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Twitter Expected to Begin Layoffs and Stop Headquarters Expansion

nytimes.com

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Re: Twitter Expected to Begin Layoffs and Stop Headquarters Expansion

#91

Post by knorby »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #45
addicted wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Facebook has 3 properties which have more users than Twitter (Facebook, Whatsapp, Instagram). Facebook itself has more active users than Google and has another property, Whatapp which is also close to or just over that billion user mark. And they are already reporting profits. I doubt they will go the way of Twitter.

Nothing lasts forever in tech. How will they monetize Instagram and WhatsApp? Don't show me users. Show me profits from those users if you want to count them.

Facebook (the service) itself can maintain the company as is, but they have ads on Instagram at least. FB currently makes several dollars per user per quarter in revenue (or profits), with that value depending on what number you go by, but the smallest number you could pick is 1B+. No business is guaranteed to last forever, but there is really no reason to think that they have any real trouble ahead.

Re: Twitter Expected to Begin Layoffs and Stop Headquarters Expansion

#92

Post by dghughes »

werber wrote: post #5

I don't use Twitter and don't have any friends that do. Am I just uncool, or is it super niche now?

At first when it appeared I thought it was silly but now I like it since it's a quick simple way to get information without all the bloat. I never thought I'd like it, now I look forward to new technologies that don't exist yet but I think I will need when they arrive.

I have ditched Facebook that's a cesspool of humanity and HR magnet.

Re: Twitter Expected to Begin Layoffs and Stop Headquarters Expansion

#93

Post by bhc3 »

nosuchthing wrote: post #75

"Moments" tab gives a good indication that Twitter has no idea where to go and is the sum of boring meetings with marketing consultants. Twitter had potential, but it appears stagnate as all they've done is created a new version of an AOL instant messenger chatroom with hashtags and 128char limit. Limiting the API tokens for 3rd party developers was a really foolish move.

How do you mean? I think of Moments are formalizing something that Twitter does well: conversations/stories around topics of current interest. Sure, you'll engage your connections on these topics. But it's nice to see a broader view of them as well.

Re: Twitter Expected to Begin Layoffs and Stop Headquarters Expansion

#94

Post by rdtsc »

calcsam wrote: post #8

This is bad, if not entirely unexpected, news. What is out of the ordinary is the public markets' reaction: the stock is down 3% in after-hours trading. Typically when a company announces layoffs its stock goes up. More mature companies have sometimes slashed headcount on the way to a better market situation. But when younger companies announce layoffs, the markets stop assuming they have lots of growth ahead and adj…

> What is out of the ordinary is the public markets' reaction?

But is it? Maybe the public is realizing that tweets were just a cool fad for a while. For twitter to be profitable, I am guessing, there has to be people that want to use it, and (very important) people believing that people want to use it (so they'd pay Twitter for advertising).

Compare with Google. Google provides something momre back (gmail, search, calendar, docs, photo storage, directions + many other things I forgot about).

Twitter provides 140 status messages. There is nothing wrong it, that is very cool. But I think there is a realization that it just isn't as cool as it was in 4 years ago. And it just became 3% less cool.

Re: Twitter Expected to Begin Layoffs and Stop Headquarters Expansion

#95

Post by smacktoward »

InclinedPlane wrote: post #52
calcsam wrote: post #8

This is bad, if not entirely unexpected, news. What is out of the ordinary is the public markets' reaction: the stock is down 3% in after-hours trading. Typically when a company announces layoffs its stock goes up. More mature companies have sometimes slashed headcount on the way to a better market situation. But when younger companies announce layoffs, the markets stop assuming they have lots of growth ahead and adj…

I suspect that's just people having their delusions of rampant future growth and expansion of twitter being crushed in the gears of mundane reality. These moves are perfectly fine for a normal company that intends to continue operating at about the same level as it is currently indefinitely. But people view every tech company through the lens of apple, google, amazon, etc. They expect growth, they expect new stuff, a…

> The truth is that with modern technology you can build a company that has hundreds of millions of high-volume users and yet is not very expensive to operate.

Investors had to dump more than a billion dollars into Twitter to get it to where it is today.

Re: Twitter Expected to Begin Layoffs and Stop Headquarters Expansion

#96

Post by smacktoward »

yid wrote: post #24
xienze wrote: post #9

4100 employees for a service dedicated to moving around 140 character messages? Yeah, there might be a little fat to trim there.

> 4100 employees for a service dedicated to moving around 140 character messages? Yeah, there might be a little fat to trim there. Absolutely! You could probably get a single rack to handle storage and broadcast of millions of tweets per minute, perhaps hook it up to a Teradata appliance to handle search and storage at that throughput. Throw it in a nice distributed database indexed by user. Then just another couple…

But would that be Web scale?

Re: Twitter Expected to Begin Layoffs and Stop Headquarters Expansion

#97

Post by jliptzin »

smacktoward wrote: post #95
InclinedPlane wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect that's just people having their delusions of rampant future growth and expansion of twitter being crushed in the gears of mundane reality. These moves are perfectly fine for a normal company that intends to continue operating at about the same level as it is currently indefinitely. But people view every tech company through the lens of apple, google, amazon, etc. They expect growth, they expect new stuff, a…

> The truth is that with modern technology you can build a company that has hundreds of millions of high-volume users and yet is not very expensive to operate. Investors had to dump more than a billion dollars into Twitter to get it to where it is today.

Uh, most of that money was from the IPO and that was probably done because founders/early investors wanted to cash in. I'd say the vast majority of that funding was not necessary to scale to where they are today.

Re: Twitter Expected to Begin Layoffs and Stop Headquarters Expansion

#98

Post by nosuchthing »

bhc3 wrote: post #93
nosuchthing wrote: post #75

"Moments" tab gives a good indication that Twitter has no idea where to go and is the sum of boring meetings with marketing consultants. Twitter had potential, but it appears stagnate as all they've done is created a new version of an AOL instant messenger chatroom with hashtags and 128char limit. Limiting the API tokens for 3rd party developers was a really foolish move.

How do you mean? I think of Moments are formalizing something that Twitter does well: conversations/stories around topics of current interest. Sure, you'll engage your connections on these topics. But it's nice to see a broader view of them as well.

Checking it showed no relation to anything in my feed, friends, or posts.

Additionally it brought up nonsense click bait.

It looked like they just fed in the front page of yahoo.

Re: Twitter Expected to Begin Layoffs and Stop Headquarters Expansion

#99

Post by Ganz7 »

Sexagesimal wrote: post #49

This what happens when you create a company around a glorified public majordomo public email list manager and virtuous feedback loop used by the media. I'm looking for the Google and companies that invent real tech.

Just because you don't derive utility from a product doesn't mean it's not 'real' tech. Twitter is basically the news medium for me and most of my friends at school. I cannot remember the last time I went to read a news article from a site other than (mostly) twitter.

Re: Twitter Expected to Begin Layoffs and Stop Headquarters Expansion

#100

Post by rboyd »

meeper16 wrote: post #55
xienze wrote: post #9

4100 employees for a service dedicated to moving around 140 character messages? Yeah, there might be a little fat to trim there.

I completely agree. Twitter was never really a technology company to me considering it was essentially just a mimic of a wrapper around an email list.

Any company that operates at web scale is a technology company. Besides that look at their opensource contributions. Twitter has/had some impressive engineering talent.
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