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Twitter is the Benjamin Button of startups.

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Re: Twitter is the Benjamin Button of startups.

#61

Post by stevencorona »

001sky wrote: post #50
gavinlynch wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 vis…

Certainly fair questions. Here are some of the data: 1.16 billion of capital and 140 employees 6.0-7.0 billion valuation, estimated In terms of profit per employee, you're looking at 50 to 100 million to 'break even' at that vauation So, part of it is the $$ raised and part is the $$ valuation Is it possible paint yourself into a box, strategically, if you take money at aggressive valuation? Source: http://www.crunch…

Woa woa, 140 employees? You mean over 1000 now. Source: http://www.mediabistro.com/alltwitter/twitter-1000-employees...

Re: Twitter is the Benjamin Button of startups.

#62

Post by beagle3 »

smacktoward wrote: post #32
OzzyB wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 whe…

> 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.

Actually, there is: app.net could just observe what twitter did.

And twitter didn't have to go through it either; There's discussions going on about that since 2008 when their uptime suffered outage after outage; here's something I wrote 2 years ago, for example: http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/b2u6t/twitter_o... and I had given that same answer before several time in other forums.

> 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.

And yet, reddit which is much more complex, and of comparable reach (I don't have time to google the numbers right now, let's say it has 1/10 of the audience), costs much less than 1/10 of twitter's operational costs. And is profitable.

> 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.

Actually ... I suspect gmail can easily handle the entire world email infrastructure, cheaply and reliably. They already handle a two-digit percentage of the world email accounts.

For sure, facebook can do that - they already do it (although it is simplified email).

The reason email is sliced is not a problem of scale - it is a problem of control.

edit: removed half a sentence that was there, and which was written earlier.

Re: Twitter is the Benjamin Button of startups.

#63

Post by code177 »

rblion wrote: post #53
MartinCron wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I actually just re-read the book with my son. It holds up really well considering it's age. The complexity and chaos stuff maps, I just don't see the parallel between the idealistic Zuck wanting to change the world and inGen trying to make a dinosaur theme park.

The parallel is both were trying to do something considered 'impossible' and doing it on the grandest scale possible. John Hammond wanted to clone extinct animals, Mark wanted to create a network for millions of people. Both projects are incredibly complex with a lot of variables and the consequences of miscalculation could be disastrous. Chaos is the underlying theme of it all...

To be fair to John Hammond, I'm not sure creating a (albeit massive) social networking service is in the same league as reverse engineering 65+ million year old, fragmented DNA strands, then bringing the dinosaurs not only to term, but healthy adulthood, and finally housing them in a multi-billion dollar facility on a leased island.

Facebook has roughly 4x as much source code as Jurassic Park did, and probably can't be run from a single room for up to three days with minimal staff.

Also, if say, Facebook Profiles breaks down, the profiles don't eat the users.

Re: Twitter is the Benjamin Button of startups.

#64

Post by smacktoward »

OzzyB wrote: post #48
gavinlynch wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 vis…

1) No, but I know that the difference between $50M and $500M+ would change my outlook in terms of who I need to satisfy dramatically. 2) Don't like App.net? Pick Reddit vs Digg, same case. One managed to "get by" with a core team, the other took a ton of money, hired a bunch of folks, made a bunch of promises, and tried to shoehorn their original vision, the one that got them established in the first place, into some…

The wrinkle in #2 is that once you decide to take conventional venture funding (as opposed to bootstrapping, or fundraising through angels, incubators, etc.), you really don't have the option to just be a small, sustainable business anymore. VCs don't want to invest in small, sustainable businesses, they want to invest in aggressive plays that have the potential to blow up into something huge.

According to TechCrunch the only money Reddit ever raised was $100k of seed funding (http://www.crunchbase.com/company/reddit). That's a very different trajectory than Twitter, who (again according to TC: http://www.crunchbase.com/company/twitter) have raised $1.16 billion (with a B) in funding.

Taking in that sort of money raises the stakes dramatically. Nobody loans you a billion dollars to build a $50 million/year business.

Re: Twitter is the Benjamin Button of startups.

#65

Post by photorized »

potatolicious wrote: post #40
OzzyB wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

What I always found curious about Twitter, despite its massive concurrency requirements, is how low quality and short-lived the content is. Outside of charting historical trends, there's very little value in mining historical Twitter data - it's only the real-time part that matters. Theoretically, they coould just delete all content older than x days - and I doubt that many would notice.

1bln is funding is unreasonable, both from a technology standpoint (Twitter does go down, btw) and from a "let's figure out a way to monetize this" standpoint.

Re: Twitter is the Benjamin Button of startups.

