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Twitter is the Benjamin Button of startups.

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Re: Twitter is the Benjamin Button of startups.

#31

Post by gavinlynch »

OzzyB wrote: post #28
smacktoward wrote: post #24

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, but the problem with Twitter is they took too much money. 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…

1) How do you know how much money it takes or does not take for Twitter to offer it's service?

2) Don't you think it's a little early to compare app.net and twitter? App.net is in it's infancy and is nowhere near the product twitter is

3) What could Twitter have been exactly? How did closing a few API's off prevent it from getting there?

4) Have you ever imagined that perhaps your vision for Twitter and Twitter's vision for Twitter just do not mesh?

Re: Twitter is the Benjamin Button of startups.

#32

Post by smacktoward »

OzzyB wrote: post #28
smacktoward wrote: post #24

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, but the problem with Twitter is they took too much money. 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…

I have no idea if Twitter is over-funded or not, but App.net has yet to have to service anywhere near the level of simultaneous traffic that Twitter deals with daily. App.net services 20,000 users (http://thenextweb.com/socialmedia/2012/09/07/off-slow-start-...); Twitter services 140 million (https://business.twitter.com/en/basics/what-is-twitter/). Twitter went through severe growing pains to reach the point where it could handle that much traffic; there's no reason to believe App.net won't have to go through similar issues if/as it grows.

Any centralized system that has to support tens or hundreds of millions of users in real time is going to be seriously expensive to operate. There may well be a point at which it's simply economically infeasible to do it without splitting the expense into tiny slices borne by lots of different parties, the way we do for email.

Re: Twitter is the Benjamin Button of startups.

#33

Post by shadowmatter »

blhack wrote: post #18
akkartik wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think there's a faction of engineers who want to work on interesting (which can be hard) problems, and those who want to work on interesting products.

I believe this is demonstrated clearly by the jobs pages for both Apple and Google. From Apple:

* Every detail matters… It matters all of the time. That’s how we do things at Apple. The result is some of the best-loved products in the world.

* Simplicity isn’t simple... It means rethinking every customer experience until the clutter has fallen away — until all that remains is what’s essential, useful, and beautiful. That might be a new product feature that delights even die-hard fans.

From Google, specifically an interview with Google employees about work there:

* ”... love to work on challenging projects”

* ”... love being faced with problems that were not ever solved before”

* ”... you hear people talking about algorithms and coding and programming languages”

* ”... it was just a pleasure being interviewed by smart people and being given a lot of puzzling questions”

I discussed this in a blog post I wrote which you can find here: http://mgp.github.com/2012/02/13/problems-and-products.html

I used to work at Google, and I joined there during a period when I wanted to work on interesting (i.e. hard) problems. I left to work on interesting products.

Re: Twitter is the Benjamin Button of startups.

#35

Post by MartinCron »

rblion wrote: post #25

Facebook is the Jurassic Park of startups. 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 million…

It's a good story, but I think you're remembering both the plot details and the themes of Jurassic Park differently than I am.

Re: Twitter is the Benjamin Button of startups.

#36

Post by joejohnson »

From the comments on Google+:

"Very true. Along the same lines, Google+ is the Major League Soccer of social networks. Other countries have very successful soccer leagues that happened organically. The US tried to manufacture a soccer league, and it spent a ton of money in doing so. It so happens that the most talented athletes in the country prefer sports that are already popular. The most interesting people in the league are has-beens from Europe. Still, nothing wrong with being the fifth or sixth most popular sport in the country." -Diego Basch

Re: Twitter is the Benjamin Button of startups.

#37

Post by MartinCron »

mbreese wrote: post #26
ceejayoz wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I very much doubt Twitter is interested in an acquisition.

A different question is, who would want to buy them? Twitter, who should know their network better than everyone else, is still trying to figure out how to best monetize it. Who would want to take that task on? 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.

I would be surprised but not totally shocked if either Microsoft or Apple bought Twitter. Tight integration into OS and devices + the huge critical mass of active social users + the social and cultural relevance of Twitter would be assets for them.

Re: Twitter is the Benjamin Button of startups.

#38

Post by weego »

therealarmen wrote: post #5

I wonder what impact all this Twitter-hate is having on Twitter's HR department. I say this because I don't think shutting off third-party clients will hurt the company that much. If it makes it difficult to attract the best talent, that's a different story. Look at what happened to Y! over the last decade.

Twitters open source contributions to Scala are superb and I would jump at the chance to work there based solely on that. I couldn't care less about API access restrictions compared to the effort and attention they clearly put into engineering...and honestly who would?

Re: Twitter is the Benjamin Button of startups.

#39

Post by ImprovedSilence »

ceejayoz wrote: post #29
debacle wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Facebook already has a social network. Google already has a social network. Apple's probably not interested in running one post-Ping. Who else is going to purchase them at a price their investors - who've sunk over a billion in VC $ - wouldn't balk at?

Have they really had over a billion in investment capital? I realize they may have had investment rounds valuing the company at 1bil+, that doesn't mean they were given a billion dollars.

Re: Twitter is the Benjamin Button of startups.

#40

Post by potatolicious »

OzzyB wrote: post #28
smacktoward wrote: post #24

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, but the problem with Twitter is they took too much money. 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…

> "You don't need to have $1Billion dollars in financing to offer a service like this"

Sometimes you do. We've seen a dramatic amount of "overfunding" of social media startups, and I have a theory why.

When your business model doesn't involve well, actually making money at its core, you end up in a position where you have to staff up massively so you can pursue an enormously vast range of monetization strategies in the hopes of finding something that sticks.

How many people on Facebook do you think are working on the core product - as in the Facebook that end users interact with on a daily basis? How many instead are working on a enormously numerous systems that Facebook hopes would make them monetizable? Ad platforms, billing systems, support systems, analytics systems, etc etc.

So yeah, Twitter as defined as "that thing where you submit strings of 140 chars or less and follow others doing the same" probably didn't need $1bn to get off the ground. Twitter in the "this might actually make money" sense though, probably isn't THAT overfunded.

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