the "fediverse"). [1]: https://gnu.io/social [2]: https://github.com/Gargron/mastodon Disclaimer: I'm working on Mastodon, it's a new open source implementation, I'm trying to…

Nice thing this mastodon.social, how do I reach out to people/interests ?

Short answer: The sidebar has a form at the bottom where you can enter a username@domain to follow them. For that method, you have to know the user in advance, realistically atm you can browse the public timelines on quitter.se and quitter.no etc to see who interests you (or ask friends who're using the network, etc).

I'm going to eventually implement a "who to follow" suggestions section to make this process smoother.

Mentioning people in statuses works the same as in Twitter, except if it's a user on the same domain as you (e.g. mastodon.social) you can enter their @username, but if they are somewhere else, you enter @username@domain.

If you are replying to a status on your timeline, the mentions are pre-filled like you would expect from e.g. TweetDeck to save you the typing.

Edit: You can follow me as Gargron@mastodon.social

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

#233
post #218
post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The feeds of both are whatever the algo thinks - which will be some compromise between what you want and what the owner of the algo wants.

What is algorithm-driven in my twitter feed? The 'While you were away' stuff at the top? Other than that, as far as I know it's always been a chronological feed of whoever I want.

Are you sure? http://fortune.com/2016/03/20/twitter-algorithm-social-marke...

If you don't even notice it, the algo has got you...

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

#234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$29 per human user or per account? There's a big difference here. $29 per human is a steal, however if 9/10 accounts are bots, spammers, or dead, that's $290 per human which is a total ripoff.

The number I cited was their claimed active users. I'm not sure why you consider $29 per human user a steal. There are two sides to a transaction--what you pay and what you get for it. What exactly do you think investors are getting for their money here?

Just compared to other industry metrics.

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

#237
post #233
post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is algorithm-driven in my twitter feed? The 'While you were away' stuff at the top? Other than that, as far as I know it's always been a chronological feed of whoever I want.

Are you sure? http://fortune.com/2016/03/20/twitter-algorithm-social-marke... If you don't even notice it, the algo has got you...

Oh, wow. Does this effect third-party clients as well? I use Echofon almost exclusively.

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

#238

Can someone actually explain to me how the situation came to this point where it practically looks as if Twitter's fate is being decided and played out in the media via endless speculation? It is not like Twitter is a tiny company with an unknown brand, few users and no possibility of improving its profit margins. I am not aware of what they are trying to do, but at the same time it is not as if they could have exhau…

> Can someone actually explain to me how the situation came to this point where it practically looks as if ... Is this just impatience from stockholders? Money doesn't grow on trees, and Facebook has lost a half billion dollars every year. They have maybe four years left at that rate before they run out of cash on hand. The numbers are improving by about 20 percent a year, which, if projected forward, means they'll s…

> Money doesn't grow on trees, and Facebook has lost a half billion dollars every year.

Dammit, Twitter has lost half a billion annually. Sigh.

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

#239
post #237
post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you sure? http://fortune.com/2016/03/20/twitter-algorithm-social-marke... If you don't even notice it, the algo has got you...

Oh, wow. Does this effect third-party clients as well? I use Echofon almost exclusively.

I can't imagine not - would Twitter give people an easy way to avoid sponsored content etc? That's one reason they cut off all the devs.

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

#240

By 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

>> By any normal metric, Twitter is a huge success > Revenue - Cost is perhaps the most normal metric

Badly chosen phrase. I'm not saying that currently Twitter is not a business failure--it is, at the moment. But from the perspective of providing value to many people, it's doing very well. Plus, the cost part of the equation is driven at this point largely by trying to figure out how to make more money, not by continuing to provide a valuable service to users. (The making-more-money thing is obviously not working yet.)

The alternative model is: lower costs drastically by focusing on doing a handful of useful things well. And then you might be able to raise the money to cover those costs the way Wikipedia does.

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