I think Twitter needs to learn to be okay with its current size, or perhaps even smaller. The core idea is very compelling - a curated feed of short, simple content. The nonsense Twitter has added lately substantially detracts from its core values, and it feels like desperate pleas for unnecessary growth to somehow support the massive payroll they convinced themselves to take on. The Silicon Valley obsession with endless growth is harmful sometimes.
>The Silicon Valley obsession with endless growth is harmful sometimes
There's healthy ways to grow, and unhealthy ways. I agree with you that twitter (the company) needs to be happy with the size of twitter (the product), but that doesn't mean the company needs to stop growing. There's plenty of opportunities to leverage the technology stack and the userbase of twitter to get into other markets and allow growth to continue. Their future growth is not in getting more users to sign up for the twitter microblogging service, it's in other products like Vine and Periscope (and potentially a longer-form writing integration like has been rumoured)
> Their future growth is not in getting more users to sign up for the twitter microblogging service, it's in other products like Vine and Periscope
Are they not past the "growth" stage and very much into the "time to start actually making money" stage?
What on earth use is growing 2 more different sharing networks when your first sharing network is at capacity and isn't pulling it's weight and bringing the money in.
Before the core idea became the real-time news, it evolved from being a tool for personal status updates, a way to coordinate small groups, a way to search for public sentiment on certain events like political debates, and a few other mini-incarnations I've missed.
Perhaps someone using Twitter to coordinate their small group or family meet-ups denounced CNN, Bloomberg or Reuters as "nonsense" when those organizations appeared on Twitter.
And that's the core product problem - there's always a potential that the old core idea is no longer relevant, and perhaps a stream of photo updates (Instagram, Twitpic), a stream of video updates (Vine) or real-time video broadcasting (Periscope) is the next big thing and therefore the new core idea.
I agree, especially since all this additional nonsense is very expensive.
Twitter does not need more than 1,000 employees and could probably get by with <500. They have over a billion dollars in revenue and would easily make a solid profit if they cut staff back to what's actually necessary.
Quick off the cuff math, if you figure $200k all-in per employee, that's $100mm/year they'd save by going from 1000 to 500. They lost >$500mm in 2014[1] so that would not make a large dent if their goal is to achieve profitability.
The problem is that they don't seem to have any path to growth. If they slash headcount in half and you've got most of those people dedicated to keeping the lights on then it's hard to imagine a future where they get much bigger and if investors see no path to growth then their stock price is going to take a beating.
My problem with Twitter has always been what the fuck does it do that requires 1000 employees to run? I don't use Twitter so I may be missing something huge here, but my understanding of the service:
1. User A posts messages either to themselves or by addressing another user.
2. Users B, C, D .. Z subscribe to messages from A and see them on their own feeds.
There are no concerns about message QoS and you don't need a consistency so you can basically blast out messages and if B views it before C then no biggie.
Twitter's basically a pub-sub messaging platform without any kind of need QoS... what am I missing? Why does this require 1000 employees or even 500? it seems like something that could absolutely be run by 50 people with software (feature, optimization) engineers concentrated in one location and operations (test, deploy) teams spread out across the globe at major hot spots. Obviously you also have some stuff like sales and marketing, but I still don't see how that requires 1000 employees.
Large scale distributed systems aren't that simple. I don't know any internal details of Twitter, but from what I've gathered they are trying to hit the kind of QoS you are dismissing. Imagine some celebrity with millions of followers says something controversial: it would be confusing to a lot of people if they start getting retweets or discussions of that tweet significantly before they see that tweet themselves. And that's just one scenario.
I don't know about the 500 vs. 1000 employee question, but Twitter is a big engineering challenge.
> Large scale distributed systems aren't that simple.
Nobody's debating that. If it weren't a "large scale distributed system" then the debate would be about 3 employees vs. 10. The core experience without scale could be made by a single engineer.
But running a service like Twitter doesn't require 4,000 employees, even at scale. Facebook has "only" twice as many employees, despite a 10x more complicated product and 12x as much revenue.
> Large scale distributed systems aren't that simple.
It is not simple but it also doesn't have to be 1000 employee-type of complexity.
As a counter-example I'd point to WhatsApp was handling 1B users with 50 employees. That includes custom apps for fringe phones used in 3rd world countries. It included media sharing, it including managing and ops.
I know they are not Twitter but still 50 vs 1000 is a huge difference.
