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Twitter Falls Below IPO Price as Concerns Mount Over CEO, Growth

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Re: Twitter Falls Below IPO Price as Concerns Mount Over CEO, Growth

#141

Post by mahyarm »

nkozyra wrote: post #117
teaneedz wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's what makes Twitter, well Twitter. I love the 140 char limit because it enforces brevity and aids quick consumption. That's me.

But often it encourages abusing the limitation by splitting long(er)-form content into multiple tweets. I agree that it's so fundamental to the brand and Twitter's identity that it might cause a lot of problems if it were reverted, but frankly it's completely arbitrary. If you want to produce 140 (or less) content, you can do that without a hard limit. People hack around it because it's such a ubiquitous platform, bu…

It creates a barrier to doing long form content although, encouraging brevity. The amount of multi-part tweets are low compared to the average tweet.

Re: Twitter Falls Below IPO Price as Concerns Mount Over CEO, Growth

#142

Post by sloanesturz »

I feel like every three weeks I see an article like this on Hacker News and a gazillion good ideas about how to improve Twitter's service.

At the same time, there have been no core changes to Twitter in the last several years.

Is Twitter the only company in the Valley where every engineer isn't checking Hacker News every few hours!?

Re: Twitter Falls Below IPO Price as Concerns Mount Over CEO, Growth

#143

Post by benwoodward »

ThomPete wrote: post #97

Twitters main problem is that it's a protocol more than an actual content platform. What they need is to get more content onto their platform and the only way to really do that is to allow for richers posts which means loose the 140 character limit. I know a lot of people will say "but thats what so great about twitter" and I would claim that it isn't, they just think it is. The short tweets and the asyncronous chara…

Totally agree. I stopped using Twitter because I got so tired of rewording everything to fit into 140 characters. The most interesting people on Twitter tend to use multiple tweets to broadcast one message, and join them up with "...", but when I see that I'd rather they had just written a short blog post and linked it.

In my opinion, what Twitter is most useful for is sharing links and short updates to prompt action from your followers, like reading your new blog post. And because of this, it's not the kind of place where you want to spend a lot of time, because the content isn't that engaging, it's just the news ticker that you scroll through for 5 minutes and leave.

Re: Twitter Falls Below IPO Price as Concerns Mount Over CEO, Growth

#144

Post by resu_nimda »

vacri wrote: post #115
shostack wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've long wondered this. I haven't followed the evolution of Twitter's homepage, but I'd be really shocked if they hadn't tested this to death. The thing is, this keeps causing me to miss moments to engage with them. Someone posts a link, I find something on a website, etc. that go to Twitter? BAM! SIGN-UP NOW OR LEAVE! While I do of course have an account, if I were a non-user, I'd keep thinking "why would I sign-up…

> Someone posts a link, I find something on a website, etc. that go to Twitter? BAM! SIGN-UP NOW OR LEAVE! If they force you to sign up, they get more user data for the pool. I don't think that the slice of their market they're losing out on by this is very big. > Lowering the barrier to entry for that is critical. The barrier to entry for content creation on twitter is absurdly low. It's not the login process. It's…

Anecdotally, I've never bothered to sign up for Twitter, and the experience for logged-out users has contributed to that. Instead of thinking "wow all my friends and important people are on there so I guess I'll sign up," I think "well this isn't very engaging, but I still technically got the content I came for, so I'm not really incentivized to go further."

And I disagree in general - login processes are often a huge barrier. People don't want to create accounts everywhere; it used to be cool and novel, now it's a burden.

Re: Twitter Falls Below IPO Price as Concerns Mount Over CEO, Growth

#145

Post by Pyxl101 »

adventured wrote: post #65
therobot24 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

but would a search engine approach be any more effective at conversions? I use google and wikipedia, but it doesn't mean i have a blog or edit.

That prompts a question as to whether Twitter can best grow its future value more through user signups / conversions, or through maximizing one-way consumption as a broadcast medium. I read the nytimes.com all the time. They have no idea who I am and never will. I'll never signup for an account. They still get to feed me ads. I consume ESPN one-way. They have no idea who I am and never will. It's worth $50 +/- billio…

> I read the nytimes.com all the time. They have no idea who I am and never will. I'll never signup for an account. They still get to feed me ads.

