
Twitter Falls Below IPO Price as Concerns Mount Over CEO, Growth - adventured
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-08-20/twitter-falls-below-ipo-price-as-concerns-mount-over-ceo-growth
======
mikegioia
To me the problem with Twitter lies solely with what Twitter's logged-out
homepage looks like. I don't know what it's trying to be but asking me to sign
up, browse categories (?), and read top celebrity posts is not it.

Why is logged-out Twitter not a search engine? They have up-to-the-second
thoughts from their users about everything and it's the first place I go when
a site is down, or some news story is breaking. They're sitting on a search
goldmine yet they're trying to convert signups and popular celebrity post
clickthroughs.

~~~
shostack
I've long wondered this. I haven't followed the evolution of Twitter's
homepage, but I'd be really shocked if they hadn't tested this to death.

The thing is, this keeps causing me to miss moments to engage with them.
Someone posts a link, I find something on a website, etc. that go to Twitter?
BAM! SIGN-UP NOW OR LEAVE!

While I do of course have an account, if I were a non-user, I'd keep thinking
"why would I sign-up when I have no idea if it is worth my time to be nagged
by you via email?"

There's a well understood notion that on user-generated content sites like
Twitter, Reddit, etc. the number of content producers is relatively low
compared to the number of content consumers. While I don't have data to
support my hypothesis on this yet, my gut tells me that you have a better
chance of converting people to content producers if you can get them hooked on
being a content consumer. Lowering the barrier to entry for that is critical.
If I felt like I was really missing out on all the cool stuff going on within
Twitter, I might be more inclined to sign up if I hadn't yet, and exposing
that data lowers the barrier to entry.

But again, I'd be shocked if they hadn't tested that to death.

~~~
vacri
> _Someone posts a link, I find something on a website, etc. that go to
> Twitter? BAM! SIGN-UP NOW OR LEAVE!_

If they force you to sign up, they get more user data for the pool. I don't
think that the slice of their market they're losing out on by this is very
big.

> _Lowering the barrier to entry for that is critical._

The barrier to entry for content creation on twitter is absurdly low. It's not
the login process. It's the content itself, which is only a couple of
sentences. It's not editing a video, or writing a short article, or creating
an image, or managing a forum. It's just 'spurt out what I'm thinking right
now in one sentence'. Login processes are not the barrier to content creation,
effort required is.

~~~
resu_nimda
Anecdotally, I've never bothered to sign up for Twitter, and the experience
for logged-out users has contributed to that. Instead of thinking "wow all my
friends and important people are on there so I guess I'll sign up," I think
"well this isn't very engaging, but I still technically got the content I came
for, so I'm not really incentivized to go further."

And I disagree in general - login processes are often a huge barrier. People
don't want to create accounts everywhere; it used to be cool and novel, now
it's a burden.

~~~
vacri
I do agree that login processes can be a huge barrier. Slack got to be a
gorilla by making onboarding buttery smooth, whilst its competitors had a
fairly vanilla approach, clunky by comparison.

But, in terms of content _creation_ that the GP mentioned (rather than content
_consumption_ ), login processes are not the problematic part.

------
brainflake
From a product standpoint, I feel like Twitter has barely changed in 5 years.
There's been some polish and redesign, sure, but the main dynamics are almost
exactly the same.

Facebook has features like intelligently improving the quality of your feed,
being able to hide posts from certain people, prioritizing posts (not just
stacking them based on their age), calendar/birthday stuff, events, chats,
etc.

Twitter is just a never ending stream of information, not prioritized and
always overflowing with too much content (at least IMO).

