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

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311–320 of 361 posts

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

#311
post #266
post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

And all of them weren't launched in last 3 years.

Google Photos (launched in May 2015) reportedly had 200M 30DA a year after its official launch [1]. Sure, it's not a billion, but how many products do you know that reached 1B 30DA in their first 3 years? I can't think of a single one.

[1] http://www.theverge.com/2016/5/18/11685424/google-photos-upd...

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

#312
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.)

Yup. On twitter I see ads for tech and movies - that fits my tastes. On fb I see ads for sleaze.

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

#313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

fb doesn't do that. Twitter can follow what fb does. Right now twitter is very light weight, un-cluttered. It can change UI/UX to advertise more. Of-course there has to be value for advertisers as well - which I think is there (350M users).

Twitter's basic problem is that they opened up to third party clients back while they were still growing, and those third party clients quickly outpaced them in new usage features.

Twitter has been trying to reign that in since (various things their official client can do is not accessible via the public APIs), but they can't just drop their third party support or they would see the usage rates dwindle in no time flat.

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

#314
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.)

[deleted]

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

#315

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.

Outside of Bloomberg, most news organizations are struggling. They couldn't foot the bill at ten billion.

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

#317

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…

This. Also, not only does Twitter have great brand recognition but also individual tweets can have far greater reach than Twitter's user numbers might suggest. A lot of non-users see Tweets - embedded in news stories, shared around the internet, or shown on TV. And lots of non-users hear about things that happen on Twitter. That said, while that brand recognition and reach is scarce and hard to reproduce, it's not ne…

Maybe popular tweets inline with and advertisers brand could be sponsored; "@jonwhoever from Colorado tweets 'I have never had such a popular tweet about the mobile phone industry' brought to you by blackberry".

I'm only slightly not serious about this :-)

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

#318

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.

Um.. This is exactly what advertising is.

Twitter just has a terrible advertising platform. FB is making huge amounts on what should be basically the same product.

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

#319
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...

Wow, didn't know that either. But I don't "follow" people. Rather, I simply add them to different lists (finance, news, science, tech, right, left, etc.) and use tweetdeck to follow the multiple lists.

I wonder if they're also messing with the lists... In any case, as far as I can tell, I seem to be getting all the tweets of people in the list in chronological order.

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

#320
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…

One man's garbage is another man's gold. I believe that the suitors will be able to make more value of the data from Twitter, than Twitter could by itself.
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