#66

Post by rblion »

code177 wrote: post #63
rblion wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The parallel is both were trying to do something considered 'impossible' and doing it on the grandest scale possible. John Hammond wanted to clone extinct animals, Mark wanted to create a network for millions of people. Both projects are incredibly complex with a lot of variables and the consequences of miscalculation could be disastrous. Chaos is the underlying theme of it all...

To be fair to John Hammond, I'm not sure creating a (albeit massive) social networking service is in the same league as reverse engineering 65+ million year old, fragmented DNA strands, then bringing the dinosaurs not only to term, but healthy adulthood, and finally housing them in a multi-billion dollar facility on a leased island. Facebook has roughly 4x as much source code as Jurassic Park did, and probably can't…

Keep in mind, it was a movie and the metaphor was constructed around chaos/complexity. If you read the books, Hammond actually needed an entire other island, Isla Sorna, to produce batches of dinosaurs and allow them to mature. Most of the embryos did not reach maturity. He also had a much larger control room on that island to oversee the main island.

If your Facebook data gets exploited, it could affect you in big ways.

Re: Twitter is the Benjamin Button of startups.

#68

Post by gavinlynch »

MatthewPhillips wrote: post #52
gavinlynch wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this "mark on humanity" talk is rubbish. I mean, what does that even mean ? Twitter is just a service that allows people to connect and publicly talk to each other on the Internet. That's it. 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 communicati…

> How was Twitter changing the world, and how is it not anymore...? Twitter was a utility. Now it's ABC. It could have changed the world in the way that, you know, the web changed the world. But instead it's changing the world in the way that cable news changes the world. That's what's so bizarre about Ev Williams to me. He's so damn talented but he doesn't give a shit about anything but the flip. It's true of so man…

>> "Twitter was a utility. Now it's ABC."

I honestly have no idea what this means. Twitter is still a utility for communication. ABC is a content provider, not a utility.

>> " It could have changed the world in the way that, you know, the web changed the world."

I am also scratching my head at this statement. Perhaps you could elaborate, I have no concept of how Twitter could have changed the world in the way that the World Wide Web did. WWW was an astronomical leap in the way we perceive and use the Internet. Twitter has been a revelation for many average consumers who did not take advantage of the social nature of the web as many people had previously, but to compare it to the creation of the WWW itself is--in my view--a little far-fetched.

>> "But instead it's changing the world in the way that cable news changes the world. "

I again respectfully have no concept of what you are talking about.

And finally, generally: All this hand-wringing about Twitter irrationally eschewing it's mantle as the savior of humanity and as the last true final hope for a social web and social networking services in general (or whatever values you are projecting on this company)....

Wow... I mean seriously guys? We're talking about closing down a few client-side API's among other things.

Don't you think this hyperbole is getting just a tad out of touch with reality?

Re: Twitter is the Benjamin Button of startups.

#69

Post by 001sky »

stevencorona wrote: post #61
001sky wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Certainly fair questions. Here are some of the data: 1.16 billion of capital and 140 employees 6.0-7.0 billion valuation, estimated In terms of profit per employee, you're looking at 50 to 100 million to 'break even' at that vauation So, part of it is the $$ raised and part is the $$ valuation Is it possible paint yourself into a box, strategically, if you take money at aggressive valuation? Source: http://www.crunch…

Woa woa, 140 employees? You mean over 1000 now. Source: http://www.mediabistro.com/alltwitter/twitter-1000-employees...

Thanks, this is a good catch. I pulled the data from techcrunch (they were out of date, added reference above).

General direction of the comment is distilled, still as follows:

1) valuation is 7x invested capital

2) The invested capital is large, requires large exit

3) This is going to put pressure on the team ($10-15B exit?)

4) Thats a requires lot of $$/head for the team to bring in

Re: Twitter is the Benjamin Button of startups.

#70

Post by ChiperSoft »

gatordan wrote: post #45
patrickaljord wrote: post #16

Twitter already said that most people access Twitter through their web ui and mobile apps. So even if they were shutting their whole API down, it wouldn't have such a negative effect on their usage growth. The only thing that's happening is that devs won't be able to build toys around Twitter, but Twitter doesn't care as most people don't use nor need these toys. Some of us devs just have to admit that we are not tha…

Does anyone know the actual percentage of users that access Twitter through third party client applications? And what users are currently getting out of these apps that would make them annoyed enough to quit the service if they were forced to switch to Twitter's app/web interface? My gut reaction is to agree with you that the Hacker community is overreacting to getting screwed over and that Twitter will go on fine wi…

This is just my own testimony, but there are numerous features in tweet bot which Twitters own app doesn't even attempt to provide. Such as conversation threading in both directions (twitter only let's you see In Reply To). The app is also quite a bit more polished and better behaved (Twitter Mac triggers my discrete gpu, Tweetbot doesn't). Twitter Mac doesn't even support gestures.

As for the website... Twitter loses all its value to me if I have to open a browser every time I want to read content.

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