I think Facebook nailed it with realizing their engagement levels are directly
related to the quality of the newsfeed, and because of this they put a great
deal of effort into making it as relevant as possible to each user. They
realize that if you friend (or follow) somebody, you're not necessarily
interested in ALL of their content, but maybe only their most interesting or
popular. They also realize that if you only log in 2 times per week, they
should prioritize with the best recent content, not just the stuff that was
posted 1 hour ago.

~~~
JacobAldridge
I know that "intelligently improving my feed" was the final straw for me
leaving Facebook, and if Twitter forced it on me it would probably end my
Twitter fetish as well.

AND I know that I'm likely not the ideal client for Facebook and their efforts
probably enhance the experience for said clients. I'm not sure who Twitter's
ideal client is...

~~~
AJ007
Twitter could probably use some sort of light scoring which users have the
ability to over-ride. Tweets can not be re-arranged outside of chronological
order like Facebook now does.

There are different markets that need to be addressed.

For the "pro" users, Twitters is basically a two way news ticker. You follow
people you need to communicate with, who are always doing interesting things,
or who you need to hear from directly when something occurs. If you want to
see the latest on VR, or WebGL, or whatever topic, following the right people
on Twitter is pretty much unparalleled.

The second is the casual users. These are the 13-25 year olds who would have
been using Twitter 5 years ago and have gone on to use Instagram and Snapchat.

When you split the pro group from the casual, Twitter's holes start to appear.
Casual users post crap and they post a lot of it. On Facebook is gets auto-
buried. One Twitter it doesn't. On Instagram and Snapchat users get to publish
images and pictures that in most cases they created themselves. Even if a
photo is noise, the user can scroll past it in a quarter of a second.

Whatever they do, they can't burn the pro user base. Those users are their
moat. The casual users will be fought for continuously because casual social
apps are more like fashion than tools.

------
natecavanaugh
Is there anyone else who hates Twitter because of its 140 character limit and
overall focus on broadcasting rather than sharing? For the 140 character
limit, I get the historical SMS reasons and that it helps you "focus" your
content, but taking 10 minutes to squeeze a thought in that turns from
something half interesting to "bc u r 4 the GPL" or whatever. Sure MAYBE I
could reword things a little denser, but a tweet should be somewhat in the
moment and nothing takes me out of it like editing to some arbitrary limit. As
for the aspect of people liking smaller messages, they can do what FB does and
hide behind a "Read more" link.

Overall, Twitter feels like being in a crowded bar. Lots of noise, not many
conversations.

This could all just be me, though...

~~~
teaneedz
It's what makes Twitter, well Twitter. I love the 140 char limit because it
enforces brevity and aids quick consumption. That's me.

~~~
nkozyra
But often it encourages abusing the limitation by splitting long(er)-form
content into multiple tweets.

I agree that it's so fundamental to the brand and Twitter's identity that it
might cause a lot of problems if it were reverted, but frankly it's completely
arbitrary. If you want to produce 140 (or less) content, you can do that
without a hard limit.

People hack around it because it's such a ubiquitous platform, but people
would also like to address that audience in long(er)-form. It culminates in
inconvenience for both producer and consumer.

~~~
mahyarm
It creates a barrier to doing long form content although, encouraging brevity.
The amount of multi-part tweets are low compared to the average tweet.

------
jtouri
I never thought the problem was the product, rather it is the management and
the community. What's valuable about hacker news is the people who are
involved, and what's great about Quora are the people who give a response.
It's not helpful that most people spam useless tweets constantly. It took a
while, but I finally set my twitter to follow news updates perfectly.

~~~
stephengoodwin
> I finally set my twitter to follow news updates perfectly

Just curious: What's your setup or setup philosophy?

------
sloanesturz
I feel like every three weeks I see an article like this on Hacker News and a
gazillion good ideas about how to improve Twitter's service.

At the same time, there have been no core changes to Twitter in the last
several years.

