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Income < expenses.
Were the APIs taken away?
So effectively development stopped in 2014 and it's on maintenance mode since then.
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…
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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.
Edit: which is my slightly harsh way of saying dreams are easy, but doing is what counts.
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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 difficu…
I can follow the thoughts of people without having to see most or all of their thoughts. I can follow people without becoming committed to their antics.
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!?
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How would you monetise the backbone? At least with the website/app they can use advertising.
GPS is out there for anybody to use for free. It's incredibly useful and the value to the economy of having that there as a utility anybody can use is huge. Perhaps Twitter as a utility could be just as valuable. Maybe it doesn't need to be monetized.
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GPS is out there for anybody to use for free. It's incredibly useful and the value to the economy of having that there as a utility anybody can use is huge. Perhaps Twitter as a utility could be just as valuable. Maybe it doesn't need to be monetized.
Sure, just convince the US military to use Twitter to drop bombs on people.
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…
Twitter is hurting affiliate marketing networks? I would say it's the other way around.
Semi-offtopic: this is what the front page of Twitter looks like for me. https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-s5LeMVvmcJ0/V_UeJYgxG6I/A... There's this and two more tweets, in rotation. They are three sports-related Tweets from two years ago, with that shit image quality, and what's even more amusing: since I'm based in Spain, they believe I'm interested in Argentinian football, probably because I speak the same langua…
https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/sjFY1xcd8zjgSkpU_3AF1UP7vm...