
Twitter is not dying. It’s on the cusp of getting much bigger - smacktoward
http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2014/05/twitter_is_not_dying_it_s_on_the_cusp_of_getting_much_bigger.single.html
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aaronbrethorst
I'm inclined to agree. I originally planned to not invest in Twitter until the
lockup expiration next week, but tossed in a bit of money in November of last
year. My investment increased by about 50% until a couple weeks ago when it
ended up in negative territory. On the off chance that Twitter's last
quarterly earnings ended up being awesome, I bought another chunk of stock on
the afternoon before they reported. It immediately went down 10%, and so I
bought some more.

I'm now excitedly looking forward to getting to triple(?) down on my
investment with the lockup expiration on the 6th. Call Twitter a social
network, or whatever you feel like. I think it's essentially part of the
fabric of the Internet today, and far less replaceable than something like
Facebook, despite the significantly smaller user base. I'm bullish—and very
long—on TWTR.

~~~
gfodor
I think I disagree. Twitter's economic moat seems very narrow. From a user's
perspective it's just a pub/sub messaging system. Facebook has a much deeper
set of features. It feels very much like Twitter can be replaced by a
decentralized, open alternative if executed well. If Twitter's ads start to
get annoying enough, or the network itself becomes full of trash, people will
be ready for an alternative at some point. (And in general, these types of
networked messaging services fall in and out of favor every 5-7 years or so it
seems.) I don't think the same holds true for Facebook (which has been tried
before and failed.)

But I look at something like the bitcoin blockchain and wonder if that concept
is just a few conceptual degrees from something that could replace the twitter
stream. In 5-10 years will we be using twitter or will all devices just have a
way to broadcast out into the ether, with a 'distributed ledger' of messages
maintained by agents on the network?

I'm almost certain there is someone tooling away on this right now, the
question is will they be able to make it accessible and easy to migrate onto
from twitter.

~~~
wellboy
Very unlikely to happen. Traction is such a huge factor why people use social
networks that outweighs all the features such as ad-free or better usability
by the amount of 10 probably.

Twitter needs to f up big time to lose its current popularity.

~~~
gfodor
AIM, MySpace, Friendster, etc beg to differ.

~~~
wellboy
Yeah because they f-ed up big time by not innovating.

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diego
There's an unusual amount of bullish articles about Twitter's stock these
days, and one must wonder if it's related to the post-IPO lockup expiration
coming up next week.

[http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2014/05/01/the-
end-o...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2014/05/01/the-end-of-the-
twitter-stock-lock-up-isnt-a-good-reason-to-sell-twitter-stock-now/)

~~~
fizx
The quarterly earnings call just happened, TWTR got roasted, and we all love
contrarian articles.

~~~
bhouston
These things do not just happen, there is usually a good PR firm behind these
types of coincidences, probably pitching it as "everyone loves contrarian
articles and don't I have a good one for you."

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aspidistra
> Don’t be surprised to see Twitter become more YouTube-like, turning its home
> page into a real-time news platform accessible to anyone, whether they’re
> logged in or not.

I'm sure the home page (i.e. twitter.com) _was_ like this at one point. There
was a search box, a list of top tweets, some featured accounts, and a
(scrolling?) list of top and trending hashtags for the region you were viewing
the page from.

edit - Wayback Machine capture of what I mean, from Nov 2010:

[https://web.archive.org/web/20101102183624/http://twitter.co...](https://web.archive.org/web/20101102183624/http://twitter.com/)

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caseyf7
Ok, so Twitter should be valued as a media platform instead of as a social
network. Wall Street is still going to let out a collective ugh oh when they
realize they gave an RSS platform a $22 Billion valuation.

~~~
adventured
Recently a $40 billion valuation. It was trading at a _mere_ 60 times sales or
so.

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bsder
Well, if the float is only 70 million out of 600 million available, the lock
expiration is likely to dramatically increase the float. Since it doesn't look
like Twitter has pent up buyers demand, that's likely to wallop the stock.

Or, if you are feeling uncharitable, what better way to make all your
employees hold onto their stock than to crash its price right before they can
cash out their options (presumably a lot of that 600 million shares had to be
allocated to service options).

~~~
colinbartlett
Wait, you can't really "make" someone hold onto their stock, can you? Like
have a condition for continued employment be don't sell?

