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Twitter? It’s Not Fun Anymore

thetwitcleaner.com

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Re: Twitter? It’s Not Fun Anymore

#41

Post by krapp »

hcho wrote: post #23
itafroma wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What gets me is that they aren't even re-hosted: they're hotlinks to other websites' imagery. Besides being incredibly lazy , leaching off of other people's bandwidth without giving them credit or placing the imagery in their original context by linking to the pages they appear on is just a low move.

Leeching bandwidth? Really? This is not 1999 anymore, no one cares if their images are hot linked anymore. Be ready to be surprised, people found ways of making money from hot linked images.

Not true.

Some of us are still on shared servers or have limited bandwidth, or just care on principle.

When the leechers are popular forums it can be a definite tax.

Making a local thumbnail isn't that difficult, likely in whatever language you happen to use.

Re: Twitter? It’s Not Fun Anymore

#42

Post by ihuman »

waterlesscloud wrote: post #9

It's feeling more and more like the people at the top of Twitter have lost the thread. At one point I thought there mission was to "Know what everyone in the world is thinking right now ". Obviously useful, obviously valuable. Instead....well, I don't really know where they're going, and I don't think they do either.

"How can we make money off of what everyone in the world is thinking right now?"

Re: Twitter? It’s Not Fun Anymore

#43

Post by moocow01 »

It seems pretty obvious that Twitter is trying to become a business and these alienating changes are part of the strategy but the unfortunate part is that they seemingly have picked the completely wrong strategy around what their business should be.

Twitter really from a tech prospective is a protocol and it seemed that Twitter as a business was in line with what they were providing. Twitter.com acted as the centralized hub and the developers were invited to build upon and enrich the Twitter protocol. The goal was the more tweets and users the better no matter where they were coming from.

Then they realized they need to start making money.

It seems that from the business folks the reaction has been to strong arm users back to using Twitter controlled products with the assumption that they can start to serve ads. I don't blame them necessarily in that this is the standard business model for a social network but I think it will fail specifically for Twitter. In my opinion advertising will cannabalize their business - they should be looking to sell analytics and insights - thats where their value is. Yes its harder, less proven but they are just destroying themselves with their current strategy. Im sure nobody wants to see ads on Twitter and I wouldn't be surprised if nobody really wants to serve ads in that Twitter is exceptionally noisy and the functionality is very streamlined. On the other hand the value of real-time trends or the licensing to do so is exceptionally valuable to just about every company. Perhaps its not as easy of a business model as ads but at least its seemingly more scalable with their ecosystem.

Re: Twitter? It’s Not Fun Anymore

#44

Post by BlackJack »

Retric wrote: post #19
xnxn wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That doesn't sound trivial to me. Many would just use a client/extension that doesn't render said obvious ads. On the other hand, that is the status quo of the web (cf. AdBlock) and it mostly works.

I suspect if they made it a terms of service violation to block adds they could fairly effectively police smartphone apps. If nothing else it would be interesting to see them try. I am also of the opinion that a vary cheap add blocking option say 1$/month would prevent most people from jumping though many hoops for add-block software.

I agree with what you're saying, but you really don't have to "jump through hoops" to get ad-block software. It takes about 30 seconds to install an ad-blocking extension.

I think the better argument is that most people don't know/care for ad-blocking software. I think AdBlock and its alternatives are prevalent in the tech community, but we're just a small part of total users.

Re: Twitter? It’s Not Fun Anymore

#46

Post by TheZenPsycho »

What I find frustrating is that twitter has ignored /really obvious/ opportunities to monetize in a natural way, in favour of this strategy that involves backtracking on the things that makes twitter /twitter/. Opportunities that I see:

-- Charge celebrities and companies for the capability of having huge numbers of followers. Remember Ashton Kutcher's race to be the first twitter user with 1 million followers? Yeah. Having that many followers is valuable to the person with the followers, and caused actual strain on twitter's infrastructure. Why didn't they charge money for that?

-- Charge third party developers for increased API capacity. It's obvious that this is a pain point. Why not just provide the option to pay to remove this pain point? Maybe they are planning to? who knows

-- Charge users for special account abilities- like, perhaps, many of the features offered by tweet deck.

And yet we have them pursuing this artificial advertising strategy. sigh.

I can only think that the strategy they are pursuing is that they see twitter as a passive medium for celebrities to transmit messages to their fans. Like it's a text based TV, that they can run ads next to. Perhaps they have the user demographics to back this up. Us weirdo geeks that use it as a a many-to-many communications medium are the vast minority.

Re: Twitter? It’s Not Fun Anymore

#47

Post by OGinparadise »

moocow01 wrote: post #43

It seems pretty obvious that Twitter is trying to become a business and these alienating changes are part of the strategy but the unfortunate part is that they seemingly have picked the completely wrong strategy around what their business should be. Twitter really from a tech prospective is a protocol and it seemed that Twitter as a business was in line with what they were providing. Twitter.com acted as the centrali…

On the other hand the value of real-time trends or the licensing to do so is exceptionally valuable to just about every company. Perhaps its not as easy of a business model as ads but at least its seemingly more scalable with their ecosystem.

Maybe there is no serious money on that type of business model. Remember, most employees, investors and execs are trying to dump Twitter to investors, who cares what happens 2-3 years from now? The revenue needs to be shown now, ideally before advertisers get to see any hard stats on effectiveness.

Facebook has been adding more ads, Google is virtually all ads so why not Twitter. Facebook will tire people with ads, Twitter too, Google will lose their reputation little by little considering that fairness is the core of it's business. But many will have cashed out and others will hold the bag

Re: Twitter? It’s Not Fun Anymore

#48

Post by zaidf »

I've suggested before that we should explore an independant organization that rates companies and their treatment of devs who use their API. If a company has a history of constantly trimming usage limits, it should be documented. At some threshold, recommendations could be made to avoid or be weary of certain APIs.

We are returning back to the 90s where API access came from BD deals and the rest of us did dirty parsing to make things work.

For a while we got the illusion those days may be gone. And why not, it sure felt like that. But now we are getting to a stage it's almost worse for services to have public or free APIs at all.

Re: Twitter? It’s Not Fun Anymore

#50

Post by phillmv »

BlackJack wrote: post #44
Retric wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect if they made it a terms of service violation to block adds they could fairly effectively police smartphone apps. If nothing else it would be interesting to see them try. I am also of the opinion that a vary cheap add blocking option say 1$/month would prevent most people from jumping though many hoops for add-block software.

I agree with what you're saying, but you really don't have to "jump through hoops" to get ad-block software. It takes about 30 seconds to install an ad-blocking extension. I think the better argument is that most people don't know/care for ad-blocking software. I think AdBlock and its alternatives are prevalent in the tech community, but we're just a small part of total users.

>It takes about 30 seconds to install an ad-blocking extension.

I'd be willing wager that those 30 seconds of barrier would deter like 70-80% of the computer using population. Very few people as a whole know or are comfortable with browser extensions.

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