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Twitter's new timeline feature

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Re: Twitter's new timeline feature

#121
post #27

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Yeah, this seems like it might be useful for people who follow loads of accounts. I follow about 40, and I want to read literally everything all of them say. So long as it doesn't fuck up that use-case (e.g. by remaining optional), I'm fine with it.

That's what lists are for. I follow over 400 people but have them segmented into lists and its never unmanageable for me.

Yeah, Twitter lists are what has kept Twitter sane for me. Coupled with a decent twitter client (I use TweetBot on iOS) that supports lists in an easy to use way.

I actually use Facebook the same way too.

Re: Twitter's new timeline feature

#122
post #68

I think twitter would be better off embracing lists. I follow relatively few people because of the firehose effect. My attitude towards the people I follow is that I like seeing their tweets, but I don't really care if I miss them. News would be a good example of this. It's great to get news or sports tweets in the moment, but they're probably not tweets I'm going to go back through later to find out what happened. O…

I second lists. I can view lists easily with TweetDeck, but organizing lists is a chore. How about themed lists & channels based on category? Make a channel called Fashion or a channel called Movies and it would more or less operate like a subreddit with moderators. I think it would be more engaging. There's too much self managing and noise right now with Twitter. I pretty much have to have a separate account in orde…

It's crazy how hard it can be to follow conversations on twitter, and seems like a huge loss.

To do better, I think twitter should look at how Sina Weibo does it. Weibo started out as a complete rip-off, but wound up coming up with some very useful ideas before zombie accounts and government censorship ran it all into the ground.

Re: Twitter's new timeline feature

#123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you considered using a client that doesn't stay scrolled all the way to the top (TweetBot has a toggle for "pin to top" for example)? I would find what you're describing pretty much a deal breaker in my use of twitter, so I use this feature and literally read every tweet from everyone I follow. When I open twitter (and it syncs between desktop/mobile), I'm at the same spot I was when I opened it last.

That would help with the scrolling issue, but it would still force me to read through tons of irrelevant tweets to find the few interesting ones...

True but, in my opinion, inherent to Twitter. Just because some algorithm decides some tweet is 'important' doesn't mean I'll agree :)

Re: Twitter's new timeline feature

#124
post #97

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I actually think Twitter's "while you were away" does a great job finding things I care about.

For me, the "while you were away" feature shows me things I don't care about. I do indicate so by clicking the "X" to train their engine - but it hasn't shown me anything worth caring about. For example, I really care about funny cats. My timeline is 85% cats, and I retweet funny cat pictures 65% of the time. However, the while you were away feature shows me things like opinions about voting, or holidays, or what co-…

> However, the while you were away feature shows me things like opinions about voting, or holidays, or what co-workers are doing and saying, etc - Yah - it's in my feed, but I literally don't care. I spend 8 hours a day with my co-workers and hear all their tweets first hand.

Mute them on Twitter if the unfollowing isn't socially acceptable?

Re: Twitter's new timeline feature

#125

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I left facebook for this exact reason. the platform has diminished so greatly that it's now virtually unusable to me.I'm really not sure what to equate the experience to, it feels like trying to read a newspaper that is all ads. It's all vapid useless sales instead of meaningful interpersonal connections over long distances... the way it started. I fear twitter is not far behind.

Yes. I totally hope Twitter follows in the footsteps of the $200B+ Facebook.

First of all, market capitalisation is only the measure of the number of outstanding shares multiplied by the current price. You are absolutely kidding yourself if you think that all the FB shares in existence could be sold at the current NASDAQ closing price.

Secondly, to achieve the current $296Bn market capitalisation, investors are rating the company at sixty-six times 2015 earnings. That means that FB better be growing at an obscene rate for the very long term, because as we say in the market, FB is "priced for perfection". Any hiccups in earnings or signs of faltering growth and investors will be just as quick to de-rate the FB price as they have been for TWTR. So it can be "worth" $296Bn one day and significantly less than that the next.

Re: Twitter's new timeline feature

#126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For me, the "while you were away" feature shows me things I don't care about. I do indicate so by clicking the "X" to train their engine - but it hasn't shown me anything worth caring about. For example, I really care about funny cats. My timeline is 85% cats, and I retweet funny cat pictures 65% of the time. However, the while you were away feature shows me things like opinions about voting, or holidays, or what co-…

> However, the while you were away feature shows me things like opinions about voting, or holidays, or what co-workers are doing and saying, etc - Yah - it's in my feed, but I literally don't care. I spend 8 hours a day with my co-workers and hear all their tweets first hand. Mute them on Twitter if the unfollowing isn't socially acceptable?

I don't want to mute them because I follow their tweets and timelines! I wouldn't hesitate to block/ban if I didn't find them interesting.

