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Twitter Is Expected to Field Bids This Week

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Re: Twitter Is Expected to Field Bids This Week

#221

Post by ars »

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.

> and made money at the same time

The ecosystem would be a loss leader, simply for the purpose of having lots of market share.

They would make money on their main product.

Same as how google runs all sorts of services without making money on them, simply for the purpose of expanding online usage.

It's basically a variant of the Freemium model.

Re: Twitter Is Expected to Field Bids This Week

#222

Post by remarkEon »

mc32 wrote: post #14
w1ntermute wrote: post #3

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

I have difficulty imagining Disney being any better, so I'm curious to hear an argument for Disney.

ESPN (owned by Disney) subs are sliding. Have been for a while. I imagine that, given how the clusters of traffic on Twitter can be pretty dense around sports that there could be some integration there. Second, Disney has a pretty massive property book right now (there's, I think, either a Star Wars or MCU movie coming out every year until sometime into the 2020s) so maybe they could view Twitter as a sort of natural channel to deliver that content?

Best I could do.

Re: Twitter Is Expected to Field Bids This Week

#224

Post by omouse »

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.

https://boingboing.net/2016/10/04/proposal-turn-twitter-into...

It can happen, co-operatives are a viable business model. My bank is a co-operative and they work for their member-owners.

Re: Twitter Is Expected to Field Bids This Week

#225

Post by bufordsharkley »

morgante wrote: post #127
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.

> 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…

Social networks are in practice a natural monopoly. Having the operation of the natural monopoly pass be handled by the state is one solution.

I think another solution is for the state to force the operator of the social network to keep its APIs open. (It's anti-competitive to do otherwise, would be the argument.)

I think it's interesting that there's a Wiki page about this issue.[0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_media_as_a_public_utili...

Re: Twitter Is Expected to Field Bids This Week

#226

Post by criddell »

jimmytidey wrote: post #211
criddell wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 solut…

I don't think the namespace issue is as big of a deal as you seem to think it is. People are used to dealing with namespaces when they make phone calls, send emails, send a letter, get a license plate, or go to a website.

Re: Twitter Is Expected to Field Bids This Week

#227

Post by jimmytidey »

Nadya wrote: post #102
oldmanjay wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm endlessly amused by the attitude people get over websites they like. I'm not sure what your personal argument for forcing twitter to be a utility is, but I'm sure it would make me laugh. Care to let me know?

My issue with Twitter is people need to learn how to take things into their own hands - even if it means at their own expense. Realistically, this is impractical for most people, especially the technically illiterate or those too poor to pay for hosting (even if it is only for personal use, instead of being open to a public) Twitter will never realistically be a utility. But there can be an open and distributed repla…

Wasn't aware of this - will check out...

Re: Twitter Is Expected to Field Bids This Week

#228

Post by disgruntledphd2 »

downandout wrote: post #151
disgruntledphd2 wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Means (and typically last-click based means at that) are surprisingly poor summaries of distributions. Even if the average for Twitter users is low, there are probably pockets of value for particular services. These are potentially not the kinds of customers these affiliate networks are interested in. Your Android point is rather different, given the wide disparity of Android devices. If 80% of Android devices are wo…

>Your Android point is rather different, given the wide disparity of Android devices. I disagree that it's different. Of course there are pockets of both value and worthlessness everywhere, but overall the LTV of an Android user to developers and advertisers is a small fraction of that of an ioS user, and a Twitter user is worth (to advertisers) an even smaller fraction of the value of a Facebook user. At scale, aver…

I don't think its efficient, just easy. It makes very little sense though. Do you attribute which beer you drink to the sign outside the bar?

I think that its difficult to assess your premise under a last-click model, to be honest. When you look at the history of advertising, its very difficult to believe that a direct response (measurable by click) is actually the whole thing.

I'm pretty sure I've never clicked on a Coca-Cola ad, but I have bought a lot of their product over the years.

I mean, conditional on your experience with the value of Twitter users (for a particular set of clients/services) and a last-click model, I don't disagree with you, I just think that such a view of advertising leaves an awfully large amount of stuff out.

Full disclosure: mobile attribution is hard, there is not standard or even dominant way of tracking views there (i believe) and so for some mobile-heavy/only advertisers better attribution methods are just a pipe dream at this point.

Re: Twitter Is Expected to Field Bids This Week

#229

Post by jimmytidey »

tootie wrote: post #200
jimmytidey wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't sound like you have a particularly open mind on this one, but I always address this question when it comes up on Hackner News because it's something I have strong feelings about. I'm not going to defend Twitter being a utility (which the parent comment also doesn't mention) but I will say that in general, it's very clear to me we haven't worked out what kind of institutions can best deliver services in the…

I would strongly dispute that. Twitter has that much public value. Relativley few people use for critical information. It's a default option for broad communication, but it's hardly the only one.

It was the key source of info for me during brexit.

I'm told that in Afghanistan it played (plays?) a key role in for aid agencies.

Re: Twitter Is Expected to Field Bids This Week

#230

Post by [deleted] »

Bedon292 wrote: post #220
mbesto wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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