They've traditionally credited Erlang and FreeBSD as one the techologies that was responsible for their success. Not sure if Facebook will strong-arm them into switching to whatever Facebook is using.
One can then ask, well, why don't companies look at that and learn and do the same? And I think the answer is once they headed in one particular direction with their choices, they are more susceptable to the sunk cost fallacy. Coming in one morning and telling everyone, screw it, we picked the wrong direction 2 years ago. We'll lay off 50% of the people and re-write the whole thing in Swift using this other stack. We'll cut half the products and work on new ones. Etc. That is almost impossible to do. So they are sort of bound to heading in the direction they've been heading, even if individual people will all see it is probably the wrong direction.
WhatsApp chose engineering cost first. It's a singular device only service, they do not retain any messages and a slew of other decisions. Look at their iOS client for more examples of engineering cost first. A new client for an obscure phone costs about 1 engineer for WhatsApp too.
How many employees did it take to run IG? Architecturally they are very similar.
Now, I do think there's more to it, once you start adding in monetization and business features, but it doesn't take that many people to run a highly scalable distributed pub/sub.
I've always assumed most of Twitter's employees are either customer support, or "community managers" for various high-profile accounts. That's the sort of thing that has no economy of scale whatsoever.
My guess is embedding "monetization" platform within existing. So yea it's a simple service, but under the surface they probably got all sorts of hooks to increase value of their 'social graph.' My guess also is, by the looks of their revenue, etc., it's a mess
This is true, but as others stated an over-simplification of Twitter's features. Even without the factor of scale, building Twitter for 1000 users would be hard when you consider things like private messages, e-mail notifications, on-site notifications, hash tags, retweets, favoriting, follower-lists, url shorteners, images / videos, ads, analytics, search, security, new features like their 'moments' tab, - and considering how all of these features work together on mobile as well as web. THEN start thinking about scale and how these features work together - not just the C and R of CRUD, but the U and D too.
> Quick off the cuff math, if you figure $200k all-in per employee, that's $100mm/year they'd save by going from 1000 to 500.
Your math is off by an order of magnitude. Twitter spends >$100M per quarter on stock-based compensation alone. [0] Just what do you think Twitter's major expenses are in "Research & Development" (for example)? I guarantee you that employees are by far their number 1 line item (as they are for most tech companies).
Twitter's Q3 2015 expenses were ~$500M. Do you really think that the majority of that wasn't salaries?
All public companies have to report that stuff and it is usually free to download from their website. It is an incredibly useful skill to learn to read annual and quarterly reports. You can find out if your company is about to tank ;-)
While I see this as true, man does it suck to be an employee who was hoping for stock options to be worth anything. Especially for those who became Twitter employees via an acquisition, since I imagine a big part of their compensation from that event was stock.
Work for a large well know established company making a great salary and tangible RSUs or work for one of the other 99% of startups that pay under market and whose options will never be worth $0.01. Yeah, sucks to be an employee at Twitter. :-/
I guess? I have friends who worked for a company acquired by Twitter pre-IPO and their stock options are apparently not doing well. Granted it's anecdotal, but I'm not saying that nobody makes money off of Twitter.
For context, TWTR priced its IPO in $17-20 range http://www.cbsnews.com/news/twitter-prices-ipo-at-26-a-share... before the wave of demand pushed its higher. Unless someone was acquired in a largely stock-based transaction during the short period of time TWTR was in sub-$70 range, the trip has been relatively stable.
Twitter's problem is not really revenue; the ads and other sources are working (they'll probably announce over $2 billion in 2015 revenue). Their problem is that Facebook has trained Wall Street to look at Monthly Active Users as a core metric and Twitter's user growth and retention doesn't match up well compared to FB.
Twitter execs have been trying to underscore their "logged-out users", as in views on embedded tweets and other pageviews, and are adding ads in those places.
If they retrain Wall Street to value logged out users, then they will have to accept a much lower valuation as the new norm.
Twitter's IPO valuation was based on persuading the market that they were another Facebook, i.e. a sticky platform that would extend out to solve problems in varied industries.
I agree that their media business is really solid. They acquired TellApart, Mopub, and a bunch of smart ad tech people.
The problem is that a solid media business is not what investors were hoping for. If that's Twitter's new story then they're a well-equipped media/ad tech company -- another AOL, Yahoo, or even Criteo. Those are real companies that generate revenue but they're not the sorts of companies able to recruit top-level talent, retain and empower their acquired talent or garner 10x valuations.
