
Twitter’s First CTO Greg Pass Steps Down - ankimal
http://techcrunch.com/2011/05/20/twitters-first-cto-greg-pass-steps-down/
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michaelpinto
When put next to how far Facebook has come in the same amount of time, Twitter
really feels like a shadow of what it should be in terms of adding new feature
sets and even stability. The potential to be great is still there, but they
could also be the next MySpace if they don't start to play catch up.

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blantonl
Frankly, I believe that Twitter is already great. They have an enormous user
base and the participation is off the charts.

The problem is, I cannot for the life of me see how this platform is able to
monetize itself into a viable, hugely profitable business. Granted, Twitter
now is a profitable business, but my understanding that a significant part of
their revenue comes from search agreements from Google.

So, how does Twitter expect to drive _significant PROFIT growth_ on a
foundation defined by 160 character sentences?

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SpikeGronim
Purchasing a 50% random sample of all tweets in real time is reported to be
$360,000 per year [1]. Apparently you can get the 100% feed for a negotiated
price. If they can sell many licenses for those feeds, which I think that they
can, they have the potential for real profit growth. I too was very skeptical
of Twitter's profit potential until this service launched.

1\.
[http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/twitter_to_sell_50_of_a...](http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/twitter_to_sell_50_of_all_tweets_for_360kyear_thro.php)

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tptacek
Do the math on this in your head --- many/most? of the Global 2k don't need a
full Twitter feed; what's US Gypsum gonna do with it? --- and you're left with
a total addressable market that doesn't come close to justifying their
purported valuation.

I'm not being down on Twitter. Just, whatever the monetization plan is, this
can't be it.

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angryasian
it may be just me, but I don't see how losing ev williams, jack dorsey is
really at Square even though they say he's still there (I wonder what really
his involvement at twitter is or more of a morale thing) and now loss of Greg
Pass, is positive for twitter. For such a huge, emerging quasi
startup/business, it smells like trouble to me when everyone responsible for
building the site is jumping ship so early.

they are just now focusing on making money, and the man running twitter gave
us the dickbar. Just none of this sounds promising to me.

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x5315
Firstly, Jack is at Twitter every day.

Secondly, we're not just focused on making money. There are many teams at
Twitter working on many amazing things unrelated to a financial goal.

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drewvolpe
There might be good work going on there, but, us users, see little progress in
the last few years. Facebook is only two years older than twitter and, in
addition to a basic status feed has added an amazing amount of functionality:
photos, groups, apps, a very powerful ad system, etc. All the while, it's had
a very high uptime and reliability.

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x5315
Twitter solves an elementally different problem to Facebook, which may lead to
the disparity in features that you see and has previously caused issues with
scalability. The Twitter engineering blog (<http://engineering.twitter.com/>)
details some of the fundamental systems development we've been doing to solve
these issues and give us a better platform.

From this, we can launch better products. I can't go into specifics, but
there's some really good stuff coming in the future.

