
Twitter’s multibillion-dollar mistake happened five years ago - choult
http://www.mathewingram.com/work/2015/04/30/twitters-multi-billion-dollar-mistake-happened-five-years-ago/
======
galfarragem
I hope Twitter doesn't go away.

I was a very late adopter of Twitter because I always thought that Twitter and
Facebook were the same. They are not. Twitter is slowly replacing my RSS and
news reader. Twitter is not a community thing, it's about broadcasting (in
real-time, if you need it, most people don't, they are just addicted). That's
why I don't tweet and I'm just following 11 accounts. I don't even follow
friends, I just follow who has something to broadcast. Twitter is great for
that.

Facebook is more noisy by concept. Their focus in communities and friends
makes broadcasting side noisy. I had to turn off almost all my friends/likes
wall notifications, I don't have the time or will to read that one friend that
I meet once a year went to the restaurant or played a game. It's just too much
noise. That's why FB is nowadays mostly a chat/email friends app (and FB knows
it: they bought whatsapp).

~~~
ForHackernews
I'm just the opposite, I hope Twitter _does_ go away. I think it's been bad
for marketing, bad for activism, bad for internet discourse in general.

Encouraging everyone to make constant, short, pithy, public pronouncements is
not a recipe for thoughtful conversation.

~~~
wutbrodo
> Encouraging everyone to make constant, short, pithy, public pronouncements
> is not a recipe for thoughtful conversation.

I have a friend who switched to Twitter a few years ago and whenever the fact
that I don't use it comes up, I mention that I just can't deal with the
inevitable dumbing-down and loss of context that comes with such an idiotic
limitation. It's a medium designed for soundbites instead of consideration and
"wit"[1] instead of intelligence. His go-to explanation is that the
limitations force people to be concise and choose their words carefully.
Either he's rationalizing or he's extremely naive about the quality of
discourse on the Internet.

[1] I mean that in the most negative way possible. "Perceived wit" might be a
better term to use here: I've often seen things like pleasing sentence
structure used to cover a lack of veracity, a la "If you're not part of the
solution, you're part of the problem". or "YesAllWomen". While not inherently
incorrect, I've seen both of those used a massive number of times in
situations where they're entirely irrelevant or inaccurate. And yet, because
it comes across as pithy and clever, they dominate the conversation.

------
teh_klev
I know someone has already posted a google cache copy of the page (because
403) but archive.is has a properly formatted archive of the page which is
nicer on the eye:

[https://archive.is/CkEn8](https://archive.is/CkEn8)

~~~
schnelle
Thank you, this is way better!

------
laumars
_> "After [Alex Payne, who ran the developer and platform side of the company
for a long time] left in 2010, he described a letter that he had sent to the
executive team arguing that Twitter was making a mistake by closing down the
network, and that it should have made the opposite decision: that is, by
becoming as open as possible. In a nutshell, he said, Twitter’s choice was to
become more open — to decentralize the network — or die like other walled-
garden platforms before it."_

A decentralised Twitter would have been _amazing_. I've tried playing with all
kinds of services to push notifications to a variety of devices and the only
thing I've ever found that I liked was Twitter - but I don't want to share
private notifications with public Twitter servers (even if I do mark the
account as private)

One day I might actually build a service myself - but I have far too many
projects on the go as it is.

~~~
debacle
> A decentralised Twitter would have been amazing.

And _amazingly_ not profitable.

~~~
tonyedgecombe
They aren't hugely profitable now, $7m on $361m revenue[0], I doubt that
warrants the investment they have had.

[0][http://www.theverge.com/2014/10/27/7079277/twitter-q3-2014-e...](http://www.theverge.com/2014/10/27/7079277/twitter-q3-2014-earnings)

------
UVB-76
I disagree. The third party eco-system diluted the brand, restricted
monetization potential, and left Twitter with little control over their user
experience.

Letting third parties do the hard work of experimenting with user acquisition
and engagement, then buying up the best and turning their backs on the rest
was a masterful move.

We need an open alternative to Twitter, but as a publicly-traded for-profit
organization, Twitter, Inc. will never deliver that.

