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Twitter says it could turn first-ever profit

reuters.com

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Re: Twitter says it could turn first-ever profit

#81

Post by pgwhalen »

baddox wrote: post #41
randomblob wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also: What data is being bought? Publicly available information bundled up so there's not hassle with gathering it would be ok IMO. Private data would spark my interest as well. They can't be selling DMs, can't they?

They used to sell the “firehose,” which I believe was a real-time feed of every single tweet (something not available from the normal API). I don’t know if that still exists.

They do to some extent, there was a great talk at Strange Loop this year about the architecture of that system.

Re: Twitter says it could turn first-ever profit

#82

Post by jakelarkin »

c3534l wrote: post #60
samstave wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, we know that twitter maintains "celebrity handlers" --- who is on the Trump handler team?

Someone did a linguistic analysis and demonstrated that there are two writers of Trump's tweets. Trump's were all the crazy ones, his handler's were all of the moderate ones and the ones that walked back what was said previously.

its more or less well known that Dan Scavino, Trump's social media dir, posts to Trump's twitter

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2017/10...

Re: Twitter says it could turn first-ever profit

#83

Post by jack6e »

jonknee wrote: post #65
jack6e wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if FBI/Secret Service swoop in to prevent the President's data from being sold in these cases. Or if they restrict its use/sale by other platforms as well.

He's made it clear that he values his phone more than he does national security, they don't have the ability to intercede.

I am not saying they would take his phone or remove his account, but that they would restrict Twitter from using/selling his data.

Re: Twitter says it could turn first-ever profit

#84

Post by jsonne »

radiorental wrote: post #77
stingraycharles wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They’ve acquired the company Gnip a few years ago, which then became the exclusive reseller of Twitter firehose data. Their biggest competitor is Datasift, which has similar exclusive deals with Facebook and Linkedin. There’s an incredibly big market here, with customers ranging from social media analytics companies to investment firms.

TIL marketing to bots is a thing. /s

Like any other media platform there's advantages and disadvantages. Twitter is fantastic if you're trying to reach media professionals or developers in my experience.

Re: Twitter says it could turn first-ever profit

#85

Post by Dylan16807 »

lotso wrote: post #56
baddox wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you mean it’s not easy to define ? It shouldn’t be difficult to calculate any particular metric going forward, but it’s inportant to define what it means to be “active.”

Calculating these metrics at scale is not trivial.

In real time, yes.

But the user database should already have backups, importing those backups into an analysis server should be easy, and running queries like that on an analysis server should be easy.

Counting messages, or users with X messages, etc. is also largely a function of whether your backup/restore system works. But this time you do it in chunks.

Re: Twitter says it could turn first-ever profit

#86

Post by jjeaff »

a13n wrote: post #47
ProAm wrote: post #3

They would be profitable in an instant if they'd get rid of half their employees? Im not sure why they need SO many people for Twitter. I believe they have over 4000, they could easily get by with 1000

Oh boy, another Hacker News commenter with zero experience running a large corporation telling experienced folks how they should run a large corporation. Better yet, with no explanation for why. The sheer arrogance.

Although few have any experience operating at that scale, one can make comparisons.

I do find it curious that WhatsApp was operating at a much larger scale in terms of users and messages processed when they were sold to Facebook. And they had 55 employees.

So obviously you don't need 4,000 employees for the technology at this scale. I'm not sure what in the world the other 3,945 employees are doing though.

Re: Twitter says it could turn first-ever profit

#88

Post by derefr »

cpeterso wrote: post #18
nharada wrote: post #14

"may become profitable for the first time next quarter after ... ramping up deals to sell its data to other companies" Cool, so any indication on who is buying all my data?

"ramping up deals to sell its data to other companies, which could help to break its reliance on advertising for revenue." i.e. "we don't know how to profit from this user data ourselves, so we'll sell it to people who know how."

More like, “we’ve analyzed our data to death and know it’s not worth beans, but we don’t have to tell anyone else that, and there’s a sucker born every minute who thinks they can beat the stock market by squinting at this-or-that data firehose just right, so we’re happy to charge them for the attempt.”

Re: Twitter says it could turn first-ever profit

#89

Post by bayonetz »

stingraycharles wrote: post #61
nharada wrote: post #14

"may become profitable for the first time next quarter after ... ramping up deals to sell its data to other companies" Cool, so any indication on who is buying all my data?

They’ve acquired the company Gnip a few years ago, which then became the exclusive reseller of Twitter firehose data. Their biggest competitor is Datasift, which has similar exclusive deals with Facebook and Linkedin. There’s an incredibly big market here, with customers ranging from social media analytics companies to investment firms.

When they bought GNIP they ended their partnership with DataSift. It was a major blow to DataSift. It was a shrewd move on Twitter's part. My company switched over to using GNIP and our DataSift sales rep told us tons of other customers switched too and that he was leaving because of it.

Re: Twitter says it could turn first-ever profit

#90

Post by rainythunder »

c3534l wrote: post #60
samstave wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, we know that twitter maintains "celebrity handlers" --- who is on the Trump handler team?

Someone did a linguistic analysis and demonstrated that there are two writers of Trump's tweets. Trump's were all the crazy ones, his handler's were all of the moderate ones and the ones that walked back what was said previously.

Trump sends his from his phone, and the other person/people use the desktop version of Twitter.
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