> Those are real companies that generate revenue but they're not the sorts of companies able to recruit top-level talent, retain and empower their acquired talent or garner 10x valuations.
That kind of sums up the current bubble, doesn't it?
Why do Facebook's metrics matter when talking about Twitter? Just because Facebook and Twitter are both social networking sites does not mean they are comparable.
Twitter should not have gone public, or at least not at the valuation it did. I think those who invested just wanted to ride Facebook's coattails, assuming that a new "social networking" bubble could be created and investing in any such company would be an easy buck. Surprise! You actually need to evaluate a company's individual merits, rather than expecting that any Silicon Valley IPO is a guaranteed windfall success.
And how in the world does Twitter have 4300 employees? The product should be sustainable with less than 10% of that.
"And how in the world does Twitter have 4300 employees? The product should be sustainable with less than 10% of that."
Assumption for this comment: many of them are working in engineering.
I have thought about this for some years. I have no explaination yet, some hypothesis though. Many CEOs and VCs think engineering is key. CEOs don't know how many engineers they need. So often they have as many as they can afford and are rarely challenged for that. I've seen many companies where I look at a Kanban/Scrum board for the features and think "Hu? This is what they working on?", a lot of features have no impact. Number of features seems to be a function of number of engineers not number of good ideas (with impact). So there is no downward pressure on the number of engineers, work fills the over capacity. This leads to 4300 employees.
But far from sure, still wondering about that mystery of high employee numbers of many companies.
Trying to rework Twitter into a profitable company does not seem like an enviable position. How do folks see Twitter becoming sustainably profitable, without tactics that will alienate their userbase?
They've tried ads (promoted tweets), which doesn't seem to have worked well. They've tried analytics targeted at high-end users/companies, which doesn't seem to have much traction (though it does seem both useful and unobtrusive).
Paid accounts? What features would such an account have that free accounts wouldn't?
Longer tweets? That'll certainly change the culture drastically, but not necessarily for the better.
Richer content? Likewise.
Twitter seems like the contemporary company with the most valuable yet least profitable product.
Twitter has annual revenue of $1.4 billion. You really can't figure out how to be profitable on that?
That seems to signal a lack of creativity. Twitter has nearly 4,000 employees—there is simply no way you need that many employees to run their core services.
Twitter has already done some layoffs, but they could stand to do plenty more. They really don't need more than 1,000 employees.
The company was built with the idea that it'd be the next Facebook but there doesn't seem to be any path to that happening. They need to accept their market position and optimize on profiting from it. Fortunately, unlike Facebook, their core user experience is much simpler and should require way fewer engineers.
There's only so much fat you can trim. Even if you managed to automate everything, fired everyone and just let Jack run it on his own, you're looking at a max of $1.5b profit/year. With no prospect for growth that $12B market cap is going to collapse very rapidly.
Right now they are trying to find other niches to fill so they can continue to grow, they are just not doing it very successfully.
If they actually got to $1.5b annual earnings, they could definitely justify a $12b cap. A P/E of 8 would be ridiculously low for the technology industry—heck, for any industry.
I'm not enthusiastic about Twitter and certainly wouldn't buy the stock, but the company also definitely isn't "worthless." There's certainly a path to profitability.
You would only have to pay out 360 million a year to shareholders on a market cap of 12B to get a 3% dividend yield. It may not be sexy, especially in Silicon Valley, but Twitter could be a perfectly viable company.
But that's the problem they have - the market is/was bought in on the basis that this is a $40bn company (or more), the price reflects an massive upside belief, but the reality is $12b is about right.
So - sack a lot of people, cut costs, hold cash in the business and disappoint investors... Will the investors wear that though?
I disagree. For one thing, a P/E of 8 is standard for industries which most think are either declining or entirely stable. Benjamin Graham used 8.5 as a "no-growth" P/E so it's hardly insane. [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benjamin_Graham_formula
Moreover, even without feature expansion, I do think Twitter will see growth, though that growth will be minimal. At the very least they stand to benefit from the ever-increasing number of people on the internet.
A P/E of 8, in today's interest rate environment, means the company is actually failing and you're buying a decreasing future stream of revenue. Out of the S&P 500, there are four companies with P/E below 8 (Delta, Noble Corp (oil rigs), Yahoo, and Valero (oil again)).