Is Twitter the only company in the Valley where every engineer isn't checking
Hacker News every few hours!?

~~~
harlanlewis
This exactly captures why Twitter is so disappointing.

From my normal user perspective (not advertising, not a celebrity...) they've
never been an internally innovative company - @mentions and retweets are
community inventions, the best clients for niche, power, and general use have
always been 3rd party, and after stumbling onto a private messaging hit they
shot DMs behind the woodshed just before the world went wild for whatsapp and
snapchat. The community continues to come up with interesting ideas, never to
be implemented. There's no doubt Twitter has stellar engineers. It's strategy
that needs to be externalized. A shame they've spoiled so many developer
relationships.

~~~
niccaluim
For the past five years Twitter engineering has been focused on two things:
rebuilding the infrastructure and building an ad platform. They nailed both of
these. But unfortunately that left little time for product engineering. Add in
the revolving door of heads of product and it's no surprise there hasn't been
much substantive change to the product.

------
busterarm
I've been short on Twitter from the get-go, I just didn't think it would take
this long. This doesn't mean I'm anti-Twitter - I would actually prefer that
it stay the niche platform for journalists/celebrities/activists.

I don't know the business strategy to make sure that is viable, but I don't
want it to be a mass-market product (except in terms of consumption)...the
signal to noise ratio is so much better than other social platforms.

Twitter, quite bizarrely, is filling a void no longer filled by newspapers
(wow, what that says about our attention spans). It's only peripherally
mainstream but incredibly useful as a _tool_ to a small group of people. It's
not any one thing: it's different depending on who you are.

~~~
getdavidhiggins
That's why I wrote ‘Twitter Should Be A Public Utility’
[http://blog.higg.im/2015/06/12/on-
twitter/](http://blog.higg.im/2015/06/12/on-twitter/) For me the disconnect
was that Twitter failed and partially succeeded in making Twitter what I call
'plumbing', or a sort of duct tape for the web. If microblogging had a stack
similar to TCP/IP that could be fundamental to how the web operates, then they
missed that boat repeatedly.

------
Greenisus
"At stake is whether Twitter [...] can become a mainstream platform instead of
a niche forum favored by journalists and celebrities."

I found that line interesting, because I often think of Twitter as a niche
forum favored by technology workers and celebrities.

~~~
freehunter
When I think of twitter I think nothing but mainstream. There are two
platforms that anyone who is anyone (celebrity or business or politician)
needs to have: either Facebook or Twitter. Niche is Instragram. Niche is
Snapchat. But when Kardashian is on CNN once an hour because of a tweet, it's
not niche. App.Net is niche. Twitter is the epitome of mainstream.

~~~
icpmacdo
I think thats the main problem with Twitter, saturation. Its mainstream enough
the regular people are not likely to jump on Twitter now if they already
haven't.

~~~
bluepostitnote
And yet Facebook is still signing up users

~~~
incongruity
I'd argue they're better about extracting value from network effects –
Facebook allows you to broadcast, but it really encourages interactions... the
value grows a lot more with your network... whereas, following more people on
twitter just makes it harder to follow.

------
sirbetsalot
Twitter is the Ganges River of Social Media. Filled to the brim with garbage,
everyone who floats in it drinks the water, dies and joins the floating corpse
pile at the end of the data funnel. you can't have a fresh mountain spring of
great data when you let people pollute constantly with their verbal offal.

~~~
simonswords82
I'll be using "Twitter is the Ganges River of Social Media." in casual
conversation from now on. Great analogy.

------
panabee
Twitter owns unique and compelling content. Lots. Yes, there is lots of junk,
but there is also lots of junk on the web. The challenge is surfacing and
distributing great content, and this is where Twitter should focus: maximizing
reach and curating content.

Instead of forcing users to come to Twitter, Twitter should go wherever users
are. Bring Twitter’s amazing content to them, wherever users are, through
partners and syndication. Get people hooked as consumers before worrying about
conversions. The upside is much cheaper user acquisition by piggybacking on
media habits rather than breaking them. The downside is less revenue and
possibly less loyalty, at least in the near term.

