
Twitter may receive formal bid, suitors said to include Salesforce and Google - kgwgk
http://www.cnbc.com/2016/09/23/twitter-may-receive-formal-bid-shortly-suitors-said-to-include-salesforce-and-google.html
======
imagist
IMO, Twitter is the poster child for the tech bubble. They have users, which
is their only claim to viability, but notably, they have _never_ made a
profit. Currently valued at around $10 billion with 350 million active users,
that's about $29 per user. You'd be hard-pressed to find an investor so
foolish that they would invest $29 in each of their users and hope to make it
back if it were stated in those terms, but people have rushed to invest in a
company which only has users, and whose attempts to monetize users through
advertising have correlated strongly with loss of users. There can be little
argument that Twitter's price has become entirely detached from its value.

That doesn't of course, mean you couldn't make money by investing in Twitter.
You can make money by investing in overvalued companies as long as you don't
hold onto your share until it busts. One profitable route would be if Twitter
does get bought by a larger company. The market as a whole will lose on
Twitter, but local maxima can be more profitable than the whole.

But at a personal level, don't be naive about this. A lot of people are
investing, not just money, but time and energy, in Twitter or startups like
Twitter. If you find yourself thinking that Twitter is a company with any real
value, you should take a step back and evaluate whether you're being wise, or
whether you've fallen prey to the unbridled optimism of the tech bubble.
Twitter's position as poster child for the tech bubble makes it a good litmus
test for people's understanding of the industry, and I suspect it will
correlate very strongly with who loses everything when the tech bubble
collapses.

~~~
briholt
Agreed on poor finances. But Twitter has one thing that no one else has - they
are in the center of the zeitgeist. Every political candidate is on Twitter.
Every news network discusses Twitter happenings everyday. NFL broadcasts list
players' Twitter handles. Half the commercials on TV advertise hashtags. South
Park just did a whole episode about Twitter. The cost to embed your brand in
the minds of Americans like that would be far greater than $10B. The question
is can some larger company capitalize on that mindshare.

~~~
orblivion
Oddball idea: If all these news outlets, and other organizations, benefit from
it, maybe they could finance it. The same way the Linux Foundation is
sponsored by large tech companies.

~~~
jonny_eh
I can't imagine politicians funding Twitter.

~~~
eric_h
I most definitely saw a Trump ad in my twitter feed.

I marked it as offensive ;)

------
owenwil
Google acquiring Twitter is actually the _best_ end result here. Salesforce is
probably the worst. Lots of people hate the idea of a Google acquisition, but
I think it's well suited because:

\- Google learnt from its mistakes with Google+ and is eager to not repeat
them

\- The company is a very different one now from years ago

\- Google doesn't want to mess up identity again, so that wouldn't be an issue

\- Google mostly just wants a social graph

\- Twitter is a bad public company that makes irrational decisions

\- Merging Google engineering/leadership with Twitter might actually give
direction and ease the financial pressure that seems to drive the company's
poor engineering decisions

~~~
bad_user
> _Google learnt from its mistakes with Google+ and is eager to not repeat
> them_

Google has learned nothing from their mistakes.

As evidence their real name policy is still active. Contrast with Twitter
where a lot of users have fake names. And yes, you can find hateful users on
Twitter and I know of some folks that have been harassed, but the community
I'm active in is very professional and civilized and the conversations have a
much higher quality than what I've seen on Google+ or YouTube, even with their
real names. Guess some people are assholes no matter what.

Also the Google+ API is still read-only. Which means you can only use Google's
official tools for posting content. There's no way for example to cross-post
on both Twitter and Google+. Apps like TweetDeck aren't possible for Google+.

Oh and Google Reader is still dead.

> _Google doesn 't want to mess up identity again, so that wouldn't be an
> issue_

I'm sure they don't want to mess it up, but given that they are continuously
messing up identity, I'm also sure that it will be an issue.

~~~
deepfriedbits
_> Also the Google+ API is still read-only. Which means you can only use
Google's official tools for posting content. There's no way for example to
cross-post on both Twitter and Google+. Apps like TweetDeck aren't possible
for Google+._

Is this true? Buffer allows you to cross-post to Facebook, Twitter and
Google+.

~~~
bad_user
I don't know what Buffer is, but if they can post to Google+ it only means
they have a private deal with Google.

The Google+ API is read-only, it says so in their own docs:
[https://developers.google.com/+/web/api/rest/](https://developers.google.com/+/web/api/rest/)

And if you want a service that has integration with everything except for
Google+, there's IFTTT.

