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Twitter may receive formal bid, suitors said to include Salesforce and Google

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Re: Twitter may receive formal bid, suitors said to include Salesforce and Google

#331

Post by nl »

home_boi wrote: post #322
nl wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Um.. This is exactly what advertising is. Twitter just has a terrible advertising platform. FB is making huge amounts on what should be basically the same product.

The two platforms are completely different. The users of FB (and LinkedIn) put their real information on the website, allowing advertisers to target effectively which raises the average ad value on the website. Intuitively, revenue = ad value * # impressions. Twitter is in between anonymous forums (unfortunately they all died) and FB/LinkedIn in terms of ability of advertisers to target users. They're living off of h…

Yes, the anonymous accounts are a problem - but mostly because of the trolling, not the lack of identity. Snapchat and Instagram both have anonymous accounts and don't have a problem.

Yet Twitter has people like Kim Kardashian selling tweets for $200K/tweet[1] (so there's your measurement of ad-value), and yet Twitter can't make money.

Meanwhile, people are moving to Snapchat stories which is exactly the product Twitter should have built. Twitter, on the other-hand make the ground breaking decision to not include URLs in the 140 char tweet count.

Twitter can't ship new product.

[1] http://haveuheard.net/2015/08/kim-kardashian-how-much-money-...

Re: Twitter may receive formal bid, suitors said to include Salesforce and Google

#332

Post by nowprovision »

panarky wrote: post #326
skewart wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This. Also, not only does Twitter have great brand recognition but also individual tweets can have far greater reach than Twitter's user numbers might suggest. A lot of non-users see Tweets - embedded in news stories, shared around the internet, or shown on TV. And lots of non-users hear about things that happen on Twitter. That said, while that brand recognition and reach is scarce and hard to reproduce, it's not ne…

Problem #1: 90% of Twitter is shit [1] Problem #2: It's expensive to support millions of users who post shit Problem #3: Twitter's revenue base is too small for its cost base Solution: Eliminate advertising and charge $20 per 1000 tweets. Free to read, costs a tiny bit to tweet. People who post shit will disappear. People who have an audience and something to say won't bat an eye at this low cost. If this weeds out 8…

Disagree, I don't follow people who "post shit", I follow a few hundred people in the tech space (developers, devops, VCs, CTOs etc..) that I think are interesting (and dont post shit) and thus my twitter feed has very little overall shit. You curate your own feed based on who you follow, if you don't want to listen to whiney SJWs, or people twisting every word of Hillary or Trump then don't follow them (or unfollow them)..

Re: Twitter may receive formal bid, suitors said to include Salesforce and Google

#333

Post by dzhiurgis »

gaius wrote: post #113
trentmb wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps there's some back end tech, talent that would be useful for tackling Salesforces problems.

Salesforce's back end is AWS. They ran their own cloud for a while, but ditched it.

Not yet. I believe they will be using AWS to serve Australia and/or Brazil. That or offer completely new service built on AWS, given $400m contract. Heroku runs on AWS, but its hardly integrated with SFDC.

Re: Twitter may receive formal bid, suitors said to include Salesforce and Google

#334

Post by evo_9 »

panarky wrote: post #326
skewart wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This. Also, not only does Twitter have great brand recognition but also individual tweets can have far greater reach than Twitter's user numbers might suggest. A lot of non-users see Tweets - embedded in news stories, shared around the internet, or shown on TV. And lots of non-users hear about things that happen on Twitter. That said, while that brand recognition and reach is scarce and hard to reproduce, it's not ne…

Problem #1: 90% of Twitter is shit [1] Problem #2: It's expensive to support millions of users who post shit Problem #3: Twitter's revenue base is too small for its cost base Solution: Eliminate advertising and charge $20 per 1000 tweets. Free to read, costs a tiny bit to tweet. People who post shit will disappear. People who have an audience and something to say won't bat an eye at this low cost. If this weeds out 8…

You may not agree with this comment but it's intelligent and well argued. Seriously stop down voting on knee-jerk bullshit reactions.

If you disagree and feel strong enough about it to do that, post a comment like nowprovision did.

