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Twitter Is Expected to Field Bids This Week

wsj.com

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Re: Twitter Is Expected to Field Bids This Week

#71

Post by jimmytidey »

crabasa wrote: post #18

This is a sad outcome, but once upon a time Twitter had a choice: be the defacto messaging backbone for the Internet or compete with Facebook and be a destination website/app. They chose the latter and rewrote their TOS to effectively eliminate 3rd party development on their platform. An entire ecosystem of companies, products and tools was destroyed because Twitter couldn't imagine or articulate the value of powerin…

We still need the thing that Twitter ought to have been, a public short messaging service.

Who is going to step up? What kind of institution could deliver something like that, while remaining open and accountable? A Wikipedia style foundation?

My guess is that it needn't be (too) expensive to run, especially if you hand over responsibility for long term storage of the messages to third parties.

My PhD (in progress) is based on the public utility of Twitter data. I'm deeply sad about this.

Re: Twitter Is Expected to Field Bids This Week

#72

Post by Alex3917 »

crabasa wrote: post #18

This is a sad outcome, but once upon a time Twitter had a choice: be the defacto messaging backbone for the Internet or compete with Facebook and be a destination website/app. They chose the latter and rewrote their TOS to effectively eliminate 3rd party development on their platform. An entire ecosystem of companies, products and tools was destroyed because Twitter couldn't imagine or articulate the value of powerin…

Eliminating 3rd-party devs was only half the issue, the other half was the lack of velocity.

I've been saying for a while now that my cofounder and I add more functionality to our startup every two weeks than Twitter's 4,000 employees add to theirs in an entire year. Now this is obviously an apples-and-oranges comparison for all sorts of reasons, yet all caveats aside I think it's still pretty telling.

Re: Twitter Is Expected to Field Bids This Week

#73

Post by proksoup »

mc32 wrote: post #68
proksoup wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They became the defacto place for public discussion instead. The focus on 3rd party api's hindered that and would have hurt their growth in that regard maybe? Journalism happens on twitter first, it's where famous people talk to each other, not facebook, yeah?

It's where famous and infamous people go to boast and to brownnose each other and score points. It's a forum to continue high school style social interaction (peer pressure and peer approvals) Or, as nirvana said, territorial pissings. It's also good as a breaking news medium.

That social approval is what defines what's socially acceptable everywhere.

Twitter has expanded the boundaries of politically correct / acceptable speech, by enabling that brown nosing and echo chamber re-enforcement and not cracking down further on what's acceptable speech on their medium.

Re: Twitter Is Expected to Field Bids This Week

#74

Post by whatever_dude »

w1ntermute wrote: post #3

I hope Twitter doesn't get acquired by Salesforce - that would destroy it.

It is difficult imagining any buyer being a fit for Twitter. I can't see how integrating Twitter with anything could be positive.

But then again, Twitter itself has been a bad fit for Twitter, so maybe something will come out of this.

Re: Twitter Is Expected to Field Bids This Week

#75

Post by tarancato »

bernardlunn wrote: post #63
omouse wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Twitter should be owned as a worldwide co-operative at this point, it's too useful as infrastructure to hand it over to some greedy jackasses.

But it is too expensive now for that route

I wonder how cheaper would it be if tweets were removed in, let's say, six months.

Re: Twitter Is Expected to Field Bids This Week

#77

Post by untog »

jerf wrote: post #67
untog wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why do neither twitter nor facebook offer premium/business accounts? Because it will cause their ad revenue to plummet. The users with money are the ones advertisers actually want to reach, so if you let them opt out of seeing advertising you'll just be left with an exclusive pool of users who won't buy anything. And no advertiser wants that.

It still remains unclear to me how letting users opt out of making Twitter $0.55/month by giving Twitter, say, $4.95/month is a bad idea. OK, so the advertising rates go down... so what? Advertising rates are not what a business is trying to optimize, revenue is. Up to this point, the counter to this argument was basically "Well, what Twitter's doing is obviously working for them". But that's not quite as strong as i…

> It still remains unclear to me how letting users opt out of making Twitter $0.55/month by giving Twitter, say, $4.95/month is a bad idea.

Hypothetically speaking, allowing those users to opt out would mean Twitter makes $0.20/month from the remaining users, rather than $0.55/month. Will enough users buy a premium subscription to make up that loss? I don't see the evidence that they would.

Of course, it's all hypothetical and none of us know the actual numbers involved. But I'd wager Twitter has looked at it at least once and decided it was not a good idea.

Re: Twitter Is Expected to Field Bids This Week

#78

Post by true_religion »

aembleton wrote: post #54
crabasa wrote: post #18

This is a sad outcome, but once upon a time Twitter had a choice: be the defacto messaging backbone for the Internet or compete with Facebook and be a destination website/app. They chose the latter and rewrote their TOS to effectively eliminate 3rd party development on their platform. An entire ecosystem of companies, products and tools was destroyed because Twitter couldn't imagine or articulate the value of powerin…

How would you monetise the backbone? At least with the website/app they can use advertising.

Charge people who build applications that use it in any significant way beyond sending text messages through the Twitter approved interface.

Re: Twitter Is Expected to Field Bids This Week

#79

Post by harryh »

jerf wrote: post #67
untog wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why do neither twitter nor facebook offer premium/business accounts? Because it will cause their ad revenue to plummet. The users with money are the ones advertisers actually want to reach, so if you let them opt out of seeing advertising you'll just be left with an exclusive pool of users who won't buy anything. And no advertiser wants that.

It still remains unclear to me how letting users opt out of making Twitter $0.55/month by giving Twitter, say, $4.95/month is a bad idea. OK, so the advertising rates go down... so what? Advertising rates are not what a business is trying to optimize, revenue is. Up to this point, the counter to this argument was basically "Well, what Twitter's doing is obviously working for them". But that's not quite as strong as i…

It still remains unclear to me how letting users opt out of making Twitter $0.55/month by giving Twitter, say, $4.95/month is a bad idea.

$0.55/month is the mean for the entire userbase. The actual amount for any particular user can be far more or far less (well up to .55 less) than that.

Users who are more likely to pay 4.95/month are much more likely to be worth more than 4.95/month in advertising revenue.

Re: Twitter Is Expected to Field Bids This Week

#80

Post by oldmanjay »

Alex3917 wrote: post #72
crabasa wrote: post #18

This is a sad outcome, but once upon a time Twitter had a choice: be the defacto messaging backbone for the Internet or compete with Facebook and be a destination website/app. They chose the latter and rewrote their TOS to effectively eliminate 3rd party development on their platform. An entire ecosystem of companies, products and tools was destroyed because Twitter couldn't imagine or articulate the value of powerin…

Eliminating 3rd-party devs was only half the issue, the other half was the lack of velocity. I've been saying for a while now that my cofounder and I add more functionality to our startup every two weeks than Twitter's 4,000 employees add to theirs in an entire year. Now this is obviously an apples-and-oranges comparison for all sorts of reasons, yet all caveats aside I think it's still pretty telling.

Mostly it tells us that you don't have any visibility into twitter and have conflated end-user features with engineering output.
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