Keep in mind that a lot of their costs are rapidly declining as the stock price goes down. This is the piece of a GAAP earnings statement that doesn't make a lot of sense to me. If the market loves what they're doing, and the stock goes up, then what they were paying people suddenly becomes unreasonable, and they get hammered for not controlling costs? I just don't get it.
Anyway, I sold all the shares I could at $51, and then sold everything else at $31, so I clearly didn't feel like the price was worth that, but $12B for the company seems a little low to me. Given current news is likely to be taken as a reason to sell, it wouldn't surprise me at all to see the company get bought. Which I guess could push the stock up a little bit, like it did last week, but it would take months of that to get people's compensation back to where it was with RSUs that were handed out a year ago.
Investors compare earnings quality across all sectors. Very very few companies trade at 8x revenue. Tech companies typically get a premium because they usually are quasi monopolies (See MSFT at 4x EV/Rev) and have solid growth rates. If you're not adding users, it means your growth is in question; how do you then justify an 8x multiple?
For reference most run of the mill companies trade somewhere around 1x revenue.
Why would their costs go down rapidly; stock based comp? Typically stock based comp has a strike price lower than the current share price. So they save but maybe not as much as the stock price collapse might suggest. Also, they'd still be unprofitable. A lot of professional investors feel they should cut costs, focus on periscope, and start making money off the new organisations that make money off of having access to information now. Things like charging the times and the journal for a live feed from ground action in Syria.
No. There are basically 5 ways make more money as a company. Professional investors usually have a better handle on these than the companies themselves.
Time and time again, companies come up with supply driven theses that give birth to products that fail. Demand driven products succeed. Knowing when to engage in M&A, sell assets, cut costs, expand to new markets and engage in corporate actions requires judgement that few companies have. It's not always about iterating on the product you already have.
Facebook understands this which is why they have made several key acquisitions. They're looking to be the home of the best innovations in social media; whether it comes from internal sources or external teams.
In Twitter's case, they have hit the limit of mind share in most markets. Everyone knows about it; few on the margin have incentives to sign up. Periscope has potential if data costs come down.
Being able to enumerate a list of classes can be helpful for categorizing a set of actions into a framework, but it doesn't give you much insight into whether or not a particular action is likely to produce the effect you're looking for. In the specific case of Twitter, I think stopping product development on Twitter the product would be a losing strategy. Keep in mind Periscope has at least in part been successful because it can piggy-back on the Twitter network. That network is not a static asset, it must be invested in to continue to hold value.
Your assertions are based on? Intuition? Mine are backed by data from market studies. Twitter is a known quantity and those who haven't signed up don't because they don't have a need to. Social networks are valuable because of the type and quantity of people there. You can do many things to monetize that. Not much you can do when that number doesn't grow. Notice the stock has fallen despite revenue growth being spectacular.
This is why people in industry don't always make it as CEOs. Knowing which game to play is key. Thinking like an investor is key too. Don't take it from me; take it from Buffett.
As an investor, I've made north of $5M on Twitter stock. At this point I hold 0 -- because I believe MAUs are dead in the water. I believe they'll be acquired and become a footnote in history.
I think making tweets more readable would help a lot. I think pulling @ addresses, hashtags, and URLS out of the body would give every tweet more breathing room and make more sense to an everyday user.
Then I've read heaps of great ideas here on HN about how they should be leveraging the real-time stream to be the go to place for what is going on for any issue.
What I don't understand is why nothing is changing, I've only been a twitter user for a few years but I've never seen anything change. I think they need to be pumping out lots of little experimental tools for finding, consuming and creating tweets.
"Last year, Twitter effectively admitted that it needed third-party developers ... For anyone who had worked with Twitter in the past, however, this was a little bit like Fox Inc. asking for chicken volunteers to help it build a new hen-house. As far as I can tell, there’s little or no evidence that Twitter’s outreach program is working. What would Twitter be like today if it had embraced its ecosystem and tried to build on it instead of cutting it off at the knees? ... I think it would have a lot more goodwill to spend — both with developers and with users — than it does now, and I think many aspects of the service that it is now trying to build up, including smart recommendations and curation, would be a lot better off with outside input than they are now."
Then go back to the stream and find yourself at the top of the page. Have fun scrolling down to where you were. I get it, pagination is totally 1999. But isn't there some JavaScript solution to this?