~~~
dublinben
>We need an open alternative to Twitter

Like GNUSocial and Pumpio? What's your handle?

~~~
artichokeheart
I think pump.io is meant to be more like a G+ alternative. But you are right.
Open sourced distributed alternatives exist if that's what you want all you
need to do is join. GnuSocial, pump.io, Diaspora, RedMatrix, Friendica,
Twister, BuddyCloud etc etc. Each has it's own community of users. Sure your
close friends probably wont be there but were they on Twitter when you joined?

From my own perspective zot (RedMatrix) should be the future. Whether the
socialwg agrees is yet to be seen.Though I have a feeling zot will be the
betamax to socialwg's eventual vhs

~~~
pjc50
I only joined twitter because someone I knew was on there. I'll join one of
the decentralised alternatives when more than one person I already know
mentions that they use it.

~~~
artichokeheart
That's great and it's entirely your choice. I have no problem communicating
with strangers on the Internet.

------
mmahemoff
To put it in perspective, Twitter's market cap is still $25B after taking a
recent slide - that's about 10x the valuation when they started closing down
APIs a few years back.

I think it's a bit of a knee-jerk to start assessing their whole strategy on
that basis. It pains me to say so as a developer who would have loved the old
platform to remain (I had to shut down a somewhat popular hobby website
because I didn't want to put in the effort to switch to OAuth). And as a user
who misses a proper TweetDeck equivalent on the phone.

They didn't win any friends in the developer community, but the article is
about growth and it's not clear they would have achieved the same level of
growth with the majority of users on 3rd party apps.

~~~
rcarrigan87
The critique seems to be on Twitter's long term strategy.

Shutting down 3rd parties helped them get users back on the native platform,
buoying their short term results. However, without the 3rd party developers
the native platform is becoming less and less interesting.

We are in a very hot tech market right now so valuations are a little out of
whack. Facebook has had fairly strong results the past few quarters which give
investors hope Twitter can do the same. We will see!

------
fooyc
If they don't control the Twitter clients, they can't avoid the clients from
using multiple platforms (e.g. Facebook, app.net, the newer platform). Then
clients can switch away users from Twitter seamlessly.

This is pretty clear from their API policies.

This makes me think that all this locking is not about monetization. It's
about protecting their user base.

Facebook is following the same direction. Their current api version does not
allow to build an alternative Facebook client.

------
adventured
Twitter's problem is that it's a transition product.

The transition is one from its origins as a primitive status updater ("What
are you doing?") that existed on the desktop and barely on the phone, to what
it should have been all along: Snapchat, WhatsApp, etc.

There was a further b.s. step in there for Twitter, when it was temporarily
called a micro-blogging service.

The original idea for Twitter was not too distant from what WhatsApp & Co. are
today. The problem for Twitter, was that it came along too early, had to
compromise on its communication vision (the now massive smart phone market
wasn't primed yet), and now finds itself in the quicksand of being a half-
breed legacy product that isn't the best solution for any particular thing.

Twitter was supposed to be a communication platform. It failed to become that,
WhatsApp is going to have a billion users soon and took Twitter's future, and
Twitter has been left behind as an advanced variation of a status update
service. It lost its future, and the product as is has a limited potential
that will soon be all tapped out.

------
micheljansen
Very interesting read with Ev's recent post about open vs closed services and
the future in mind ("Sometimes things stay stuck"):
[https://medium.com/@ev/sometimes-things-stay-
stuck-a0796cc63...](https://medium.com/@ev/sometimes-things-stay-
stuck-a0796cc638a3)

~~~
sergiosgc
Quite ironic, having the founder of medium write in favour of openness. Take
WordPress and walk towards the path of the walled garden and you get
medium.com.

~~~
micheljansen
Exactly. More relevant though is that he is also a founder of Twitter, which
is what this post is about.