Media distributors like HuffPo and Yahoo boast massive audiences but need
interesting content. Twitter can supply the content while Yahoo and others
provide the users and sell ads. Both sides share revenue.

Outsourcing user acquisition to Yahoo and distributors doesn’t endanger
Twitter. Twitter and only Twitter can produce this content, and since the
content is unique, there is no risk of Yahoo swapping out Twitter for another
company.

Put another way, syndication only strengthens Twitter as a product.
Syndication expands the audience for tweets and deepens the incentive to
publish via Twitter, which in turn generates more content and attracts more
users, which in turn attracts more publishers. Syndication feeds a virtuous
cycle.

The second piece, curating content, requires doing more to help individuals
find and consume interesting tweets, and helping partners find and present
interesting tweets. There is lots more Twitter could do, both with man and
machine, in this area.

Maybe Twitter's greatest sin is not being Facebook, but it shouldn't be. There
is enormous potential in helping people connect with others and enjoy content
based on interests (Hi Reddit), not friendships. Many people, especially those
on Wall Street and in the media, need a foil for Facebook, but hopefully the
next CEO is not among them.

Twitter is a special company with special potential.

~~~
firebones
Facebook fell out of favor after its IPO, so some of this seems like the
periodicity for Twitter is similar, just stretched out much longer and more
attenuated due to the lower market cap and lower rung on the ladder.

Your comment that Twitter owns unique and compelling content: I view unique
and compelling content as a scarce resource. Growth rate in the boring tail
perhaps means less if they're cornering the market on the compelling blurb
real estate.

Twitter as a REIT, where the real estate is focused attention on compelling
content? Are The Donald's FB posts featured on the networks nightly?

The nightmare scenario for Twitter is that they've stumbled into a Craigslist-
style niche of providing incredible, essential value that can't be monetized
in proportion to the value it actually provides.

~~~
T2_t2
The problem is simpler: the cost of disintermediating their service, e.g. to
go ahead and build your own feed, is just too high. And maintenance is just a
pain. It is far better to view tweets other's tell you to, than use your own
feed.

What Twitter needs is better intermediation - they need better tools to tune
in and tune out of streams. The need, for want of a better analogy, a way to
change the channel from Election heavy tweets to NBA tweets, when your team is
on and you stop watching the debates.

TL;DR Twitter makes it too hard to bother, most of the great tweet content is
made available at some point, and you rarely regret missing anything.

~~~
panabee
Precisely. One strategy for addressing this in the near term is to create more
tools and products for partners/distributors like Yahoo and HuffPo to find and
present interesting tweets for their audiences. Twitter can't curate
everything in house in the near term. Algorithms aren't reliable enough, so
they need a mix of algorithms and people. Some of those people can be in-
house, but the faster, more scalable way to reach every nook and cranny of the
world is to outsource a bunch of the curation through distributors who
understand different audiences. Users have proven they won't curate on their
own. As a bonus, Twitter can analyze these curation strategies to refine its
own machine-learning algorithms.

------
hyperbovine
Twitter was the first in a long list of current (i.e. post-2000) startups
where I thought to myself, Really? That's a $X0 billion business? I wonder if
this is just the tip of the iceberg.

~~~
hatred
Twitter had a Q1 revenue of $436 million. Doesn't it make it a $X0 billion
business or am I missing something ?

The main concern to investors is primarily the growth and their ability to
warrant a premium price on the stock.

~~~
scandinavian
Twitter is huge, it costs a lot of money to run. They had a net profit of
negative $162.4 million Q1. I don't know what defines an $X0 billion business,
but I would imagine that it would be profit.