I just don't need to be reminded about what they did "while I'm away" - by definition when I'm away from Twitter I'm most likely working and talking to them directly! And often I helped them write/make/instigate the tweet that is getting so much traffic that twitter emerges it as "something hot" from their account.

I get that I want to follow them and don't want to mute them - just that the feature is extraneous for some types of tweets (and some classes of twitter accounts) - for example, if I follow a stock tweet - one that tweets pricing alerts for example, I don't need to know 10+ hours later "what important things they are up to" because by definition, that stock tweet is no longer valid (trading day is only the length of the working day).

And even if I wanted historical updates, I can just go back to their timeline and/or do a search on the stock exchange symbol.

Like I said, if they allowed users to filter out or filter in - or use the List feature - which a large % of twitter users know about and use, it'd be more useful.

Re: Twitter's new timeline feature

#127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. I totally hope Twitter follows in the footsteps of the $200B+ Facebook.

First of all, market capitalisation is only the measure of the number of outstanding shares multiplied by the current price. You are absolutely kidding yourself if you think that all the FB shares in existence could be sold at the current NASDAQ closing price. Secondly, to achieve the current $296Bn market capitalisation, investors are rating the company at sixty-six times 2015 earnings. That means that FB better be…

[deleted]

Re: Twitter's new timeline feature

#128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. I totally hope Twitter follows in the footsteps of the $200B+ Facebook.

First of all, market capitalisation is only the measure of the number of outstanding shares multiplied by the current price. You are absolutely kidding yourself if you think that all the FB shares in existence could be sold at the current NASDAQ closing price. Secondly, to achieve the current $296Bn market capitalisation, investors are rating the company at sixty-six times 2015 earnings. That means that FB better be…

Suppose your claim is true. Suppose in other words that it would be impossible to sell all the FB shares at the current closing price. How would that be an argument against the usefulness of comparing Twitter's market cap to FB's?

No one has ever bought a company whose market cap is as big as FB's currently is -- let alone bought one for cash. But publicly-traded companies with caps in the billions have been bought in all-cash transactions, and the experience there is that the buyer usually ends up paying more than the market cap right before the investing public starts to become aware of the attempt to buy the company. But even if that were not true, what relevance would it have for whether or not it is a good idea to use market-cap data to compare publicly-traded companies and their products and strategies?

Does market cap not remain a good estimate of the future expected earnings of the company?

Re: Twitter's new timeline feature

#129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

First of all, market capitalisation is only the measure of the number of outstanding shares multiplied by the current price. You are absolutely kidding yourself if you think that all the FB shares in existence could be sold at the current NASDAQ closing price. Secondly, to achieve the current $296Bn market capitalisation, investors are rating the company at sixty-six times 2015 earnings. That means that FB better be…

Suppose your claim is true. Suppose in other words that it would be impossible to sell all the FB shares at the current closing price. How would that be an argument against the usefulness of comparing Twitter's market cap to FB's? No one has ever bought a company whose market cap is as big as FB's currently is -- let alone bought one for cash. But publicly-traded companies with caps in the billions have been bought i…

I would first point out that it is not really a claim but a simply observable fact for anyone with a brokerage account, check the available market depth at any given price to see how many shares can be sold into the available bid before having to sell at the next lowest available bid in the auction.

The parent did not make a claim that comparing the market cap of TWTR to that of FB is useful, nor am I attempting to make an "argument" in the opposite direction. The goal was to point out that measuring success by an extremely volatile marginal price which rates the stock at sixty-six times earnings is neither accurate nor useful. A little surprised that my attempt to provide useful information earned a handful of downvotes compared to the parents throwaway sentence.

If one honestly believes that market cap data is useful for comparing publicly traded companies in anything but the broadest sense, then one must believe that yesterday TWTR was "worth" 2.5% more of FB than today (judging by daily fluctuations in the TWTR:FB ratio). That is observably not the case, the only difference between that day and the previous is that the company made some information public, no facts at the coalface actually changed. Value of equity is decided over the very long term life of that equity.

As for your final question, one need only look back in history to see that the aggregate marginal daily price and hence market capitalisation is often (and especially in tech) not a good estimate of future expected earnings of a company. The market almost always overshoots, both to the upside and downside, largely depending on available liquidity.

Re: Twitter's new timeline feature

#130
post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I understand your concern, but this seems to contradict reality... According to this article, only a small percentage of your followers actually see your Tweets: http://marketingland.com/facebook-twitter-impressions-90878

I think there are 2 types of twitter users. The first type follows many accounts and skim through the tweets with no effort to go through all of them. This feature is a Godsend for them. The second type of twitter users, like myself, follow a short list of people, and we actively curate this list so that we can read all the tweets in our timeline. I have just realized that it is in Twitter's best interest if everyone…

Back in 2009 the developer of Tweetie got so frustrated with the second group he made this site:

https://web.archive.org/web/20090218122324/http://twitterisn...

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