------
flurdy
Twitter also recently cut access to their firehose in a similar embrace,
extend, extinguish manner (sort of).

Only Twitter acquired Gnip can keep using it whilst access has been cut for
companies like Datasift.

[http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/04/11/twitter_cuts_off_fir...](http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/04/11/twitter_cuts_off_firehose_from_datasift_after_gnip_acquisition/)

[http://blog.datasift.com/2015/04/11/twitter-ends-its-
partner...](http://blog.datasift.com/2015/04/11/twitter-ends-its-partnership-
with-datasift-firehose-access-expires-on-august-13-2015/)

[https://blog.gnip.com/twitter-data-ecosystem/](https://blog.gnip.com/twitter-
data-ecosystem/)

I'm not in a position to say if this is as bad as the 3rd party rugpull a few
years ago, as it may only mean people have to pay Gnip for the same data
instead.

[http://blog.datasift.com/2015/04/21/processing-twitter-
data-...](http://blog.datasift.com/2015/04/21/processing-twitter-data-from-
gnip-using-datasift/)

~~~
mattzito
To be clear - the only access to the firehose that has been cut off is for
people who want to _resell_ that data.

The writing has been on the wall for that for quite a while - there's really
no reason for Twitter to sell data to a third-party, who can then sell that
data to other people.

End-users of the data are still free to purchase the data from Gnip/Twitter
and do whatever they want (within the TOS of Twitter)

------
pmontra
The post has a point about a better onboarding experience. This is an analysis
of Twitter's one [http://www.useronboard.com/how-twitter-onboards-new-
users/](http://www.useronboard.com/how-twitter-onboards-new-users/) (not my
site)

About the main point of the post, I remember not having a good feeling at
Twitter's strangling the 3rd party apps. It's possible that they already have
all the people willing to chat in public about anything now (and the
marketers) so they won't grow much more than this, but for sure a thousand
companies developing business models on the top of a 140-characters messaging
bus can have more ideas about expanding the platform than the only one
controlling the bus. Problem: not all those ideas will benefit Twitter, some
of them could even be detrimental to it. I think it's a sort of common
dilemma, my platform or theirs, my vision or the one of customers?
Historically both choices played well or badly. Twitter made their bet, let's
wait another couple of years and see.

------
watson
Am I the only one who get "403 Forbidden" when loading the link?

~~~
RobAley
I got that too. It's cached by google already though :

[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:8jwimQ6...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:8jwimQ6a970J:www.mathewingram.com/work/2015/04/30/twitters-
multi-billion-dollar-mistake-happened-five-years-
ago/+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=uk)

------
datashovel
In a strange way I'm sort of hopeful the MBAs of the world continue to make
these mistakes. In today's world of technology they are out of their depth and
in my opinion in most cases are no longer qualified to be in the positions
they've traditionally held.

~~~
Nicholas_C
These us vs. them statements regarding MBAs on HN are ridiculous. And your
broad generalization of MBAs as technologically inept is ridiculous as well.

~~~
datashovel
I empathize with your point of view. While I don't want to say this "broad
generalization" applies to ALL scenarios, I will say that even today (in my
experience) the "broad generalization" applies in MOST scenarios.

I don't know how up to speed you are with how Twitter was. There was a point
in time that they were infamous for their callous "slaying" of 3rd party
vendors. I can't say I followed this story rigorously, but even a passive
bystander understood Twitter was not about their ecosystem. They were about
Twitter.

I don't think it's a hopeless situation, but in my mind the only real path
forward is a world where the largest tech companies build up their ecosystem
and embrace 3rd party innovation and ingenuity, and not putting their heads
into a guillotine when it suits them.

------
stevebot
While I agree that Twitter has strained relationships with developers, Fabric
is a great move. For anyone who hasn't used Fabric, it is the best mobile SDK
integration I have ever seen. It seamlessly works with XCode, Android Studio,
IntelliJ and Eclipse to easily let you add Twitter features, distribute builds
ala the now POS that is Testflight, and get cross-platform crash analytics.