~~~
biot
Put simply, future value. Otherwise a sidewalk lemonade stand profiting 1 cent
per glass would be far more valuable than a lemonade manufacturing business
which sells millions of bottles a day and pumps all the profits plus
additional investment money into manufacturing facilities. At some point, the
money-losing lemonade manufacturer no longer needs to ramp up their
facilities, they pay down the equipment cost, and generate boatloads of
profit. That or they get bought out by a larger player who wants to enter the
lemonade market but doesn't want to reinvent the wheel.

~~~
swingbridge
Of course, but at some point the whole "future value" logic runs flat. The
market is losing faith in TWTTR's ability to generate value.

------
ThomPete
Twitters main problem is that it's a protocol more than an actual content
platform. What they need is to get more content onto their platform and the
only way to really do that is to allow for richers posts which means loose the
140 character limit.

I know a lot of people will say "but thats what so great about twitter" and I
would claim that it isn't, they just think it is. The short tweets and the
asyncronous character of twitter creates quite a lot of noise and so you are
actually reading way way more than interesting 140 character tweets you also
read a lot of noise and redundancy.

No whats really great about twitter is that it's more centerede around
interests than friendship and that this provide the actual value of using the
service.

~~~
benwoodward
Totally agree. I stopped using Twitter because I got so tired of rewording
everything to fit into 140 characters. The most interesting people on Twitter
tend to use multiple tweets to broadcast one message, and join them up with
"...", but when I see that I'd rather they had just written a short blog post
and linked it.

In my opinion, what Twitter is most useful for is sharing links and short
updates to prompt action from your followers, like reading your new blog post.
And because of this, it's not the kind of place where you want to spend a lot
of time, because the content isn't that engaging, it's just the news ticker
that you scroll through for 5 minutes and leave.

------
rdl
Twitter seems like both current-shareholders and the userbase would be best
served by either acquisition by Google/Alphabet, or a takeover by either
activist shareholder or private equity, with new, product-focused management.

If you focused on mobile in the right ways, you could turn Twitter into a
legitimate $30-50b company.

It's amazing that FB Newsfeed has basically taken the low hanging fruit from
Twitter -- "normal" people sharing life events, leaving only weird communities
of people interacting in public. There has to be a way to preserve that, grow
that, and get interpersonal interaction among more closely-knit communities
happening.

They had such a huge opening when Facebook fucked themselves with the shitty-
HTML5-only-mobile-clients. Sad.

------
apapli
I gave Twitter two solid tries (ie spent time finding people to follow,
downloaded the mobile apps,installed desktop apps too), once in 2010 for 3
months, and again over 2011-2013. I'm a technical business person and really
believe that outside of the tech and media scene it is pretty much useless for
every day use. They have a cool brand, but pretty uncompelling and un-engaging
user experience. And I never missed Twitter compared with the way I "miss"
Facebook or LinkedIn when I haven't logged in for a while.

Their instability with their management team doesn't help them much either.
IMHO they'll be out of business in a decade at most.

------
rezashirazian
Twitter hasn't focused on anything else besides twitter. Facebook is taking on
the mission of "connecting the world". Google has gone well beyond being only
a search engine. Amazon has expanded into mobile, AWS and ...

Twitter, on the other hand, is still pushing the same product.

~~~
Aleman360
Taking a step back, what's the advantage to society of every company growing
into a conglomerate? Why not just let a company live and die on its core
business?

Do we really want to allow all that power to be consolidated into company
boards and executives?

~~~
zalzane
imagine if snapchat announced that they would start living and dying on their
core business rather than try to expand

now you have a bunch of investors who are upset that they invested in a
company at a 16 billion dollar valuation that has jack diddly squat for income
and has no promise of some magical "over the horizon" way to monetize

~~~
Aleman360
But that just doesn't seem sustainable in the long term. That's how power and
wealth consolidate into a small number of hands.

------
mandeepj
At one point Facebook's stock also fell below IPO price. It happens. I hope
they will come back like FB.

~~~
brainflake
It's not really the same... Facebook had a botched IPO where the price tanked
immediately, but then recovered after a few quarters and their earnings
started rolling in.

Twitter has had consistently bad quarters, whether through poor earnings or
over promising on their projections. But in one way or another they are not
meeting expectations.