Agreed; while the current time-ordered view works OK for some purposes, a quick toggle to threaded conversations would help massively when reading a large set of replies.
I'm inclined to say the best thing they could do would be scaling down expectations of bubble-level returns and focusing on value rather than screwing with the core service trying for unrealistic returns. The problem is that this would require compensating executives less and we live in a era obsessed with short-term returns.
> 5. AMA-style Q & As
> 6. Chat/AI services and integrations
This actually makes me wonder: if you increase or remove the length limits, how well would Twitter work as a private chat platform?
Because compared to the terrible internal "social platform" sites that some large companies run on their intranets, a company-wide private version of Twitter actually seems like a significant improvement. Use lists (including shared lists) as an equivalent to rooms or groups. That would give three different types of streams: your main feed (people you follow from across the company), the groups you watch or participate in (where most of the productive value comes from), and the firehose (to sample what's going on across the whole company).
As a bonus, if you add in a form of federated accounts, this could allow businesses paying for such a service to have a family of verified accounts on the public Twitter, all tied to their domain (similar to email addresses).
This is basically how Yammer was introduced, as "Twitter for the enterprise". I think the Slack model makes a lot more sense in most work contexts, though Yammer may be an okay addition in a big enough company.
The idea may not be too far-fetched as Facebook actually does have an enterprise product, Facebook At Work. I think Twitter is too focused on other things to try it though.
Imagine "Enterprise Twitter", something like Yammer and Slack. I use Yammer at work and it is worse than Twitter in every way, except it has no post length limits and you can create groups. Without the annoyance of spammers, Enterprise Twitter could implement new features like following #hashtags. Twitter needs to fix their threading UI, though.
Facebook has a "Facebook at Work" enterprise product and, from what I hear, the company dogfoods its own platform for work as an alternative to email and mailing lists.
6b. "Customer support in a box" services for companies that use Twitter to find and help customers with problems.
7. Micropayments: Twitter could monetize Likes using a Flattr-like micropayment system. Just add a "tip" button next to the heart button, to pay the tweet author $0.01. It could create a virtuous cycle of more tweets, more tweeters, and more idle funds in tip accounts for Twitter to reinvest elsewhere.
A slightly different UI for digesting the firehose. With ads embedded directly into your twitter stream, it's so easy to just gloss over ads. Hell, it's so easy to skip past quality tweets as well since there is just so much coming through. I'm not sure what this new interface should be, just that there needs to be a different way to sift through tweets.
I doubt they need to increase revenue. They have billions. What they need to do is reduce costs. I have no idea what they look like internally, but I have never seen a company of their size that cannot be streamlined.
> Longer tweets? That'll certainly change the culture drastically, but not necessarily for the better.
Charging for longer tweets (either a flat amount or per char over 140) may be a good source of additional revenue. The majority of "normal" users wouldn't take advantage it, but many businesses probably would.
This would have the advantage of removing the char limit when people want to (enough to pay for it) but without drastically changing the culture since the majority of tweets would presumably still be under 140.
Something obvious: offer an easy way to pay (even $ 5) for increasing their API limits. Google did it with AdWords while Yahoo required you to pay many thousands upfront.
I'm of the camp that it's just not possible. Given their demographic and model, I don't see how this company ever makes enough money to justify any valuation.
It's an electronic wasteland and not the kind that makes money. I don't see how that ever changes.
Charge people with followers. $10 per month if you have > 10K followers, $100 for > 100K followers, and so on. You charge as you are allowing them to broadcast
I have zero data to back this up, but I would say that this will damage you more than help.
If even a smallish percentage of key athletes/celebs/whatevers move exclusively to Instagram or something else, it would seriously disrupt Twitter. IG would love that, in fact.
Plus, how many people with over 10k actual followers are there really? Is $120/year times that number really going to make a difference for the business? Seems cheap and risky simultaneously.
It will be interesting to pull out some numbers here to see how the model looks. Is there a way to find out how many people have more than 10k followers? Politicians and celebs are getting access to their fans and followers. I think that kind of access should not be free especially when celebs are promoting their apps, music, etc.
Well, that might deal with "buying followers". But my personal pet idea for paying for twitter would be something like reddit gold: a slight premium tier, but not necessarily paid for by the account holder. Encourage people to pay for the accounts of people they like. Heck, provide a "micro" donation system alongside it (although this runs into problems, Twitch passim)
Also, a lot of people would like a better anti-abuse system and some might be prepared to pay for it.
