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

Re: Twitter Is Expected to Field Bids This Week

#201

Post by bbctol » Wed, Oct 05, 2016, 7:50 PM UTC

throwaway40483 wrote: post #130

the_watcher wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

Facebook = people you (grudgingly) know Twitter = people you want to know

And it's become a remarkably good way for those people you want to know to reach out to individuals. I know a couple up-and-coming rappers who got some buzz and found their idols casually reaching out to chat on twitter.

Re: Twitter Is Expected to Field Bids This Week

#202

Post by fullshark » Wed, Oct 05, 2016, 7:52 PM UTC

alfalfasprout wrote: post #92

mrweasel wrote: post #22

Why would anyone want to buy Twitter? Sure they have a great brand, loyal fans, but pretty much no way to monetizing them. It's pretty obvious that Twitter has access to tons of interesting data, I just question if it's anything more than simply "interesting". While Twitter is huge, it's not really ubiquitous enough that you can use it for measuring things like effectiveness of marketing campaigns.

Eh, Google buying them makes a ton of sense. 1. Massive access to a social network that can better integrate all their products. 2. Integration with their ad platform (improving monetization enough to make it break-even). 3. They'd own one of the most influential social networks in the world. Google buzz, Google wave, Google + were all massive failures. 4. Integration with things like Google News. They'd be able to u…

What about Salesforce, I don't get that one.

Re: Twitter Is Expected to Field Bids This Week

#203

Post by wott » Wed, Oct 05, 2016, 7:55 PM UTC

jimmytidey wrote: post #189

morgante wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it's too useful as infrastructure to hand it over to some greedy jackasses. This is an extremely dubious claim and I don't see why everyone is so eager to support it. What exactly makes Twitter valuable infrastructure? What compelling service does it offer to people and society? What other things would stop working if Twitter were shut down? All I see is a bunch of people shouting at each other. Most people do not…

Twitter is a (I think very well designed) forum for public debate. Good systems for public debate are the precondition for democracy. In a democracy they are the infrastructure on which all other infrastructure depends. Every subsequent spending decision is influenced by them. If you turn off public debate nothing will break the next day, but in a decade most people's lives will be misery.

'Debate' in less than 140 characters, half of those being # and @ tags, is indeed a vibrant proof of a healthy democracy.

What's next? A well designed debate platform that allows only emojis? A well designed debate platform that allows only meme pictures?

Re: Twitter Is Expected to Field Bids This Week

#204

Post by mcgrath_sh » Wed, Oct 05, 2016, 7:59 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 agree about twitter and sports. For me, everyone who uses twitter and generally enjoys it talks about sports. A lot. Twitter is the best social media platform for discussing games and getting information about the game you are watching from teams, journalists, leagues, statisticians, and fellow fans. I'd wager 80% of my tweets are sports related.

Twitter is the best platform for discussion of a "live" event as it unfolds. These events include TV epidoes, news conferences, policitcal debates, games, etc. A user can see what a famous person thinks or follow other hardcore fans who have great knowledge of what they are watching. I have become friends with several people due to twitter and sports.

Facebook, Instagram, SnapChat, etc are not great for discussing something that is ongoing over the course of multiple hours. Twitter is. The ability to mute words and hashtags to avoid spoilers or certain subjects is super handy. In addition, one can follow multiple live events in a singular, timeline fashion. Twitter is very good at getting people to talk about live events. Its problem is that it is hard to see a place for it outside that, and it is hard to monotize that.

Re: Twitter Is Expected to Field Bids This Week

#205

Post by smacktoward » Wed, Oct 05, 2016, 8:10 PM UTC

sushid wrote: post #155

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.

This is hilarious to me. If you find something valuable, your proposal is to take it and have it "owned by the world?" And I thought our presidential candidate were bad.

It's not crazy, it happens sometimes with private businesses that grow into critical public infrastructure.

New York City's subway system is one example. It started out in the 1900s as a couple of private companies, Interborough Rapid Transit (IRT) and Brooklyn Rapid Transit (BRT). The lines these two companies operated suffered more and more over time from overcrowding, leading the city to establish a third, public system in the '30s, and then in 1940 to just buy out IRT and BRT and merge all three systems into the single, publicly-operated network that serves NYC today. (See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_New_York_City_S... for more on this.)

Re: Twitter Is Expected to Field Bids This Week

#206

Post by smacktoward » Wed, Oct 05, 2016, 8:20 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…

My proposal for them has always been simple: just charge for extra characters.