------
fauigerzigerk
Twitter should do group messaging and structured tags. I want to do things
like:

@friends Don't forget my birthday party on #(Aug 20, 8pm) at #SomePub

or

@friends Don't forget my birthday party! #invitation(Aug 20, 8pm, SomePub)

And I want to be able to create a list where all invitations from people in
the @friends group go

And finance people could do things like

Twitter has bottomed #buy(TWTR)

And I want to be able to specify a rule that makes these messages go to my
stock trading list

~~~
bosdev
This would be fantastically niche and tech-person-oriented, probably not the
right move for the company as a whole. That said, nothing stops you from
writing a bot on top of Twitter to power any of these interactions.

~~~
fauigerzigerk
It would be a big niche if you consider how many people use Excel functions.
It could make Twitter part of enterprise and group communications
infrastructures.

------
jchrisa
Twitter should print out these comments and throw darts to pick their new
executive team.

------
meerita
I have never installed Snapchat. I don't know if it is good or bad. All my
friends doesn't have Snapchat, but everyone has Twitter. I found Twitter a
better place, and it's ageless to me compared to all those new-UI paradigms
that come each year. The problem of Twitter is they cut off all the innovation
of 3rd party software developers to keep their shitty in house software.

~~~
teen
snapchat is pretty cool

~~~
Rainymood
relevant username ;)

------
joaq
Am I the only one who never really liked the whole concept of Twitter?

~~~
ohitsdom
It's really hard to sell/explain to the uninitiated because it's a diverse
platform. Even my twitter feed is very diverse- breaking news and headlines
from the beat writers for my favorite teams, activists and protesters covering
police brutality, and developer blogs.

With this mix, my twitter feed varies greatly. Unrest in Ferguson? Breaking
news from the ground. Microsoft Build conference? Latest in tech from Redmond.
Eagles training camp? Live highlights from reporters I trust. It's really a
wonderful thing.

~~~
joaq
No, I've tried it. I've really tried to like it, but it just didn't click with
me. I know it's perfect for others, but it can never reach the growth of a
platform like Facebook that is more universally liked. That's pretty much my
point.

~~~
mkr-hn
You sound like someone who dislikes Reddit because they think the defaults are
all there is. Twitter could do a better job helping people discover their
interest communities, but Twitter is more than the gossip-focused logged out
home page.

You need to look deeper if you think it has nothing for you.

~~~
simonswords82
> You need to look deeper if you think it has nothing for you.

Surely the onus is on Twitter to make the information easy to locate? This is
one of their key failings, if you have to wade through too much noise to find
something of interest, then the app isn't good enough.

------
udev
Many here comment just on sub-IPO price of shares.

The problem is bigger. As per Financial Times, there is a larger shift in
investor mood towards Twitter. It seems that there are many who intend to
short Twitter indicated by the amount of "borrowed" shares.

------
vit05
I read all the comments, and have a totally different point of views. Yes,
twitter needs to innovate more. You need to make a number of changes to the
user interface and give more options. But I think that for now, the best and
easiest thing they can do to bring back most users is to give more power to
his Big Players. Help than make more money, be more promoted, have more
publicity in twitter than any other social network. Stop thinking that
promoted hashtags and other options that are only used for spam have a great
return for the sponsor. Celebrities, players, journalists, politicians. People
want to talk to them and twitter is the best media tool for this.

------
codingdave
Everyone says it is all about growth. Twitter is not growing. Pretty simple
story, really.

~~~
Animats
Twitter is still growing in terms of revenue, but they're losing money.
They've already scaled up. They've had ads ("promoted tweets") since 2010.
It's not clear where they go from here. Increasing the ad density to boost
revenue begins the Myspace death spiral.

~~~
theseatoms
IIRC they announced a Buy button, but I haven't encountered any instances of
it in my feed.