Really? You actually think Twitter has negative value as a company?
They have real revenue. Fire everyone except a few dozen employees to maintain the core services/ads. That'll let you collect at least $100 million in profit.
At a valuation of <$1 billion, Twitter would be a bargain.
Good point, I used the wrong word there. Meant any valuation remotely near where they are. $12B? LOL no way. $1B, sure.
I agree with your plan and would likely run the company like that -- except "just maintaining" a social network sounds like a long-term recipe for disaster too.
The share price would also tank with that plan, which of course won't fly being a public corporation. This is why they're in such a rough place.
Twitter is actually cash flow positive. The main reason they show an GAAP loss is because of stock based comp. Take that out of the equation and they are cash flow positive and pretty profitable.
I've always said / thought the same, but they're still around. I know some people on the ad sales team, and I know how hard they work. They might be struggling and not thriving, but they're not out just yet.
I'm surprised with the amount of gloom around Twitter, as I feel like there are some fairly obvious ways they can improve the core product, and with the recent management overhauls, a distinct chance it will happen.
Would these future innovations alienate their userbase? Well do we have evidence they alienated the userbase previously. I doubt it.
While we can point to scores of #ragetweets about how Twitter is finished, finished, because they have replaced hearts with favorites, those complaints last about 2 days. Another example would be how embedded images would destroy Twitter (people said the same when Mosaic introduced images to the web in around 1994, as far as they were concerned, the internet had jumped the shark).
The fact is, Twitter has managed to slowly add features like hashtags and images without changing the essence of the product, engaged users will stick around if they keep doing so. I'd acknowledge that the one last negative sentiment was one close to HN's heart - the developer/API issues - and they still have to iron that out (so far, @Jack's #HelloWorld initiative from three months ago hasn't yielded). But I'm thinking more about features they can add to the core product.
Fairly obvious, and I think impactful, innovations we will see are:
* Long-form tweets - The 140 limit is confusing to Twitter newcomers. Meanwhile, Medium shows the power of a clean publishing platform where anyone can say something important without having to setup a blog and feel the obligation to keep posting. It helps them find an audience. Twitter has a giant ready population of people with interesting things to say and many of them are already using Twitter to say it, in less than ideal ways (too-long Tweetstorms, screenshots, linking to pastebins and 3rd party long tweet services). Designed right, I think they can introduce this with minimal impact on the normal experience and suddenly become a giant source of substantial content.
* Video - Similar argument to long-form tweets. They have a ready population of potential video makers and can easily find videos an audience. I imagine a lot of people discover YouTube videos from Twitter now; those could be directly served by Twitter in the future.
* Curation - Twitter's model of showing every tweet from every friend is archaic and doesn't serve the needs of most users. If I haven't logged in for 2 days, do I really need to see a blast of trivial tweets from 5 minutes ago? They have made some attempts to improve this (e.g. "While you were away" highlights, which so far are mediocre), but can do a lot more, e.g. showing most relevant/popular tweets from friends (see: Nuzzel) and going beyond just friends' tweets/retweets if something is relevant enough. I know moving to a Facebook-like filtered stream will enrage some hardcore users, so they would need to do so carefully and maybe with settings to keep it the old way, etc. ... but I think it will be a big quality boost for most users and also make native ads more effective.
* Apps - The official apps aren't exactly loved and lack consistency (e.g. Tweetdeck and several other official apps still can't render polls, an important mainline feature for a while now). A savvy product team could improve these across the board.
There are a lot more possibilities, and those are just features related to the core product, leaving aside monetisation opportunities such as buy buttons. Twitter has already moved in some of these directions and the signs are @Jack is intent on accelerating that effort.
A potential acquisition of Slack and cutting number of employees to < 1000 are 2 things that come to mind. Owning slack opens up other potential streams of revenue in the enterprise space. Or allow twitter users to form groups/rooms on twitter ala Slack.
Twitter can't afford Slack. Twitter's market cap is ~12B. There is no way in hell that Slack would sell for less than 10B. They probably wouldn't even sell for that much.
Is Slack, unprofitable w/ $30MM yearly revenue[1], really worth almost as much as Twitter, unprofitable w/ almost $2BN yearly revenue? That's a lot of growth to account for.