I'm guessing it will just be market forces: a bunch of twenty- and thirty-
somethings with credit card debt or an eye on Tesla deciding weather to cash
in those pieces of paper.

~~~
bsder
You assume those people have _stock_. That is very unlikely to be true. Most
of those people have stock _options_. Very different.

An option means that I can _buy_ a share of stock at some guaranteed price
(strike price). So, I would actually have to cough up the money to buy the
share. Only after that, do I now own a share of stock that I can transact as
such.

If the strike price is above what the stock currently sells for, I probably do
not want to exercise the option. If the strike price is close to the option
price, I probably would rather hang on to the option until the price rises
some more. The option doesn't cost anything until I exercise it (or lose it,
most options have a time limit) so I mitigate risk by waiting.

So, unless the stock price is above the option strike price+some margin,
people won't transact.

My uncharitable speculation was: What better way to keep everybody from
flooding the market with Twitter shares than to drive the price down enough to
keep people from wanting to cash out their current options.

To be fair, the depression in Twitter is probably just everybody getting a
shock that "Gee, Internet companies can actually saturate a market and run out
of growth."

Amazon got zapped recently (imagine, adding sales tax to their prices dropped
their sales). Google and Apple are showing some signs of deceleration (ad
revenue is slipping because smartphones have saturated all markets with real
money--so now everybody is actually chasing a competitor's customer rather
than bringing in new users).

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seren
It seems the crux of the article's argument is that Twitter is primarily a
great tool for influential people to reach a wide audience. It is a sound
argument. However, what will happen if these key people jump to the next big
thing ? It seems like a pretty fragile strategy for the long term.

~~~
rhizome
I believe a lot of the major players these days to be pretty fragile. All it
takes is a good privacy policy and a "sign in with Twitter" button to move a
person's environment over. Sure, you lose your messaging history, but I doubt
that's a dealbreaker for a lot of people. All it takes is a crappy enough
experience to motivate people to pick another corner to hang out and gab.

~~~
ronaldx
In my experience, "sign in with Twitter" acts as a significant barrier because
people don't actually know their Twitter password.

~~~
rhizome
You know what I mean: it's a solved problem to transfer your addressbook or
contact list to a new service.

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mrweasel
It's always weird to read article like this. The focus is always on "number of
users" and stock prices, but rarely are we told is a company is making money.

From the article: "direct timeline views by logged-in users are the form of
engagement that Twitter can most readily turn into money."

To me that seems to be the problem, Twitter can't readily turn logged-in users
in to money.

Just like with Facebook is pretty hard to tell how Twitter is suppose to make
a decent profit.

~~~
adventured
Not sure where Facebook fits in there. They're earning a massive profit, and a
roughly 25% net income margin. Have you seen their latest quarterlies?

Revenue was $2.50 billion, up 72% vs Q1 2013. GAAP income from operations was
$1.08 billion, up 188% compared to $373 million in the first quarter of 2013.
GAAP operating margin was 43% for the first quarter of 2014, compared to 26%
in the first quarter of 2013. GAAP net income was $642 million, up 193%
compared to $219 million for the first quarter of 2013.

I'm skeptical Twitter can replicate Facebook's results due to the difference
in the engagement, but it was never hard to imagine Facebook monetizing a
billion highly active users via ads (just on volume alone).

~~~
bsder
Much like Google, Facebook has been squeezing the advertisers rather than
generating more/better impressions.

Revenue from advertising numbers for the endpoints (company with product to
end consumer) are down across the industry, and _everybody_ is trying to hide
it. Once it becomes general knowledge, the advertising spend is going to drop
and take the numbers from both Google and Facebook with it.

From my personal experience: I always run AdBlock/NoScript. I am _APPALLED_ by
web surfing when I don't have those. If I'm stuck on an iPad or my Galaxy, I
want to hurl the pad across the room after 15 minutes. I have uninstalled apps
just because the advertising was so intrusive (to be fair--those app
developers don't want me either--I'm not the fish that will make their
revenue).

So, now, I absolutely will not use web browsers on phones/pads unless I'm
desperate (at which point ads will actively piss me off instead of get me to
buy). Good job, advertisers. You've now ensured that you absolutely cannot
reach me.

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brc
I have read about 3 articles in the last few days which say the complete
opposite. Including a 'Eulogy for Twitter'.

I don't know who is right. I know I find Twitter has become a mess lately,
with fewer people putting original thought into it, and more people using it
as a 'I can yell louder than you' platform.

I think considered thought, breaking news and wry humor is the only suitable
content for twitter. But that's just me.

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jeffmanu
The one reason I think Twitter will be valuable for a while is that there
whole concept of getting your news in less than 200 characters will always be
more appealing than many of the other options available. The future will
center around focus.

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snorkel
Seems like the article is wrestling with the semantics of "active user" and
wants to focus on counting passive users instead. Either way, the audience
size is the audience size, and growth generally means growth in audience size.

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jpswade
When someone explicitly says something is not dying, it makes me think it
probably is...

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danielweber
Separate the platform from the business.

The platform will continue on. The business is in great doubt.

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therealarmen
From what I can tell, Instagram is eating Twitter's lunch:

[http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=instagram%2C%20twitte...](http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=instagram%2C%20twitter)

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Freestyler_3
A media platform without any potential audience is as usefull as a big paper
add in a newspaper that never got published, but a few collectors got their
hands on it.

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eddanger
So now is a good time to invest... got it.

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antidaily
Finances and stock prices aside, I can't imagine what would replace it. At
least for me.

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marincounty
read 9780132302340 before investing.

~~~
mapleoin
What are you, a robot?

[http://www.isbnsearch.org/isbn/9780132302340](http://www.isbnsearch.org/isbn/9780132302340)