------
mbesto
> _Noto struck a critical tone, saying user growth won’t improve until the
> service boosts its appeal to a bigger market and that product improvements
> and marketing so far have met with minimal success._

This is going to sound anecdotal, but still feel is telling: until my parents
and my co-workers (enterprise IT professionals) see the benefit in adopting
Twitter, then Twitter will forever be in limbo. I fear the same for reddit.
Neither service has a product that supports a wide enough appeal to be
considered for that demographic, and they are effectively the last mile in
this equation.

------
criddell
Time to open up their (very nice) API to third party clients again. I think
there's still a lot of room for innovation on the Twitter platform and it
isn't going to come from Twitter themselves.

~~~
xentronium
Once bitten, twice shy. I'd never built my business around twitter api however
nice it is. It's just not worth it to close shop after twitter blocks your
token for superficial reasons.

------
WalterBright
I get constant emails from twitter.com, I finally just marked them all as
spam. I have a twitter account to get tweets, why do I need them to email me
other tweets?

------
puranjay
Twitter is one of those you either "get" or you don't (same with Snapchat).

I could never get Twitter. I couldn't understand why I would want a rapid fire
stream of messages that were a third witty banter, a third retweets of
marketing messages, and a third "breaking" news.

I know you can filter your feed out, but for me, it's too much work.

------
marcusgarvey
Twitter has been a go-to for celebs and the powerful. The entertainment /
fashion celebs are adopting Instagram in a huge way. Right now it's easy to
have Insta. auto-post to Twitter, but it doesn't speak well of Tw growth. If
other types of influential people follow suit, that will be another headache
for Twitter.

------
mrdrozdov
Stop stressing out. Twitter will be fine.

~~~
OldSchoolPro
IMHO with the current management Twitter will stagnate and die.

~~~
meatysnapper
As opposed to the previous management? 3 heads of product since 2013: Sippey,
Graf, Weil. How's that supposed to work?

------
capkutay
Snapchat's "Stories" page is the UI Twitter should have built...It has search,
a list of your friends updates, and targeted content from a few big name media
vendors. Logging into twitter just takes you to a big list of crappy,
uninteresting content IMO.

------
meatysnapper
The interesting question will be the on-going struggle between engineering
(Roetter/Weil) and business (Noto/Bain), who actually want to run a profitable
company. My bet is Roetter and Weil will be out before the year is done.

------
lnanek2
As a developer, I'm really hoping they fail and some developer friendly
alternative comes up. Google Plus is really bad because not many people use it
and they only approve certain verbs. Twitter is really bad because they banned
a bunch of my games for letting people tweet their scores easily claiming they
were too much like clients and have starved a lot of apps with user token
limits. Unfortunately there's really nothing out there that has Twitter's
numbers and is developer friendly. Facebook has some screwed up approval
process nowadays where their rejection reasons don't make any sense. They seem
to have gone the app store route and are having call centers in third party
countries try to apply rules to apps and ending up with a bad experience.

------
vasilipupkin
I like twitter, but there is just no compelling use case for it. Basically, I
use it as a news aggregator + pmarca monitor. But it's not super exciting.

------
mkorfmann
Good times to buy into $TWTR ;).

------
pinaceae
why does twitter not have a default feed of the most favorited/RTd individual
tweets? they only show trending topics/hashtag, but not a default feed.

or have create a couple of curated best/of feeds. tech, sports, humor, etc.
sort of like apple music, pandora, but for tweeters.

~~~
dredmorbius
Single "most popular" feeds tend to the most mind numbingly banal. See G+ and
its "What's Hot" problem. That stream is insultingly vapid.

A set of highly filtered feeds might be better. Still tough to pull off.

------
smegel
Time to flush the toilet.

------
theseatoms
Both Jack Dorsey and Anthony Noto recently bought shares, fwiw.

~~~
tenoman
Jack Dorsey has sold more than 10x the amount of shares he just bought over
the last few years, so the gesture rings a little hollow.