Probably. Allowing people to create chat rooms/channels is another possibility, and allows them to enter the enterprise collaboration space. Competes easily with HipChat and Slack. Most people already have twitter accounts, so groups of people can collaborate on the fly.
1. Lack of clear product vision
2. Bad execution. Look at Facebook's execution in the last 3 years. Messenger, Sports Stadium, etc.
3. Potentially another re-architecture?
Actually, the insane amount of advertising and media groups on Facebook have pushed me to Twitter, and it's very refreshing. I'll be moving away from everything but FB Messenger (imo their best product).
I see some comments talking about Twitter employee population is too big, is there any statistics about what the percentage is for each department?
Despite the fact I agree the population is quite large, but I can guess at least 30% are marketing folks, 20% are HR and process people, and then the rest are developers. Twitter has done a number of acquisitions. I don't know how many people are running Vine in production today, but my understanding is their NY core team is still quite small. However, given Twitter has launched so many products (including all of the background projects they did to support their production), I won't be surprise if they have at least 10% of their entire engineering force doing infrastructure and operation, and then 40% divided into core product like Twitter, internal application developers, security, solution engineers, etc.
When a new CEO is in charge, some layoff and some re-org usually happen. Some projects have to be closed, some have to be sunset, and some have to be merged. Let see how much they can trim down. It usually take a year to complete the evaluations and projecting new positions.
Twitter is actually the only "social network" that I use daily and find real value in so I really hope they can get their act together somehow.
Just a few more random thoughts... Twitter's biggest asset is its core product and they should not meddle too much with it. And I think they should be able to make a company profitable with just that.
Even though the product itself is really simple, there are many use cases of it that are not all easily transformed into revenue and probably not so easy to communicate to investors.
Its basically a platform that enables a new form of communication. Different people use it for different purposes. Companies use it for different purposes. Traditional media gets lots of their content from Twitter nowadays.
Mimicking Facebook in any way would be a mistake because I think it's a fundamentally different product.
It seems it's Jan 2000 all over now. Reading old comments from that time, it seemed obvious in late 1999 yet not everyone got it. For example check out the one and two star review comments (1999-2001) on this page: http://www.amazon.com/Internet-Bubble-The-Anthony-Perkins/pr...
> This book was a huge disappointment. The authors try to draw parallels between the current high-tech/Internet phenomenon and previous "manias." However, their rational is very poor. As an example, they say the Internet Bubble will burst just like biotechnology did. What they fail to mention is that Internet usage and penetration has grown faster than anything in the history of mankind. Furthermore, Internet companies are posting revenues and mainly losing money because it is a market share game right now. Biotech companies, on the other hand, never had any revenue until they had a drug on the market. They only focus on the negatives and don't provide both sides of the story. This type of faulty reasoning is why I believe your money would be better spent on other Internet books.
We are right back to the "share game". Although profits are in a better place, and there do appear to be strong winners today, the companies making money (Google and Facebook) are doing so at the expense of companies who are losing money ta make market share, which makes the whole thing feel like a giant house of cards.
The bad reviews on that book seem legitimate (e.g. Doomsdaying without specifics so it's difficult to pin down their point). Anyone can constantly publish that the market is in a bubble and then just wait until it goes down and claim they were right. It's completely worthless in that regard because early doomsdaying are worse for investors than getting into the market.
In hindsight it's always easy. You know what, the book authors wrote the book in 1999 for the general public, the average joe who bought tech stock without much knowledge. Many insiders from the valley knew about the bubble, yet your grandma in Texas never heard about it in 1999 or Jan/Feb2000. That's why that book helped lot's of people to get out of it, right before the crash - it doesn't matter when the crash happen, a few months before is better than a months too late, isn't it? Well the one amd two star reviewers thought they were clever or were heavily invested insiders (like you/other downvoter now?). Petty for them that those probably lost their money. It's always good to learn from history.
Which, while slightly off topic, reminds me: does Twitter do automated resume checking? I applied some time back at 3am for a job I was more than qualified for and got a rejection almost instantly. I thought maybe it was an automated system so I tweaked my resume and resubmitted and it was rejected again almost instantly.
Really put me off from ever trying again considering that I met the requirements listed and it declined me saying I did not. I had an indirect way to send a resume through some friends but decided not to bother after that.
Since this is a leak and not official (yet) we're not sure whose choice this is. If it's Twitters (Jack) then it's probably a good move to get fresh product/engineering talent in to change things up.
