A Customer-Driven Business Model For Twitter (jeffreifman.com) 65
reifman writes: As revolving door of Twitter executives makes headlines and its $100+ million quarterly losses continue, it's not clear the company will survive the year without being acquired for a quarter of its offering price. The solution for Twitter's business challenges could be to adopt an engaging feature rich subscriber model that reaffirms its status as the platform of a global democratic communication hub. Here are fifteen ideas for Twitter to transform into a profitable user-centered business including integration of open source Signal for secure phone calls and direct messaging, Stellar for payments and domain mapping and blog hosting with your feed front and center.
blackberry, much? (Score:4, Funny)
Not being shitty would be a good start (Score:2, Insightful)
Not being a shitty service catering to every whiny shitbag SJW on the planet would be a good start to recovery.
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Make people pay to use Twitter.
What could possibly go wrong.
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You mean besides the realization people will never pay for a service like Twitter? Or that the world was never going to rise and fall with the fortunes of Twitter? Or that today's hot trend is next year's thing of the past?
I'm sure except for the breathless anticipation of when Kim Kardashian is taking her next shit, the vast majority of people who used Twitter used it for about 2 months before they and their friends realized Tweeting that you were buying socks was a fairly meaningless endeavor.
On behalf
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Sure, just like any other social media site, there's shitty parts. That's what happens when you allow the masses to gen
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It's totally not about the social outcasts getting back at all the women who didn't and won't ever sleep with them, nope not at all!
And it's vicious hateful stereotyping like that that makes you SJW such epic hypocrites.
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Only if by "spewing hate" you mean saying offensive things like "I disagree with you" or "I think the SJW argument is wrong."
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Those are only the ones hand-picked by the "victim," of course. How many others are reported every day for things like violating "safe spaces" (where any criticism is not allowed) or reasons like "Well, I perceived it as threatening" or "Anyone who disagrees with my position is obviously a racist/misogynist/homophobe," blah, blah, and whatever other such SJW silliness they've come up with today to silence dissenters? Twitter isn't saying.
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$100m? (Score:5, Interesting)
It is just a service that takes in bits of plaintext and spits them out to multiple users, most of them are using an app so no huge bandwidth cost (although still not as efficient as it could be) there is no valid technical reason for it to cost 100's of millions. A system like Twitter could be completely decentralised and P2P based and nobody would have to spend any extra to run it, the corporation behind Twitter doesn't serve any purpose as far as I can tell.
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What do they spend these millions on? Taking ludes on a superyacht in the Bahamas?
According to one of the linked articles: " the losses are primarily due to stock-based compensation"
In other words, Twitter is really just another get-rich scam for a handful of people. "Come work for me and I'll give you millions of dollars worth of stock. And if it bankrupts the company, so what. By the time that happens, we'll have already cashed out".
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I'm still trying to figure out why Twitter has 4300 employees with 44% of them in "technical roles" What do they all do?
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I more or less have. Technically there were three of us and I'd estimate our peek traffic to be about 1/50th of twitters scale, however the only difference between where I was and where Twitter is ... Is more hardware. The support structure for managing them is the same. They don't actually do ANYTHING special.
A server works properly or it doesn't. When it doesn't, you replace it, and that done by the rack monkeys at the data center or at twitters scale, probably robots, either way that person isn't tech
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Yeah managing one of the largest global real time platforms with ridiculous uptime requirements... why can't that be run by one rockstar devops guy with a beowolf cluster of servers at his disposal.
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Of course they did.
Whether it was in Bangalore, Beijing or Birmingham[1], well, that's a different question.
[1] Either one - it's equally applicable.
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No kidding! WTF is with all the biz-speak ?!
Twitter is freaking gloried half-baked "Instant Messenger" (IM).
Reminds me of Office Space:
WTF is PC Load Letter?
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Baffled (Score:5, Interesting)
I have no clue how they can not be making money with a user base that huge and advertising on it. I'm utterly baffled. It's like the management want it to fail so it can be sold in an acquisition for far less than it's actual value to the people they rub shoulders with while they inflate their own salaries by huge factors with no comeuppance or risk to themselves personally.. ...
Oh, right.
Customer vs Product (Score:2)
And what would the advertising agencies (ie, Twitter's customers) get for subscribing to them? Or have they been confusing their customers and their product again?
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I think they're engaging in Dice-like thinking, that they want the site to work and to be a certain way (that involves lots of buzzwords), and they're finding it terribly inconvenient that the users, who are also the content providers who attract each other to the site, want something entirely else
Quickest way to kill Twitter (Score:2)
$85/mo for cell service? (Score:2)
I wish the guy said he paid $85/mo for cell service up front - would have demonstrates his disconnect from reality right there.
$10/mo for Twitter would be $10 too much. I've already quit reading any Twitter feeds (noise to signal makes it a poor use of time) and just use a free HootSuite account to schedule enough of my own tweets to keep my marketing folks off my back. (I wonder if Twitter's traffic would drop on half if it disappeared from job responsibilities.)
Freedom of speech meets the world? (Score:4, Insightful)
Users have a lot of traditional computing services for "work" or other than work activities to keep communications bland.
A walled garden is great for a set of users with the same views who have to live under their theocracy, monarchy, court systems or repressive governments.
The more a brand been about about open, free communications hopes to shape, contain, report, track freedom of speech, the harder it gets to attract interesting, creative people.
Once the tend setters feel they are been herded into something chilling they will move on. The herd of users will follow to more free platforms that respect their views and thoughts.
So what can future web 2.0 and social media creators learn?
If you start your company in the USA, allow freedom of speech and let users speak their minds. The rest of the world can opt to join in or not.
Users globally already have their own free gov sanctioned web 2.0 sites that are full of tracked accounts swapping everyday content.
Once a brand clamps down on freedom of speech, can the user base from nations with no freedoms be a useful long term user base?
Sell the amazing role of freedom of speech to the world, trying to keep censors happy just makes users look for any better platform.
Also open the platform to other people and OS's. Having your brand all over brands hardware and software is a plus.
As for profit, good to have that in place to that during the design stage, ready to go, not as a new project years later.
doomed (Score:3)
It will be merged with YouTube and Facebook... (Score:4, Funny)
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Well, I'm shocked ... (Score:2)
Yet another service which made billions when it went IPO but which nonetheless has no real business model.
I mean, why do people keep valuing these things as being worth zillions of dollars when they have no meaningful revenue? It's not like this is the first one of these.
These things were never worth billions, and then all of a sudden people start to realize that, and everyone panics and goes all boo hoo ... on behalf of those of us who always thought Twitter was just another overhyped stock ... ha ha.
Tha
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Their "viable business model" is .. what, ads or subscription?
If people won't pay for subscriptions, and their ads hasn't been working, what other options are there?
Ride Sharing, or, Save the Taxis (Score:2)
Twitter's single biggest mistake, in my humble opinion, was overlooking ride sharing. I don't want to use a paid ride sharing service where I don't know the people, the driver, or what kind of music I will hear during the ride. I would prefer to twit my ride and go with someone I know something about.
They can monetize this quite easily by charging the regulated Taxi industry a small percentage when a twitter user summons their service and pays through their Twitter account. You don't always have a twitter f