~~~
kyloren
Correct me if I'm wrong but I think buffer can also post to Instagram

~~~
brianwawok
It could be doing the reverse of scraping no? Faking app requests

------
thr0waway1239
Can someone actually explain to me how the situation came to this point where
it practically looks as if Twitter's fate is being decided and played out in
the media via endless speculation? It is not like Twitter is a tiny company
with an unknown brand, few users and no possibility of improving its profit
margins. I am not aware of what they are trying to do, but at the same time it
is not as if they could have exhausted all the possibilities. Remember
Facebook's beacon? That failed, but FB still managed to repackage the same
crap into something more lucrative didn't it? Is this just impatience from
stockholders?

For example, let us just say, hypothetically, something really damaging comes
out about FB (e.g. the news about the fake video view metrics) and advertisers
start fleeing from it. Wouldn't Twitter be the beneficiary of at least some of
that exodus? Do they really have no option of an end game?

~~~
jldugger
> Can someone actually explain to me how the situation came to this point
> where it practically looks as if ... Is this just impatience from
> stockholders?

Money doesn't grow on trees, and Facebook has lost a half billion dollars
every year. They have maybe four years left at that rate before they run out
of cash on hand. The numbers are improving by about 20 percent a year, which,
if projected forward, means they'll stop losing money in ... four years.

I don't think it's impatience to question if your investment will go bankrupt
or not. Impatience was taking the company public before it was profitable.

> For example, let us just say, hypothetically, something really damaging
> comes out about FB (e.g. the news about the fake video view metrics) and
> advertisers start fleeing from it. Wouldn't Twitter be the beneficiary of at
> least some of that exodus? Do they really have no option of an end game?

Why would you invest in Twitter if the only reason to expect a positive
outcome was if Facebook horribly fucked up?

~~~
dmoy
Wait fb is losing money? Sorry I couldn't parse that correctly.

~~~
jldugger
No, I thinko-d that. Twitter is.

~~~
dmoy
Ok thanks for the clarification

------
the_duke
Unclear is what kind of "deal" they are talking about.

A considerable buy in? A full acquisition?

And, assuming a full acquisition... what would be the gain?

Google has a bad story with attempts at social media, apart from YouTube.
(Bought Orkut, killed it, tried Google Plus, went nowhere). Twitter is hard to
make profitable without alienating the users with too many ads.

For Google, it would probably be an acquisition like YouTube. With the
knowledge that it might never be profitable, but intended to get control over
a significant asset. But sharing Google infrastructure and resources could
probably bring down operating costs in the medium term.

We'll see.

~~~
joobus
How is a company which "might never be profitable" considered a "significant
asset"?!

~~~
the_duke
Money isn't everything.

YouTube is a hugely popular service, driving lots of data, traffic and brand
image towards Google.

Could be the same for Twitter.

~~~
daveguy
I'm not sure if brand image is something YouTube gives Google. I honestly
don't think the general public knows that YouTube is a part of Google. YouTube
seems like its own separate thing to the casual user. It would be interesting
to see a poll of the general public.

But the data. The data is key. They have rocked image recognition and video is
a _huge_ data source for their ML efforts.

------
aresant
Salesforce feels like a bizarre choice, although I agree with their digital
chief that "I love Twitter" personally.

I use twitter every day as my primary method of content discovery.

So at their core the BUSINESS should revolve around monetizing my eyeballs, eg
advertising.

So to me it's Facebook or Google that should grab it, w/FB at the lead
considering their relatively smooth / unhurried / and successful takeovers of
whatsapp / instagram

~~~
trentmb
Perhaps there's some back end tech, talent that would be useful for tackling
Salesforces problems.

~~~
gaius
Salesforce's back end is AWS. They ran their own cloud for a while, but
ditched it.

~~~
packetized
Incorrect.

~~~
gaius
O RLY??

[http://www.channelregister.co.uk/2016/06/03/salesforce_aws_m...](http://www.channelregister.co.uk/2016/06/03/salesforce_aws_microsoft_platform_wars/)

~~~
btym
[http://trust.salesforce.com/trust/instances](http://trust.salesforce.com/trust/instances)

These are all running in SFDC datacenters.

------
deepfriedbits
Twitter's real value to Google is real-time search, in my opinion. They
already license results from Twitter for search results, but having access to
all of that sweet, sweet real-time data is nice.

The social graph is nice, but between Chrome and Gmail, Google already knows
quite a bit about everyone.

------
majani
Bad idea. I think the social networks who's main purpose is to feed into
people's vanity will not stand the test of time since they're not solving a
real problem and are merely novelties.

------
erickhill
I think Twitter's recent foray into becoming a content streaming source (see:
NFL) is very interesting and a natural next step, albeit a late one. The user
base is already there to essentially compete with Twitch and other streaming
providers.