Look at Twitter for a moment the way game designers look at free-to-play mobile games. Whittling Tweets down to 140 characters is the sort of un-fun, repetitive process that a game designer would describe as a "grind" (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grinding_(video_gaming)). And free-to-play games have established that letting players buy their way out of having to grind is a completely workable business model.

So just let Twitter power users skip their way out of grinding to get their Tweets under the 140 character limit by letting them buy bags of extra characters, preferably at low enough prices to be attractive as an impulse buy. If you spend all day on Twitter, and you're faced with the need spend five minutes editing a tweet to get it down under the limit, being able to just pay ten cents for a bag of ten extra characters and get that five minutes of your life back might be very attractive! And from Twitter's perspective, those ten cents are more or less pure profit, since the marginal cost of shipping 150 bytes over the wire instead of 140 is next to nothing. Free users can keep on using Twitter for free, power users can become the "whales" that provide the revenue that keeps the lights on, Twitter makes money. Everybody wins.

Re: Twitter Is Expected to Field Bids This Week

#207

Post by crabasa » Wed, Oct 05, 2016, 8:21 PM UTC

iainmerrick wrote: post #153

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…

I absolutely agree with your sentiment, but how could they have become the "defacto messaging backbone" and made money at the same time? What should their business plan have been? It reminds me of Sun and Java. Sun built a really useful product, used by hundreds of thousands of developers, but it didn't make enough money to sustain the company. They tried opening it up and that just hurt them commercially.

I won't pretend to know how they should have monetized, that's what @jack is compensated richly to figure out. My point is that the chance to be the messaging backbone of the Internet was more valuable and a better use of Twitter's resources (human and financial capital) than the certainty of being defeated by Facebook.

Re: Twitter Is Expected to Field Bids This Week

#208

Post by mbesto » Wed, Oct 05, 2016, 8:22 PM UTC

downandout wrote: post #97

This will get downvotes here, because many HNers somehow see value in Twitter. But I'm actually surprised that many people would bid on Twitter at anywhere close to its current valuation of ~$17 billion. Here's one reason why: Go ask any major affiliate marketing network how they feel about Twitter traffic. Many of them have an outright ban on it - meaning it actually has negative value to their advertisers. It simpl…

Very curious to hear from the HN crowd - do people actually see high ROI on Twitter ads? I've personally conducted full scale Facebook ads for a consumer product company with great success (very positive ROI) but almost literally couldn't get anyone to buy product via Twitter ads. Where does that $2B in revenue come from!?

Re: Twitter Is Expected to Field Bids This Week

#209

Post by PavlovsCat » Wed, Oct 05, 2016, 8:22 PM UTC

jimmytidey wrote: post #138

paulmd wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Having looked at this in some detail, my feeling is that no federated solution can work. The reason is that the underlying architecture leaks through to the user experience in unacceptable ways. As soon as a user has to understand federation - at all - I believe the proposition is dead to most people. For example Diaspora's 'pods' are, I think, fatally confusing. (I think Zuckerberg realised this, which is why he don…

If it's not federated, it's not a solution. As for that being "too confusing" to people, well, you can't save everybody.

Re: Twitter Is Expected to Field Bids This Week

#210

Post by overcast » Wed, Oct 05, 2016, 8:23 PM UTC

jimmytidey wrote: post #189

morgante wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it's too useful as infrastructure to hand it over to some greedy jackasses. This is an extremely dubious claim and I don't see why everyone is so eager to support it. What exactly makes Twitter valuable infrastructure? What compelling service does it offer to people and society? What other things would stop working if Twitter were shut down? All I see is a bunch of people shouting at each other. Most people do not…

Twitter is a (I think very well designed) forum for public debate. Good systems for public debate are the precondition for democracy. In a democracy they are the infrastructure on which all other infrastructure depends. Every subsequent spending decision is influenced by them. If you turn off public debate nothing will break the next day, but in a decade most people's lives will be misery.

If Twitter's current intent is to make it a platform for debate. They make it awfully confusing place for any newcomers. A crummy character count, that forces everyone to speak in acronyms, hashtags, and shortened URL's. It's a miserable experience for any type of dialogue, with various overlays, and drill downs, that honestly gets me lost most of the time. TechCrunch summarized this well.

https://techcrunch.com/2016/09/19/twitters-new-simpler-rules...

"SIMPLE".