Well, you certainly own it well:
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They’re a business not a software product. They’re a business with ~300 million users who post 500,000 tweets a day and are pushing around 100MB/sec of dynamically generated content 24/7 through their web/mobile clients. They have a website, mobile apps, app services/APIs, an ad service, and analytics running with millions of connections to various services constantly running. They also have to have a support staff for ~300 million users (though they certainly skimp there). They also are big enough to need sales/marketing/HR and the rest.
If they had 1,000 users they could get by on a tiny staff, but scaling is hard, and requires more people not just for engineering but for the rest of the business.
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Gosh, if only they had users!!!
Whoah, they have users!
Twitter is not the story of mad stacks of VC money and crickets chirping. As the stats attest above, Twitter is used heavily, and generates heavy revenue. It’s just that not everything is aligned. Going back to the beginning, Twitter has had multiple visions of itself, and bloody internal fighting.
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LOL I thought you hacked me for a second.
Did you not use capitalization and punctuation to make my eye twitch?
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#i 4M lee7 h4x0R, Phe4R MeH!
I used the magic of Crtl-c, Ctrl-v
Firefox (and probably Chrome, and others?) allows you to edit pages in-the-browser, which is sometimes fun.
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Oh god.
Twitter was the only thing Trump could use to let off steam at 3 am.
As president, all he’ll have left to relieve stress is the nuclear button.
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I assume the FLOTUS account will just retweet its old posts.
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To keep up with the people I’m interested in, to stay informed about things of interest to me, and to disgust and appall people with photoshops of political candidates with mouths where their eyes should be.
(I also do this here)
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Ah - Firebug? I have to use that to test this one site at work. Irks me beyond belief.[quote=“Quinquennial, post:90, topic:88135”]
Twitter was the only thing Trump could use to let off steam at 3 am.
[/quote]
Never fear. If Twitter keeps going down hill, even Trump will be able to afford to buy them out.
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Twitter = T(rump)+wit+t(o)+e(xcite/ntertain/nergize/nervate/xasperate)+r(epublicans/ejects/iffraff/ebels/your-r-word-of-choice)
He doesn’t need Trump TV, he’s got more followers than does his Worthy Competitor, and he’s already paid Twitter to bypass Adblocker* with promoted political tweets.
Maybe he should buy Twitter. Its level of discourse at present is a comfortable one for him.
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I… didn’t say anything of the kind? I said that they allowed themselves to be persuaded that, because they have something, they must have something they, or human civilisation, actually wanted.
Yes, Twitter is popular. And when products that cost something are popular, it’s a safe bet that they are (a) genuinely desirable and (b) likely to make money. But when something costs nothing to use, neither conclusions is directly implied. History has yet to judge Twitter on (b), and is leaning the wrong way on (a). Just because some investors (i.e. professional gamblers) had a good feeling about Twitter’s popularity, doesn’t mean it was a good idea to build it out into a massive cash-burning piece of infrastructure before having good answers to these questions.
It remains to be seen how Twitter’s story will compare with that of subway graffiti, which is in many ways a brilliantly insightful and good-looking analogy for me to have thought up.
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It costs time and it costs attention - opportunity costs are costs.
Back in the 90s the Coca Cola corporation said their #1 wasn’t Pepsi, it was water. Lo and behold, they monetized that ducker to the moon and back.
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They are completely bloated and should be looking at bigger staff cuts than this.
Can you give your back of the envelope calculations for how they are bloated and how much staff they should have? Please show your work. 
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So bloated that they want to sell their company to someone who can magically turn a profit from it, cut enough staff that they can magically turn a profit from it.
That’s not a number and that’s not showing your work. Frankly, you sound like an armchair guy with an opinion but not any actual information. How many people does twitter need to run? What if that is less than your scenario? They cut staff to cut costs and then can’t support their service. There is a reason that these kinds of services are startups and focus on growth and then being bought by companies that can afford to support them. Twitter doesn’t charge you for an account, which is part of why it is ubiquitous with certain groups.
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Frankly, you sound like you are spoiling for a fight.
It was certainly an off the cuff observation. I gather it doesn’t meet with your high standards for tech business commentary in the BBS.
You are free to ignore it and not bother me anymore.
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Well, unlike you (I suspect) I work in tech, have for decades, work at startups, and know people who work at Twitter. Do you? I think my “opinion,” while that, is a tad more informed about how these companies work and pay people, as well as what it takes to run them.
By all means, tell us how twitter is bloated and should reform itself. Actually do that instead of throwing off insightful things like “They’re too big and should cut staff because I say so.”
Sorry but that isn’t how an open forum works.
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OK, so how is Twitter going to turn a profit? Anyone who realistically has an interest in buying them is out. Google is the best fit and they don’t really need the data.
You tell me, what are their options other than dramatically downsizing?
You want the Twitter business plan? Great. I’m not a VC though.
That said, when you have a service used by, literally, hundreds of millions of people monthly, there are ways to make money off of that. It is a decision about how they want to do so. Twitter has been hyperfocused on “growth” as a metric because that’s what the VCs and other investors wanted them to focus on. They can focus on other things to achieve sustainability. Facebook managed the same trick. Yammer sold itself to Microsoft. There are options.
I’m still waiting for your estimations of acceptable staffing with numbers.
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