Re: Twitter may receive formal bid, suitors said to include Salesforce and Google

#335

Post by pbosko »

panarky wrote: post #326
skewart wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This. Also, not only does Twitter have great brand recognition but also individual tweets can have far greater reach than Twitter's user numbers might suggest. A lot of non-users see Tweets - embedded in news stories, shared around the internet, or shown on TV. And lots of non-users hear about things that happen on Twitter. That said, while that brand recognition and reach is scarce and hard to reproduce, it's not ne…

Problem #1: 90% of Twitter is shit [1] Problem #2: It's expensive to support millions of users who post shit Problem #3: Twitter's revenue base is too small for its cost base Solution: Eliminate advertising and charge $20 per 1000 tweets. Free to read, costs a tiny bit to tweet. People who post shit will disappear. People who have an audience and something to say won't bat an eye at this low cost. If this weeds out 8…

Introducing mandatory charges for tweeting will probably hurt their user base and they'll lose some value. But they could always make a combined approach, having first 5 to X tweets per month for free.

Re: Twitter may receive formal bid, suitors said to include Salesforce and Google

#336

Post by thr0waway1239 »

egypturnash wrote: post #274
imagist wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the long run, I don't think that Twitter's problem is one of competition from FB or any other competitor. They have enough users that they could turn a profit even if they could monetize those users, regardless of competition. But they haven't turned a profit, which after 10 years is a strong indicator that they can't turn a profit. If Twitter is able to time an addition of ads with a major event that damages FB's…

Whenever people discuss Twitter's finances I wonder what they'd look like if there was a paid tier. Just a few bucks a year to mark your account as Supportin' Twitter. Without necessarily having any other perks. Except maybe "not having any fucking ads". I'd probably do it; I was a paid user of Livejournal for many years when it was Where All My Friends Were. But no. It's always "monetize by becoming another goddamn…

I agree with the "not have any ads which follow you around the internet" as an appeal for the more privacy conscious folks which is probably an idea which is going to get more traction in the coming days...

Even better, actively mock Facebook/Google's privacy track record (while peddling the paid Twitter accounts) like the way Apple did to Microsoft. If you are going down anyway, why not go out with a resounding bang? :-) But you will burn all your bridges. Very few folks have the kind of chutzpah that Steve Jobs had.

Re: Twitter may receive formal bid, suitors said to include Salesforce and Google

#337

Post by kalleboo »

panarky wrote: post #326
skewart wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This. Also, not only does Twitter have great brand recognition but also individual tweets can have far greater reach than Twitter's user numbers might suggest. A lot of non-users see Tweets - embedded in news stories, shared around the internet, or shown on TV. And lots of non-users hear about things that happen on Twitter. That said, while that brand recognition and reach is scarce and hard to reproduce, it's not ne…

Problem #1: 90% of Twitter is shit [1] Problem #2: It's expensive to support millions of users who post shit Problem #3: Twitter's revenue base is too small for its cost base Solution: Eliminate advertising and charge $20 per 1000 tweets. Free to read, costs a tiny bit to tweet. People who post shit will disappear. People who have an audience and something to say won't bat an eye at this low cost. If this weeds out 8…

> Problem #2: It's expensive to support millions of users who post shit

Is it? I always assumed all their money was plowed into moonshot development to try to find something, ANYTHING to make a billion dollar company (stuff they throw away within 12 months, like Twitter #Music)

Just supporting their core functionality could be done with a fraction of the workforce, and could probably be profitable (although it would never satisfy the investor valuation)

Re: Twitter may receive formal bid, suitors said to include Salesforce and Google

#338

Post by ctab »

panarky wrote: post #326
skewart wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This. Also, not only does Twitter have great brand recognition but also individual tweets can have far greater reach than Twitter's user numbers might suggest. A lot of non-users see Tweets - embedded in news stories, shared around the internet, or shown on TV. And lots of non-users hear about things that happen on Twitter. That said, while that brand recognition and reach is scarce and hard to reproduce, it's not ne…

Problem #1: 90% of Twitter is shit [1] Problem #2: It's expensive to support millions of users who post shit Problem #3: Twitter's revenue base is too small for its cost base Solution: Eliminate advertising and charge $20 per 1000 tweets. Free to read, costs a tiny bit to tweet. People who post shit will disappear. People who have an audience and something to say won't bat an eye at this low cost. If this weeds out 8…

This is beautiful.

You could add a "tip jar" to allow followers to support someone by buying Tweets for them, so that high-signal accounts would seldom have to pay that fee.

Re: Twitter may receive formal bid, suitors said to include Salesforce and Google

#339

Post by brianwawok »

kyloren wrote: post #324
bad_user wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know what Buffer is, but if they can post to Google+ it only means they have a private deal with Google. The Google+ API is read-only, it says so in their own docs: https://developers.google.com/+/web/api/rest/ And if you want a service that has integration with everything except for Google+, there's IFTTT.

Correct me if I'm wrong but I think buffer can also post to Instagram

It could be doing the reverse of scraping no? Faking app requests
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