21–30 of 95 posts
I've heard a lot about twitter's support for third party apps. I have never encountered one of these apps myself. When I see quotes like "the world of third-party developers", it suggests that there is a large number of applications somewhere that I'm missing. What are these apps?
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I very much doubt Twitter is interested in an acquisition.
Why do you say that? It is likely their only out at this point. Sell the network effect, let someone else try and monetize it.
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If you think all hiring requires is a 'challenge' I have a bridge to sell you.
Excuse me? My hacker friends and I have all discussed this at length and agreed that the largest motivator for us is working on hard problems. This is how some of us justify working for the military; they offer really tough problems to solve. Twitter is the same; if twitter offered me a job, I would practically move to the bay and live out of my jeep to do it.
Look, I understand the sentiment, but here's the thing.
Twitter only exists as we know it today because a lot of people have poured a lot of money into it. Without that money, Twitter would be an impossibility. It simply would not exist, at least not at anywhere near the scale it exists at today.
My guess is that, for the people who poured in all that money, "leaving a mark on humanity" was not the primary reason they opened their wallets. They opened their wallets because they expected to make more money by doing so. They were making investments, not charitable contributions. And at some increasingly near point, those people are going to want to see a return on their investments. That means that, barring an acquisition, Twitter needs to find a way to turn a (hopefully large, from the investors' viewpoint) profit -- and sooner rather than later.
Why would you ever have thought things would be otherwise? Twitter is a company. Companies that don't make money usually don't survive. The best case scenario is that they get bought out and operated as a vanity project by a deep-pocketed patron, the way a lot of magazines are. But a magazine is a much smaller and cheaper-to-run enterprise than a centralized, global real-time communications network. Whose pockets are deep enough to run Twitter at a loss indefinitely?
If you organize yourself as a for-profit corporation, and take on investors, at some point you have to bring in more money than you burn. Otherwise you will at some point have to scale back your ambitions, because you simply will not be able to afford them anymore.
Twitter, in other words, is meeting its destiny. Maybe that destiny is not to make as big a "mark on humanity" as people wish. But without all the money they took from those investors who are breathing down their necks now, Twitter would never have been able to scale up to where it is today at all. And that money came with the condition that Twitter would at some point figure out a way to pay it back, with interest.
That point is now.
Founded by a hacker-idealist who wanted to bring people and technology together like never before. The experiment worked wonderfully at first as millions of people flocked to Facebook's revolutionary platform from around the world. Soon, questions of profitability came into the picture, forcing executives to compromise ethics for additional revenue. Chaos erupted and millions began to question their loyalty and wonder about their safety/privacy. Over time, the platform has become overgrown with ads (that are rarely clicked), spam (that embarrasses it's victims), and scandals (that frighten even the most loyal users). Fear of extinction due to unexpected competition has pushed Facebook to become even more aggressive by inflating the value of the company to astronomical proportions, acquihiring dozens of startups, and raising billions in an IPO. Today, the future of Facebook is in the air. No one knows how the variables will compound and what this corporate gene sequence will evolve into...
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Seems like the only logical reason they are doing this is because they are in the start of an acquisition. They have to prove some type of revenue stream (ads) and restricting users to the twitter site/app will help them guarantee the made up numbers.
I very much doubt Twitter is interested in an acquisition.
In the old days, I'd guess Yahoo! would be in the running, but since they have a history of buying popular sites and then letting them wither, I hope Meyer isn't going to fall for that again.
Dusk approaches when Twitter sheds its desire to leave a mark on humanity Look, I understand the sentiment, but here's the thing. Twitter only exists as we know it today because a lot of people have poured a lot of money into it. Without that money, Twitter would be an impossibility. It simply would not exist, at least not at anywhere near the scale it exists at today. My guess is that, for the people who poured in a…
Yes, that's reality. Yes, it's unfortunate and we wish it wasn't so.
I love Twitter the medium. I wish Twitter the company would find a way to monetize without taking this route. I like to think that I would have done something different in their position, but who knows.
Dusk approaches when Twitter sheds its desire to leave a mark on humanity Look, I understand the sentiment, but here's the thing. Twitter only exists as we know it today because a lot of people have poured a lot of money into it. Without that money, Twitter would be an impossibility. It simply would not exist, at least not at anywhere near the scale it exists at today. My guess is that, for the people who poured in a…
You don't need to have $1Billion dollars in financing to offer a service like this -- this is what the likes of app.net are teaching us.
A $50million Twitter could have "easily" sustained it's vision/objective without having to cannibalise it's entire ecosystem.
However someone promised the moon to a bunch of financiers and now they have to deliver above and beyond of what Twitter could have been, or should have just been.
As far I'm concerned that is the story of Twitter, a company that took the money and ran.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I very much doubt Twitter is interested in an acquisition.
Why do you say that? It is likely their only out at this point. Sell the network effect, let someone else try and monetize it.
Dusk approaches when Twitter sheds its desire to leave a mark on humanity Look, I understand the sentiment, but here's the thing. Twitter only exists as we know it today because a lot of people have poured a lot of money into it. Without that money, Twitter would be an impossibility. It simply would not exist, at least not at anywhere near the scale it exists at today. My guess is that, for the people who poured in a…
There have been previous, less successful iterations of the same common idea. Twitter hit critical mass in terms of it's user base and has created neat and unique nuances that make it's version of human-human communication on the web innovative and fun and successful. Kudos to them. It's the social network du jor for fast communication. But there will eventually be other iterations in the future. Some more successful, some less. Perhaps some new incarnations from Twitter itself as they evolve their product over the next decade.
If Twitter has a "mark", it's that they created a way to "flatten the world of communication" and take discussions to a realm where everything and everyone are drawing on the same board at the same time.
But in the end, these are all services that facilitate human interactions that have existed for thousands of years. We've just taken those interactions and put them all on an even plane at the same time, and exposed them in a way that is amazingly accessible.
So when we talk about "Twitter changing the world", I get confused. It's always humans that change the world, we're just using a different vehicle and techniques to get there. So... Rhetorical flourishes and hyperbole aside... How was Twitter changing the world, and how is it not anymore...?