Twitter Is Expected to Field Bids This Week • Hacker News Board

Re: Twitter Is Expected to Field Bids This Week

#111

Post by the_watcher » Wed, Oct 05, 2016, 4:15 PM UTC

SwellJoe wrote: post #93

tarancato wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

This election has proven the value of old tweets; as one candidate in particular has a penchant for making shit up, and then pretending later he didn't make shit up. That said, I thought about this recently when @pmarca took a break from twitter and all of his tweets disappeared, and I figured, "Well, yes, I follow him and enjoy his tweets...but I never planned to go back and read the old ones." It is a fleeting and…

> Nonetheless, I really doubt storage is anywhere near the majority of the cost of running Twitter. It takes a lot of 140 character tweets to fill up a terabyte.

Tweets contain photos, videos, gifs, etc. Text is far from the only things that would need to be stored.

Re: Twitter Is Expected to Field Bids This Week

#112

Post by acveilleux » Wed, Oct 05, 2016, 4:18 PM UTC

paulmd wrote: post #94

jimmytidey wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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) i…

This is exactly the problem that XMPP is designed to solve. You pick an XMPP provider who you trust, and you can get cross-provider traffic through XMPP Federation. One of the largest XMPP providers is Google Talk, which lets you hook right into the standard GChat. The problem is precisely that people keep re-inventing the wheel here. We don't need Facebook Chat and all the other deliberately-incompatible protocols t…

And Hangouts is only partially interoperable with XMPP.

Re: Twitter Is Expected to Field Bids This Week

#113

Post by didip » Wed, Oct 05, 2016, 4:21 PM UTC

jimmytidey wrote: post #71

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) i…

A large mesh of zeromq could do it, and let the clients deal with storage.

Re: Twitter Is Expected to Field Bids This Week

#114

Post by 6stringmerc » Wed, Oct 05, 2016, 4:24 PM UTC

If Salesforce goes down this route I don't think it will end well for either entity. Granted, I'm not sure I'd prefer Planatir Technologies to pick up Twitter (not that they will) but from a business perspective I don't think Salesforce should chase the kind of market - or whatever it is - that Twitter has. I've had to use Salesforce on several occasions and as a relatively recent Twitter user from time to time, I don't see constructive overlap. Could be me, I know.

Re: Twitter Is Expected to Field Bids This Week

#115

Post by samsolomon » Wed, Oct 05, 2016, 4:25 PM UTC

the_watcher wrote: post #110

jondubois wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's easy to speculate on what could have been but we shoudn't forget that Twitter actually did exceptionally well for itself. I personally could never have imagined that Twitter would become so popular. I'm still surprised that people are using it (the whole thing doesn't make any sense to me).

It doesn't make sense until you find an active community around a topic you are truly interested in. The NBA is what sucked me in, and it remains 95% of the reason I used Twitter (the other 5% is for when customer service is unresponsive to my chats or emails)

I think this is why I love Twitter, but also the reason many people don't.

Unlike Facebook, where I feel beholden to follow the people I know, Twitter is different. I can follow the thoughts of people I've never met, but greatly respect. There are tons of great designers, writers and journalists that make my Twitter feed entertaining and informative. Not everyone is interested in design or media and it can be difficult to discover accounts.

The other (previous) issue for Twitter is the feed. If you follow 1,000 people it will can be overwhelming. I was hesitant about the "You might have missed" section, but think it is a step in the right direction.

Re: Twitter Is Expected to Field Bids This Week

#116

Post by theli0nheart » Wed, Oct 05, 2016, 4:27 PM UTC

harryh wrote: post #79

jerf wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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.

Given the paucity of people I know who've made a purchasing decision based off of an ad on Twitter, I seriously doubt that.

Re: Twitter Is Expected to Field Bids This Week

#117

Post by jpindar » Wed, Oct 05, 2016, 4:29 PM UTC

untog wrote: post #47

mrweasel wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It you can't monetise it, then how valuable it that data really? It doesn't matter how valuable your product is, if no one is willing to pay. Perhaps the gossip magazines should pool their money and buy Twitter?

Monetisation usually implies end users paying for a product. I don't think Twitter will ever get to that point. But a media company like Disney (who, remember, own ESPN) could absolutely capitalise on the value of Twitter for live sports, for example. It would be valuable to them .

They recently did an awesome job of streaming an NFL game.

Re: Twitter Is Expected to Field Bids This Week

#118

Post by zeroami » Wed, Oct 05, 2016, 4:30 PM UTC

jimmytidey wrote: post #71

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) i…

Maybe it was too early back then to see the value in it, but does anyone remember App.net? Dalton Caldwell (now working at YCombinator) had a plan to build a backbone for developers to build on top off without fear of APIs being taken away from them[0]. The idea came about from this exact topic (Twitter becoming more and more hostile to developers)[1].

[0]http://daltoncaldwell.com/an-audacious-proposal [1]http://daltoncaldwell.com/what-twitter-could-have-been

Re: Twitter Is Expected to Field Bids This Week

#119

Post by s3r3nity » Wed, Oct 05, 2016, 4:30 PM UTC

rayalez wrote: post #24

Does anybody know why they have never tried to create a premium version? I've just googled, looks like they're making $0.55/user/month [1] I would have totally paid $7-$10/yr for no-bullshit version without ads, focused on user experience instead of manipulating my attention. I bet many other people would too. And I would use it way more actively as a result. Why do neither twitter nor facebook offer premium/business…

Well Facebook has "Facebook At Work" (https://work.fb.com/) that sort of accomplishes this, though at the moment they're not charging anything.

Also, it's a bit of support/maintenance/overhead for something that doesn't have as much support as you might think - otherwise tools like Google Contributor would be blowing up. I imagine like ~1% of users would actually opt to pay, maybe 2 or 3%, based upon my experience with freemium business models at a few different companies.

I think there's the hypothesis that these "pro subscribers" have higher incomes and are therefore better ripe for advertising demand. I would argue that Google has enough data and intelligence to internalize this hypothetical lifetime value from ad dollars into a reasonable price for a monthly subscription that would be roughly equivalent. If the counterpoint is that $7-10 / year doesn't quite equal how much Google could get for the same user through advertising (which could be substantially higher I think,) then it's hard to fault Sundar or Jack Dorsey or any other tech CEO in this space for going with what would provide better value to shareholders (which is ultimately their responsibility, for better or worse.)

Re: Twitter Is Expected to Field Bids This Week

#120

Post by SwellJoe » Wed, Oct 05, 2016, 4:34 PM UTC

the_watcher wrote: post #111

SwellJoe wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This election has proven the value of old tweets; as one candidate in particular has a penchant for making shit up, and then pretending later he didn't make shit up. That said, I thought about this recently when @pmarca took a break from twitter and all of his tweets disappeared, and I figured, "Well, yes, I follow him and enjoy his tweets...but I never planned to go back and read the old ones." It is a fleeting and…

> Nonetheless, I really doubt storage is anywhere near the majority of the cost of running Twitter. It takes a lot of 140 character tweets to fill up a terabyte. Tweets contain photos, videos, gifs, etc. Text is far from the only things that would need to be stored.

How many tweets contain media? On my timeline it is a very, very small percentage.