This headline is far better if you don't know what Magic Pony is.
I'm assuming Magic Pony is something Twitter will ride upon to bring themselves to profitability.
Twitter Acquires Magic Pony
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Re: Twitter Acquires Magic Pony
#72Machine learning on your images and videos to "enhance our strength in live and video and opens up a whole lot of exciting creative possibilities for Twitter"! As ironically stated here [1], "The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads." Though Twitter has a good record of open-sourcing internal infrastructure projects, I think it's it's safe not to expect any substantive amount of…
> "The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads." The best minds of the previous generation were thinking about how to kill Russians. I'd say it's an upgrade.
A shit sandwich is better than a catered shit buffet, but that doesn't make it good in the slightest.
Re: Twitter Acquires Magic Pony
#73The bit about the Twitter Cortex team reads like an MBA approach to product. If I just rub together some PHDs and engineers then magic will happen.
Re: Twitter Acquires Magic Pony
#74Machine learning on your images and videos to "enhance our strength in live and video and opens up a whole lot of exciting creative possibilities for Twitter"! As ironically stated here [1], "The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads." Though Twitter has a good record of open-sourcing internal infrastructure projects, I think it's it's safe not to expect any substantive amount of…
> As ironically stated here, "The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads." Thanks. Perfectly succinct summary of what I hate so much about today's business world. Dear all advertisers: how about you stop trying to figure out how to make people want your product/service more, and focus on making it discoverable and clearly understood when the time comes where they finally realize t…
Because when they do want it, there will be several competitors offering it and from experience I know they will most likely choose the name they recognize from my prior brand awareness campaigns, and do little other research.
Re: Twitter Acquires Magic Pony
#75Machine learning on your images and videos to "enhance our strength in live and video and opens up a whole lot of exciting creative possibilities for Twitter"! As ironically stated here [1], "The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads." Though Twitter has a good record of open-sourcing internal infrastructure projects, I think it's it's safe not to expect any substantive amount of…
> "The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads." There is a strong argument that as long as they continue to publish and produce open source (which they have been doing) then you could think of ads as just a source of funding and tons of data to continue to push the state of the art. It can also be a stepping stone to other ventures [1]. [1]: http://www.wsj.com/articles/where-would…
Side benefits from the advertising-industrial complex?
Re: Twitter Acquires Magic Pony
#76Earlier quoted context omitted.
> "The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads." The best minds of the previous generation were thinking about how to kill Russians. I'd say it's an upgrade.
>The best minds of the previous generation were thinking about how to kill Russians. I'd say it's an upgrade. At least the results of the previous generations research went (largely) unused, whereas the results of ad clicking research is targeted against and used on people on a daily basis, to their considerable detriment. An upgrade? If so, it seems kind of dubious at best.
As somebody who lives a mostly ad-free life, I totally agree. I think it's somewhat hard for people used to ads to appreciate how pervasive and manipulative they are. And it seems impossible to get people in the industry to see that maybe, just maybe manipulating people for a living is kinda sinister.
Even if it weren't, it's certainly wasteful. Advertising is mostly an arms race. Pepsi spends to challenge Coke. Coke spends even more to maintain hegemony. Neither is informing consumers, the perennial econ-theory justification for advertising. We all know those products exist. If we banned advertising tomorrow, consumers would be no worse off, and all those people could be doing something actually useful.
Re: Twitter Acquires Magic Pony
#77Re: Twitter Acquires Magic Pony
#78This is amazing to me, not because it's a great purchase but rather because of the absolute tone deafness that Twitter is demonstrating. People are not using Twitter because of many reasons and bad image compression is probably not one of them. Unless Twitter is planning some massive pivot what they should have spent their M&A budget on companies that will help them improve their growth situation directly (in my opin…
Twitter's massive pivot is actually well underway:
- They bought Crashlytics and released Fabric.io, a souped-up Twitter SDK + Crashlytics + their bundled ad platform MoPub. The idea is you'll develop your app with this SDK and get crash reporting, usage stats, ad serving, 'Sign in via Twitter', Twitter integration, and all of this other stuff [1] for free.
- They bought Digits, which is a 'log in with your phone number'-as-a-service and made it free to use. It's now integrated with Fabric.
- They just bought Magic Pony which will help them better classify non-text posts so that their currently-awful suggestions are better.
Fact is, 'Twitter', the service where people post tweets, is no longer their primary growth area. It's their most externally visible, sure, but they want their SDK inside every app, and mine data and serve ads, just like Google and Facebook. This might actually work, because their SDK has some very nice things you might want anyway, compared to the other two that only give you identity, integration, and ads.
Re: Twitter Acquires Magic Pony
#79Re: Twitter Acquires Magic Pony
#80Magic Pony Technology, you say?