So to recap, Twitter exploded onto the scene in 2007, the "fail whale" appeared a lot, developers made all sorts of wonderful programs hooked into Twitter, the fail whale disappeared, Twitter started to destroy the app ecosystem, App.net launched to great fanfare in response to Twitter's knuckleheaded anti-developer stance, Britney Spears and Justin Bieber arrived and knocked all the nerds out of the top spots on Twitterholic, Donald Trump came and bludgeoned everyone with his bombastic prose, and now App.net is shutting down.
And after all this, Twitter still does not have a viable business model.
> And after all this, Twitter still does not have a viable business model.
...more pertinently, App.net didn't have one either - and they had an open API, charged real money and did all the things HNers' idealized version of Twitter would.
Right - it seemed at the time it might become e an idealized version of Twitter. My hope was that by having to pay money to get in, it would keep out the shills and noise. I was a paid member for several years but it became clear that none of the people I followed moved so it became a ghost town.
> My hope was that by having to pay money to get in, it would keep out the shills and noise.
Interesting. I'd expect something entirely opposite - with one platform, pay-for-entrance, shills / marketers can just write the entry costs off as a small marketing expense. OTOH I can easily imagine a lot of smart people with interesting things to say shying away from spending money on such a platform.
It's not like using Twitter doesn't come with costs; you need to learn how to use it, you need to follow people to stay up to date, you should probably reply to some of the people tweeting at you; and last but not least, you also need to spend time on actually coming up with things to say. That's a massive time investment. The opportunity cost of that time is a lot more than the $5 app.net used to cost per month.
I assume that $5 a month is only a problem for occasional users -- but I doubt that those add a lot of value to the ecosystem (aside from higher numbers of total users signed up and other vanity metrics)
Facebook has become much less interesting once it started constantly reminding people about privacy options and almost everyone went from default-public to default-friends, or often even more restrictive settings.
Well going further than that, on Facebook, for a lot of people the majority of their 'friends' are school friends (for younger people often their entire school year, even the years above/below), and extended family, people that they feel obligated to add (due to Facebook's pressure to have a high friend count).
These are ultimately people they wouldn't choose to follow the conversations of at all, given the choice.
For me Twitter was like starting with a clean slate. I just follow the people I want to follow, basically no 'friends', just interesting people.
I have no idea why anyone even likes Twitter. Beyond broadcasting, there is nothing of value on it. Every tweet has absolutely inane replies. You can at least find some half-decent commentary in Facebook post comments, but Twitter is just insane babble
See, that's the funny thing. For me Facebook is full of inane babble and people being superficially nice to each other and incredibly ... provincial? It's like a bad sitcom.
Twitter on the other hand is full of interesting conversation, people speaking their mind, and great interaction and interesting insight. The amount of tech things I've learned from cool people on twitter is far far greater than Facebook.
Experience of both mediums prob depends on who you're interacting with. For me, Twitter is where the interesting people are.
Or as someone put it once: Facebook is for people you used to know, Twitter is for people you want to know.
How a social platform looks like to any given person depends on the people that person associates with. If twitter is inane babble to you that says more about what you did with twitter than about twitter itself.
Marketing and politics are probably the two worst areas to try to find any humanity in.
I use it for things like gaming, talking to locals (almost everyone I know in my current city I met through Twitter, or through someone I met through Twitter), getting local news, and keeping up with friends.
I haven't done anything with twitter. Technically I do have an account, but most times I visit the site, I'm not logged in. I can't find a way to get a toehold toward anything but inane babble.
1. It's where the people are. I don't think anyone is 100% loyal to it, but you have to respect its reach.
2. Instant answers. I can get insight on news via Twitter well before I can get it anywhere else. On top of that, I can get it from the people I want, many of whom are Tweeting hours before they are able to get an article published. This is great for sports, politics, etc.
I personally don't use Twitter nearly as often as I once did, and I rarely find reason to Tweet, but I do enjoy browsing it from time to time.
Don't think of it in terms of technology, think of it in terms of people. We live in the future where not only can you watch your role models on TV, but you can also follow them on Twitter and read their daily thoughts and opinions in real time.
You're forgetting that by the time app.net came up twitter was already "the" platform for this sort of stuff. App.net didn't improve on the model in any way. No awesome features, no additional value. It tried to compete with a service that's already used by millions with terrible branding (starting with the name) and a pricing model that's good for SaaS companies (because they work with business that use the solution to make money) with consumers (who don't).
Having a business model is nice. Having the right business model is essential. Twitter has a business model now, and while it isn't ideal it's in line with their type of product/company and if you scroll through some of the other comments this model isn't all that bad.
Twitter can improve it, but that's a story for a different thread.
They do pay their staff. Unfortunately the stock compensation was based on the … highly optimistic … story they told around the IPO about growing to be as large as Google or Facebook. Why spend prudently when you're about to be stupid-rich?
They pay pretty competitive salaries as well. The stock grants will eventually roll off as people's plans vest and are replaced with smaller ones(new employees have been getting smaller ones for a while already)
2) Stock grants are used as compensation for people working at Twitter, NOT something that benefits investors (except in the sense people are working at the company the investors invested in I guess).
It's easy to blame VCs for everything, but I don't see how this makes any sense at all in this case.
Who is in line for a buyout before other investors and at what multiplier? That information is usually not public and can be more important than what percentage of ownership a particular investor has.
Did it? I remember registering lots of accounts just when it launched because I had a column in tweetdeck with a search that was something like "app.net/invite-code/" (all invite codes URLs started with the same pattern) so every time someone posted an invite URL I got a notification and I could register a new account ;^}
It was $50 per account when it first opened, you must have got in when they stopped charging (it was already dying out by this point) but used an invite system.
Yeah it's pretty ridiculous. Also, Twitter still has an anti-developer stance. For the shutting down of App.net despite Twitter's unchanged politics to make sense, I think it's because the Twitter model as a whole is dying (which obviously includes App.net and similar microblogging services). I hear Instagram and Snapchat is all the rage now. Ain't nobody got time to actually read text these days in the days of strongly social networkified attention spans.
I think we would all be better served if the blockchain could be replicated and tweaked to become a new public publishing platform that is the equivalent of Twitter today. Access to the blockchain would then become a function of clients who follow the established spec/protocol, analogous to browsers and the web today. There are a couple of startups that are already pursuing the idea, but I think that this could only become realistic if Twitter were to die.
Let's take all of Twitter's scaling problems and put them on a protocol design that's way more difficult to scale and optimized for entirely different access patterns and bandwidth requirements?
This seems like a entirely inappropriate application for blockchains. There are other more suitable P2P constructs we could create using similar ideas (which predated bitcoin) instead of jumping on a bandwagon.
Twitter has no issue making money: They made over a billion last year. Their problem is in growing: They have about the same users they had 2 years ago.
Maybe Twitter is fully grown. There will be some churn, but it's basically as big as it's going to get. With the current user base, they can generate billions of dollars in revenue.
The problem, then, seems to be with management and the board not understanding or maybe not accepting reality as it is. If they can figure out how to run Twitter with hundreds of people rather than thousands, they will have a great business.
And after all this, Twitter still does not have a viable business model.