~~~
mbloom1915
Why can't youtube live replicate this streaming service and give even more
split ad revenue back to NFL, CBS, etc.??

------
hornbaker
My bet is GOOG. They need a streaming newsfeed product in which to insert ads.

~~~
0x37
What is this inane trend here on HN of referring to companies with the names
they are registered to stock exhange?

~~~
intsunny
For many of us its sheer laziness and its been this way for a long time. GOOG
is faster to type than Google. (This is especially true for MSFT.)

~~~
bdcravens
I remember MSFT being a common reference on Slashdot way back when.

------
sp527
Seeing a lot of arguments about profitability that don't make sense. At
Twitter scale, profit sensitivity to even minor tweaks in ad
rate/targeting/placement is massive. They could also go into 'maintenance
mode' tomorrow and break a massive profit (it would just be stupid).

Active users is a poor metric for Twitter. It's much more about the views. A
relatively smaller number of people on Twitter can command an outsized
influence. It's a fundamentally different kind of network.

Twitter's future will probably be more about monetizing its viewership. It's
definitely not going to disappear anytime soon.

------
mattjaynes
OH: "Twitter is a Friendster whose Facebook hasn't appeared yet."

From Jessica Livingston yesterday:
[https://twitter.com/jesslivingston/status/778948962724315136](https://twitter.com/jesslivingston/status/778948962724315136)

------
cpsempek
Is Google the suitor, or, is Alphabet the suitor? The article says Google, but
this could be out of habit. I am not sure that answering my question changes
much about the news. But it might say something about how Alphabet views
Twitter based on who they decide owns the acquisition and where Twitter would
fit within the company (as subsidiary or under Google).

------
hornbaker
My bet is GOOG. They need a streaming newsfeed product in which to insert ads,
especially on mobile where FB is killing it.

~~~
rrggrr
GOOG has to buy TWTR or its real-time web ambitions are dead. FB has to buy
TWTR to prevent GOOG real-time entry. AAPL has to buy TWTR or be cut out from
social media. MSFT too. The bidding war that is going on behind the scenes
must be unreal. This acquistion may be the biggest ever.

------
encoderer
Anecdotally I use twitter to advertise my SaaS monitoring product, Cronitor,
with far more success than we found with AdWords. The ad platform feels easier
to use, and promoting content on Twitter is less of a time investment vs
selecting, culling, and optimizing sets of keywords.

------
MollyR
I really can't see salesforce buying twitter. I think a social media giant
would gain something from twitter, but not much else.

~~~
mattwg
I think it makes a bit of sense. For a lot of companies Twitter is already a
major point of customer interaction and retention. Maybe Salesforce feels like
they could monetize that aspect of Twitter, with the advantage that a ton of
consumers are already there and using it.

~~~
abz10
It will introduce a conflict of interest, where the side that has is paying
Twitter.

The perception alone of a conflict means people will 'find' it all over the
place and those examples to their bias until slowly and gradually no one will
trust the service anymore. Even if Twitter never changes anything.

------
susan_hall
Perhaps off-topic, but does anyone know why Twitter gave up on its effort to
monetize its API? There was a moment, circa 2010, when that seemed like the
obvious move. When Twitter first began to shut down access to its full
firehose, it seemed clear that there were businesses willing to pay for its
information. But Twitter suddenly turned away from that idea, and focused on
advertising. Considering how many sites compete for advertising dollars, it
seems crazy that Twitter felt that was the right way to go.

But then Facebook went down the same path, first promoting its API, then
largely giving up on any attempt to monetize it.

And before that, way back in 2006, I tried to build a business that would rely
on Technorati's API, which they briefly promoted, then gave up on.

There are a lot of companies that make money by selling information via an
API. And there is tremendous competition for ad dollars. These 2 facts would
lead me to expect more companies might try to make money from their APIs. But
what happened in Twitter's case?

------
fideloper
I wouldn't blame Jack one bit for wanting to get back to Square full-time (not
that it's necessarily fully his decision to sell).

------
yalogin
It doesn't matter it would still not cover my losses in the stock. Talk about
crappy decisions.

