Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Twitter Is Expected to Field Bids This Week

wsj.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

211–220 of 249 posts

Re: Twitter Is Expected to Field Bids This Week

#211

Post by jimmytidey »

criddell wrote: post #192
jimmytidey wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Two thoughts: - How would you provide the functionality that hashtags do on the public timeline? - How would users know which nodes they could trust? I think email and Sms are pretty weird user experiences that have succeeded in part because there was no alternative.

Twitter is already a federation of servers and services. It doesn't seem outrageous to imagine another server or cluster of servers being owned by a second party.

I think we may be talking past each other here, what I mean is that federation must be strictly and absolutely invisible to users.

Perhaps I was wrong to say that federation is in principle ruled out, but I do think that it must be invisible to users. - Including namespacing usernames to nodes within the federation as with the @ sign in email.

I believe this is true in spite of the technical beauty of federated solutions, and it's exactly that beauty that's lured so many onto the rocks.

Re: Twitter Is Expected to Field Bids This Week

#213

Post by wslh »

rch wrote: post #144
wslh wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Companies are paying a lot, the problem is that you don't have a lower tier. Just to compare, in AdWords you can pay $ 5 if you want, you are not forced to have a budget of a thousands. AdWords was revolutionary in that aspect, before them you needed to have a budget for advertising in Yahoo or other networks. I think Twitter didn't want to deal with small customers, indeed nobody wants to operate small accounts but…

The problem with monetizing the Twitter stream is that you need rather a lot of data, often in real time, to do much of anything. So the minimum useful tier is accordingly expensive to provide.

You can summarize interesting information and charge for that.

Re: Twitter Is Expected to Field Bids This Week

#214

Post by richardthered »

jondubois wrote: post #88
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…

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).

I mostly use it like an RSS feed. I follow the sites/people that I'm interested in, and post rarely.

Re: Twitter Is Expected to Field Bids This Week

#215

Post by overcast »

rco8786 wrote: post #69
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.

> but pretty much no way to monetizing them. I don't understand why people keep saying this. Twitter has multiple billions of dollars in revenue from monetizing their users. Profitable? No. They built out a massive organization planning for user growth comparable to how fast Facebook was growing, but user growth stalled. There is a profitable business within Twitter, but someone has to be willing to do the gut job.

Canning a couple thousand employees would free up a couple hundred million I suspect.

Re: Twitter Is Expected to Field Bids This Week

#216

Post by cdubzzz »

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.

Perhaps an App Store style system for all that third party development?

Re: Twitter Is Expected to Field Bids This Week

#217

Post by remarkEon »

the_watcher wrote: post #108
this_user wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am not sure I would call what happens on Twitter discussions. It's a great platform for posting things that are easily misunderstood or taken out of context due to their brevity. Then someone starts a witch-hunt, which in turn sparks a counter-witch-hunt. In the end no one is any wiser, but everyone is little more bitter. I think the appeal of Twitter is feeling "in the loop" due to the real-time nature of the serv…

Plenty of what you mention is true and is a major problem with Twitter. That said, there remain some vibrant, niche Twitter communities where discussions do take place (the NBA comes to mind immediately)

Minor League Baseball as well. Speculation about scouting reports, and potential call-ups is really fun. I'm a huge baseball fan (as I imagine many here might be), and this kind of thing is just not talked about on SportsCenter and it adds a human element to The Game. Concur about the NBA. NBA-Twitter is awesome.

Re: Twitter Is Expected to Field Bids This Week

#219

Post by jimmytidey »

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.

I am, of course, not saying that Twitter is the only kind of public debate, or that public debate did not exist before Twitter.

I am saying that for millions of people Twitter is a unique way to join public debate. Personally, I have interacted with several public individuals who I couldn't conceive of contacting any other way. This is an example of two politics professors taking the time to explain something apparently well known in their circle to me:

https://twitter.com/Jimmytidey/status/757494127537905664

Where else would that happen?

If it does not suit you, fair enough. I find newspapers disinteresting, but I would prefer to live in a society that has them to one that does not. I would also prefer, as with Twitter, that their ownership structure was a little different (I'm in the UK).

I agree that Twitter has design flaws as a medium for public discussion, and I also believe that some of them could be alleviated if Twitter was run was by people with different incentives.

I myself am very happy with the character count, the truth is that the limiting factor is not how long a message you are permitted to write, but how long a message others will be inclined to read. I suspect Twitter is just being honest with us in this regard.

Certainly it is not the place to articulate a nuanced view. It is a place where you can find a unique audience.

Re: Twitter Is Expected to Field Bids This Week

#220

Post by Bedon292 »

mbesto wrote: post #208
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!?

I would suspect it might have something to do with promoted tweets and things which drive traffic to their twitter/website. These sites are paying for the traffic (which then earns them ad revenue) and seem to be happy with the results. I have seen very few ads for purchasable items on twitter, just lots of traffic driving.
Post reply on HN