Earlier quoted context omitted.
"wud" is not a word. Use English. please.
Not sure how wood it fit in their business plan
Please use periods at the end of sentences. This is Hacker News for crying out loud.
Twitter may receive formal bid, suitors said to include Salesforce and Google
301–310 of 361 posts
Re: Twitter may receive formal bid, suitors said to include Salesforce and Google
#302Re: Twitter may receive formal bid, suitors said to include Salesforce and Google
#303IMO, 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…
You could say all the same things about AOL and AOL Keywords 18 years ago...
Re: Twitter may receive formal bid, suitors said to include Salesforce and Google
#304Google 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 developed a brand problem"
You're spending too much time in the HN/Startup echo chamber. Google has no brand problem with public at large.Re: Twitter may receive formal bid, suitors said to include Salesforce and Google
#305Earlier 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.
And Wave.
http://hello.com/ I'm not 100% sure of it now but at one point there was some side group inside google building this.
Re: Twitter may receive formal bid, suitors said to include Salesforce and Google
#306Earlier 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…
You could say all the same things about AOL and AOL Keywords 18 years ago...
You really couldn't. Yes, people who were online recognized AOL keywords the way they do URLs today, but it never had the pervasiveness that Twitter does. News channels show tweets and hashtags. A large fraction of news shows up on Twitter before it hits other sources of news. It's the platform for putting up a smoke signal, a firsthand account, or a story as it develops.
(None of which inherently makes it profitable.)
Re: Twitter may receive formal bid, suitors said to include Salesforce and Google
#307Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's copious evidence that's public, look for how it's talked about externally. I think you're substituting a particular group of Twitter users for the public - the general perception is Twitter is full of hateful trolls and management can't be bothered to control them.
> the general perception is Twitter is full of hateful trolls and management can't be bothered to control them. Do you have some respectable polling data to support this claim? I also visit some of the biased websites that constantly beat that drum, but that doesn't mean this opinion is held by the general public.
I don't use Twitter much[1], but I see the opposite. They selectively censor to push their type of politics. They hide trending tags they don't like. I don't trust them at all.
It'd be great if Google bought them for one reason: see what they do with the censorship part. Will they continue picking off tags they don't like and open up the idea that Google is deliberately biasing things? Or will Twitter users suddenly see popular trends they never saw before?
1: The website is hostile to consuming content. If you scroll down a few pages of tweets then click an image or something, you lose your spot. Pressing back brings you to the bottom of the first "page" of tweets, not however far you had scrolled. Add in the slowness and wow, it's really quite a bad experience.
Re: Twitter may receive formal bid, suitors said to include Salesforce and Google
#308Salesforce 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…
Salesforce has this weird hosted private social network called Chatter. It's closer to facebook statuses than twitter. I'm not if there really could be a tie in, but one thought is that if a company could take an internal chatter post and promote it to public, that public post could be spread via twitter.
They could already do this using Twitter's API. Seems like a stretch of a reason to buy Twitter.
Re: Twitter may receive formal bid, suitors said to include Salesforce and Google
#309Would it be a bad idea for Twitter to charge a small yearly fee for use? The reason why I think this might work is because some users are very loyal and might not mind spending $20/year for an advertisement free Twitter service. They have about 350 million users, according to a comment here, and if 50 million users would stay, that would be $100 million revenue per year, and with many fewer users, their cost of doing…
So they'd convert 15% of all user accounts (many user have more than one account)? That seems really high - 1% might be attainable. Hardly the numbers they need to justify their valuation. Maybe if they lay off a ton of employees and start getting lean, while keeping their current revenue?
Re: Twitter may receive formal bid, suitors said to include Salesforce and Google
#310Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why the hell is their expense that high? 350 million users, sure it's a lot. Plus they have to store the messages for a long time and it's not like a text message but more like a group chat. Still, most of their expense can't be going towards their tech stack but headcount. Anyone that takes over the company is going to be doing massive layoffs. They should do it their self and become profitable or else someone is go…
Every time I've looked at their reports, stock-based compensation is significantly greater than the total net loss. It seems like the classic tech bubble company where there's a solid large company which is at risk because they're spending like a profitable huge company.
Getting rid of half their staff probably wouldn't hurt. In fact, they might finally be able to turn a profit.