------
fabiandesimone
To me Twitter has always been real time news.

Why haven't they worked on a way to 'validate' tweets around a story, I can't
understand it (from a biz perspective, not technically).

With validation they become, instantly, the #1 news agency in the world.

------
mark_l_watson
Would it be a bad idea for Twitter to charge a small yearly fee for use? The
reason why I think this might work is because some users are very loyal and
might not mind spending $20/year for an advertisement free Twitter service.
They have about 350 million users, according to a comment here, and if 50
million users would stay, that would be $100 million revenue per year, and
with many fewer users, their cost of doing business would be reduced, but with
reduced network effects the service would not be as valuable for users. I like
Twitter and I would pay $20/year in return for no promoted tweets.

~~~
MichaelGG
So they'd convert 15% of all user accounts (many user have more than one
account)? That seems really high - 1% might be attainable. Hardly the numbers
they need to justify their valuation. Maybe if they lay off a ton of employees
and start getting lean, while keeping their current revenue?

------
WA
Stock is through the roof right now. About +19%

~~~
kelukelugames
Oh good. Just 30% off from when I first bought in.

------
samlevine
I would pay $10 a year to use Twitter. It's just that good for live news.

------
dcgudeman
By Salesforce?? RIP twitter.

~~~
ceejayoz
C'mon, no one knows how to run indefinitely at a loss than Salesforce...

~~~
staticautomatic
Indeed. They've never turned a profit either, right? I still can't fathom
how/why they're sinking half a billion dollars into that new building in
downtown SF.

------
sorenjan
At the end of 2015 Twitter had 3900 employees [0]. Why would they need close
to that? How many could a new owner fire without noticeably affecting the day
to day operations?

[0] [https://www.statista.com/statistics/272140/employees-of-
twit...](https://www.statista.com/statistics/272140/employees-of-twitter/)

------
bsparker
I wish Slack would somehow take over Twitter. Expertly adding in custom
channels would save the social platform.

------
edbaskerville
By any normal metric, Twitter is a huge success. 300 million people find their
service useful.

But it was already huge success when it had no business model. Moreover, what
is fundamentally valuable about Twitter to its users--sharing and discovering
little bits of textual expression over a publicly visible social network--is
not very expensive.

From the perspective of the users who find it valuable, why does it need a
for-profit model at all? Why can't we just subsidize it as a non-profit via
grants and donations, a la Wikipedia? I'm pretty sure you could do the
important thing that Twitter does--ignoring all the extras devoted to figuring
out how to extract more money from the data--at a small fraction of its $2
billion in revenue.

I'm not being naive here--it's quite obvious why things are the way they are.
But there many examples out there of making a big impact while making a decent
living (just without anyone trying to become a billionaire). Social networking
is ripe for more of this approach. The attempts so far have failed not because
of their business model, but because of the usual reason: poor execution.

~~~
Avshalom
>>By any normal metric, Twitter is a huge success

Revenue - Cost is perhaps the _most normal metric_

~~~
edbaskerville
>> By any normal metric, Twitter is a huge success > Revenue - Cost is perhaps
the _most normal metric_

Badly chosen phrase. I'm not saying that currently Twitter is not a _business
failure_ \--it is, at the moment. But from the perspective of providing value
to many people, it's doing very well. Plus, the cost part of the equation is
driven at this point largely by trying to figure out how to make more money,
not by continuing to provide a valuable service to users. (The making-more-
money thing is obviously not working yet.)

The alternative model is: lower costs drastically by focusing on doing a
handful of useful things well. And then you might be able to raise the money
to cover those costs the way Wikipedia does.

------
happy-go-lucky
If you try to make people want what you make, you end up making something
disposable, a short-lived romance.

------
aikah
Amazon or Facebook . It would make sense for the latter as it is its only real
competitor.

~~~
jbverschoor
Facebookgot big by copying the twitter timeline. They won't buy them. Not for
the product, not for the team

------
k2xl
Why are Twitter's expenses so high? Don't get me wrong, scaling is hard... But
at the same time, they don't have the issues of scaling photos or videos (like
Facebook).

~~~
pbarnes_1
They host both those things...

------
randomestname
They aren't investing in the present value, they are investing in the future
value. Is Twitter going to be more or less relevant in 5 years? 10 years?

------
rch
Why no mention of Oracle? That's a more likely acquirer than Salesforce.