...if this is a fox luring me into it's hen-house, the hen-house sure is comfy
and well-featured. Sad to see it diminished in this article, when IMO it's a
far far better offering than any other major companies (looking at you
Facebook) are putting out.

------
marban
I was Idealab's first acquisition in this story (Twidroyd) and I can only
confirm that dealing with Twitter on whatever level has indeed gone downhill
each and every year since then. No comparison to the days when working
directly with Ev & Co. Arguing whether that's part of growing up as a Business
is part of another discussion — Last time I checked that numbers weren't that
convincing.

------
x0x0
And it's clearer why twitter bought tellapart.

Twitter's problem per Ben from Stratechery is they can't grow registered users
quickly enough, so they're resorting to building ads for unregistered users.
The problem is those unregistered users don't monetize as well.

Tellapart built ad products for ecommerce companies. I've worked in that space
a bit, and the problem generally isn't registered logged-in users you know a
lot about: you can do pretty good recommendations and it's relatively
straightforward to advertise to them; it's just that they are a small fraction
of your traffic. So tellapart, by necessity, had to get good at advertising to
low information drive-by users. That's what twitter needs; not for ecommerce
necessarily, but in general.

It's still a shitty business though; if users aren't logged in and sharing
information about themselves both directly and via data exhaust, twitter is
fighting on more even ground with all other ad companies in the world and not
exploiting the prize that no-one else has access to.

------
jusben1369
I always felt like Twitter was the Mosaic browser who tried to turn itself
into AOL.

------
digitalzombie
Oh I heard about this a few years ago, interesting this goes into more details
what happen and the result of trying to kill of devs.

While they need devs now, I think they'll get devs back. I've seen people
using machine learning on twitter to do some stuff and there are potentials
with any large amount data.

But I wouldn't bet the bank on Twitter as a business or a startup. I was
interviewed at a start up and their whole business relied on Twitter and
creating a third party software with it.

------
jcfrei
How would you monetize an interest graph? This seems much more difficult to me
than simply forcing all users on your proprietary clients and websites and
deliver ads there. It took facebook years to deliver a solid mobile experience
with their native app, but now that they do, they reap the benefits.

~~~
discardorama
> How would you monetize an interest graph?

By becoming an ad network! That's the logical conclusion of all such endeavors
in the Valley. :-)

------
feraloink
Payment due? [http://www.mathewingram.com/cgi-
sys/suspendedpage.cgi](http://www.mathewingram.com/cgi-sys/suspendedpage.cgi)

~~~
mathewi
Nah, they just had to move my account to a different server and I didn't
update the DNS nameserver info quickly enough.

~~~
feraloink
Where can I read your article then?

~~~
mathewi
Should be here: [http://www.mathewingram.com/work/2015/04/30/twitters-
multi-b...](http://www.mathewingram.com/work/2015/04/30/twitters-multi-
billion-dollar-mistake-happened-five-years-ago/)

------
xnull2guest
Can we speculate about this with regard to the timing of DoD's investment into
Silicon Valley (and the problems the DoD has had with Twitter), or is that too
conspiratorial?

~~~
bdhe
You'll have to be more specific before we can speculate. What investments?
What problems has the DoD had with Twitter? I'm curious to know more.

~~~
xnull2guest
DoD investment:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9448807](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9448807)

The DoD has had a problem with Twitter where they will not onboard to
information sharing programs and will not censor certain types of Twitter
content. Other partners, such as Facebook and Google, have been very complicit
with the DoD. Twitter is willing to delete accounts, but shadowbanning content
and dropping content has made them uncomfortable over the years.

------
chintan
@pg on Twitter in 2009:
[http://www.paulgraham.com/twitter.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/twitter.html)

------
yyhhsj0521
get a 403 forbidden

~~~
schnelle
I do too, here's the Google Cache version of the page:

[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://www.mathewingram.com/work/2015/04/30/twitters-
multi-billion-dollar-mistake-happened-five-years-ago/)