How do you know you're not being tracked through cookies on other sites that you have logged into, or ad networks that interact with those sites? When I load nytimes.com and view the network trace, I see about 50 different domains appear there:

  pagead2.googlesyndication.com
  s.tagsrvcs.com
  .fls.doubleclick.net
  px.dynamicyield.com
  beacon.krxd.net
  pixel.tapad.com
  c1.rfihub.net
  tags.w55c.net
  p.rfihub.com
  secure.quantserve.com
  d.xp1.ru4.com
  ...
I'll stop there. I assume that these sites can track my persona whether or not I'm logged in, and probably with a pretty good chance even if I use an incognito window.

Re: Twitter Falls Below IPO Price as Concerns Mount Over CEO, Growth

#146

Post by firebones »

panabee wrote: post #125

Twitter owns unique and compelling content. Lots. Yes, there is lots of junk, but there is also lots of junk on the web. The challenge is surfacing and distributing great content, and this is where Twitter should focus: maximizing reach and curating content. Instead of forcing users to come to Twitter, Twitter should go wherever users are. Bring Twitter’s amazing content to them, wherever users are, through partners…

Facebook fell out of favor after its IPO, so some of this seems like the periodicity for Twitter is similar, just stretched out much longer and more attenuated due to the lower market cap and lower rung on the ladder.

Your comment that Twitter owns unique and compelling content: I view unique and compelling content as a scarce resource. Growth rate in the boring tail perhaps means less if they're cornering the market on the compelling blurb real estate.

Twitter as a REIT, where the real estate is focused attention on compelling content? Are The Donald's FB posts featured on the networks nightly?

The nightmare scenario for Twitter is that they've stumbled into a Craigslist-style niche of providing incredible, essential value that can't be monetized in proportion to the value it actually provides.

Re: Twitter Falls Below IPO Price as Concerns Mount Over CEO, Growth

#147

Post by harlanlewis »

sloanesturz wrote: post #142

I feel like every three weeks I see an article like this on Hacker News and a gazillion good ideas about how to improve Twitter's service. At the same time, there have been no core changes to Twitter in the last several years. Is Twitter the only company in the Valley where every engineer isn't checking Hacker News every few hours!?

This exactly captures why Twitter is so disappointing.

From my normal user perspective (not advertising, not a celebrity...) they've never been an internally innovative company - @mentions and retweets are community inventions, the best clients for niche, power, and general use have always been 3rd party, and after stumbling onto a private messaging hit they shot DMs behind the woodshed just before the world went wild for whatsapp and snapchat. The community continues to come up with interesting ideas, never to be implemented. There's no doubt Twitter has stellar engineers. It's strategy that needs to be externalized. A shame they've spoiled so many developer relationships.

Re: Twitter Falls Below IPO Price as Concerns Mount Over CEO, Growth

#148

Post by pbreit »

therobot24 wrote: post #50
ohitsdom wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This. I get that they want sign-ups, but it's hard to sell the service with that page.

but would a search engine approach be any more effective at conversions? I use google and wikipedia, but it doesn't mean i have a blog or edit.

Search should be part of it. But they could create a pretty compelling logged out page of trending topics.

Re: Twitter Falls Below IPO Price as Concerns Mount Over CEO, Growth

#149

Post by amenghra »

mikegioia wrote: post #29

To me the problem with Twitter lies solely with what Twitter's logged-out homepage looks like. I don't know what it's trying to be but asking me to sign up, browse categories (?), and read top celebrity posts is not it. Why is logged-out Twitter not a search engine? They have up-to-the-second thoughts from their users about everything and it's the first place I go when a site is down, or some news story is breaking.…

The question (for Twitter) is why are people like you hitting their homepage logged-out instead of logged-in? You gain growth by getting people to try your service, you build value by offering something that brings people back continuously.

Re: Twitter Falls Below IPO Price as Concerns Mount Over CEO, Growth

#150

Post by nitrogen »

amenghra wrote: post #149
mikegioia wrote: post #29

To me the problem with Twitter lies solely with what Twitter's logged-out homepage looks like. I don't know what it's trying to be but asking me to sign up, browse categories (?), and read top celebrity posts is not it. Why is logged-out Twitter not a search engine? They have up-to-the-second thoughts from their users about everything and it's the first place I go when a site is down, or some news story is breaking.…

The question (for Twitter) is why are people like you hitting their homepage logged-out instead of logged-in? You gain growth by getting people to try your service, you build value by offering something that brings people back continuously.

Why should it matter whether someone is logged out or logged in? If the service is valuable, they don't need an account to keep them coming back.
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