Other Oracle acquisitions: Datastax, push.io, Collective Intellect, etc.

~~~
nkassis
Has Oracle shown an interest? But like Salesforce, why would Oracle they be
interested? I may be missing something but it is not at all obvious how
twitter is related to the type of thing those two companies are currently
doing.

------
eddiecalzone
I had to come here to read some saner comments; the comment section on the
linked CNBC article is, uh, deplorable.

------
wslh
Is it logical to buy Twitter at $ 16B? I think it is too expensive considering
a lot of their actual users are bots.

~~~
draw_down
A lot of everyone's users are bots.

------
nvk
Twitter should be a public utility.

~~~
athenot
That would be nice but who would pay for servers? I would love an "Open
Twitter" built on standard protocols and implementable by anyone, however if
SMTP and NNTP are any indication, most people prefer convenient silos over
open solutions. And the reality of a hostile internet mean that there is a
need for active resources devoted to protecting any service from abuse.

~~~
redial
> most people prefer convenient silos over open solutions.

Most people don't care one way or the other. They just want it to do what they
want/need.

~~~
CM30
And they also want their friends to be on the service. That's what's really
important, and why a lot of open solutions didn't take off. No one they cared
about was using them.

------
_kyran
Just going to leave this here (from last month):

[http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/downloadthissho...](http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/downloadthisshow/swisherr/7719978)

"Twitter will be sold in six months - Kara Swisher"

~~~
maxander
I'd be curious to see a statistical analysis of how unlikely it is for there
to be predictions of something like this on _any_ given timeframe. Whenever
Twitter got sold (or didn't), what are the odds that some vaguely recognizable
name would have "predicted" it?

To do this analysis we would need some kind of easily searchable corpus of
simply-worded predictions, issued by a sizable fraction of public
personalities. _Hmm..._

------
smegel
If there is anyone who could mess up Twitter worse than Twitter it is Google.

------
plg
If google buys twitter, I'm out

------
ben_jones
Anyone else see S20E02 of southpark? All I'm going to say is it put Twitter in
a very interesting perspective.

------
mandeepj
any idea why advertising is working on facebook and not on twitter?

------
lcnmrn
There are better alternatives to Twitter out there. It’s time for everybody to
move on.

~~~
mikeycgto
Such as?

~~~
daveid
GNU social [1], Mastodon* [2]

There is a set of standartized web protocols called Webfinger,
ActivityStreams, Salmon and PubSubHubbub which allow websites to interact with
each other as a sort of decentralized/federated Twitter (this is called the
"fediverse").

[1]: [https://gnu.io/social](https://gnu.io/social) [2]:
[https://github.com/Gargron/mastodon](https://github.com/Gargron/mastodon)

Disclaimer: I'm working on Mastodon, it's a new open source implementation,
I'm trying to make it more approachable to people who value UX and
maintainability

~~~
nenadg
Nice thing this mastodon.social, how do I reach out to people/interests ?

~~~
daveid
Short answer: The sidebar has a form at the bottom where you can enter a
username@domain to follow them. For that method, you have to know the user in
advance, realistically atm you can browse the public timelines on quitter.se
and quitter.no etc to see who interests you (or ask friends who're using the
network, etc).

I'm going to eventually implement a "who to follow" suggestions section to
make this process smoother.

Mentioning people in statuses works the same as in Twitter, except if it's a
user on the same domain as you (e.g. mastodon.social) you can enter their
@username, but if they are somewhere else, you enter @username@domain.

If you are replying to a status on your timeline, the mentions are pre-filled
like you would expect from e.g. TweetDeck to save you the typing.

Edit: You can follow me as Gargron@mastodon.social

------
sidcool
Salesforce wud be an interesting prospect. Not sure how wud it fit in their
business plan

~~~
packetslave
"wud" is not a word. Use English. please.

~~~
atombath
Not sure how wood it fit in their business plan

~~~
hackaflocka
Please use periods at the end of sentences. This is Hacker News for crying out
loud.

~~~
back_beyond
Not sure how wood it fit in their business plan. . . . . .. ..

------
alex_hitchins
Might sound strange, but I think this would be a great purchase for Apple.
They have the cash, they certainly have the engineers and UI skills it
desperately needs. iMessage working brilliantly, but closer integration with a
Twitter style feed makes real sense to me.

~~~
__abc
Actually, with the new iMessages app platform I wish all my Twitter
conversations moved to iMessages. If Apple buys Twitter, that would be
personally awesome.

~~~
protomyth
I can only imagine what Apple will do with censorship given their app
guidelines and general attitude towards editing their own user forums. Ping
wasn't such a hit either.

