Twitter Expected to Begin Layoffs and Stop Headquarters Expansion(nytimes.com)
nytimes.com
Twitter Expected to Begin Layoffs and Stop Headquarters Expansion
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/10/technology/twitter-expected-to-begin-layoffs-and-stop-headquarters-expansion.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=second-column-region®ion=top-news&WT.nav=top-news
413 comments
I'm sad for my friends at Twitter but, this shouldn't come as much of a surprise.
Is indeed sad for the people that are let go, but at least the market is hot and they will probably find new jobs soon.
That is true if the layoff is specific to Twitter and not a harbinger of a general downturn
There is another bloated company with an unclear growth story right across the street from Twitter, and it happens share same CEO. How long can Square keep up its act?
What makes you say that? Last I saw they had great revenue/were filing for IPO. Just wondering.
Twitter has great revenue too. It's the profit that's problematic.
Profit is not a problem as long as you have growth. Twitter doesn't have that, and neither does Square.
Square has a clear business model, i.e. transaction commissions. I don't think it's particularly comparable to Twitter.
Yeah, honestly I'd think it were sad if they were, say, manufacturing employees who were laid off and had poor prospects, but in today's market any decent engineer or product person who worked at Twitter would be snapped up in a second.
A sad day for Twitter, but a dose of reality for a lot of the fluffiness in the market at the moment.
Companies need to have real revenue and produce real profit and then need a valuation based on sane multiples. Twitter got behind that curve badly and ultimately this is what happens.
Companies need to have real revenue and produce real profit and then need a valuation based on sane multiples. Twitter got behind that curve badly and ultimately this is what happens.
Yes, it's sad for employees being let go, but it's good news for Twitter. I don't think Twitter is going anywhere; it has a huge user base and a lot of people think of it as a branch of the internet. By cutting surgically (removing, as you put it, the "fluffiness"), Jack might very well be able to bring some fighting spirit back.
Oh I agree, I didn't say I thought the company was going bust... just saying that this is likely the start of a lot more focus on the hard numbers of tech companies and less focus on hype-based valuation (although the later isn't going to disappear entirely). Just that question a a lot of startups hate "So how are you going to make money?" is likely going to start getting asked a lot more.
Yes, it's sad for employees let go, but it's good news for AOL. I don't think AOL is going anywhere; it has a huge user base and a lot of people think of it as the internet. By cutting surgically (removing, as you put it, the "fluffiness"), Jonathan might very well be able to bring some fighting spirit back.
Not trying to be snarky, but when have you ever seen a company do "surgical" layoffs? Anything across the board is not surgical by definition. This is just a plain, simple RIF to stem the losses. There's nothing surgical about it. Surgical would imply killing off specific teams and products. This is across the board.
> Surgical would imply killing off specific teams and products. This is across the board.
Perhaps I missed it but no where did I see any specific mention that this was either surgical or across the board. Care to elaborate? If they didn't specify it certain could go either way.
Perhaps I missed it but no where did I see any specific mention that this was either surgical or across the board. Care to elaborate? If they didn't specify it certain could go either way.
>I don't think Twitter is going anywhere; it has a huge user base and a lot of people think of it as a branch of the internet.
It's not going anywhere in the next year or two. But in five years? Ten years?
Twitter's main problem is that it has one product, and it's possible to get bored with that product. It's not really possible to get bored of googling things or buying things off amazon, but it's entirely possible to get bored of twitter.
Remember when every man and his dog had a blog? (Or possibly a livejournal?) Remember when the word "blogosphere" was all over the news? What happened to all the blogs?
It's not going anywhere in the next year or two. But in five years? Ten years?
Twitter's main problem is that it has one product, and it's possible to get bored with that product. It's not really possible to get bored of googling things or buying things off amazon, but it's entirely possible to get bored of twitter.
Remember when every man and his dog had a blog? (Or possibly a livejournal?) Remember when the word "blogosphere" was all over the news? What happened to all the blogs?
That analogy doesn't hold up as well to tools. I mean we're still using E-mail right? Twitter is basically a format in its own right at this point
No it's not, and unlike email, it's a proprietary system under the control of a single company.
A format like Twitter requires major infrastructure to work well so being under one company makes complete and necessary sense. This doesn't detract from the fact that it's become a format that a lot of the Internet now depends on for communication and news. Simply saying "no, it's not" doesn't prove anything.
I don't see it so much as a tool as an experience. The twitter experience is almost always the same, which is why I got bored of it.
> What my vague acquaintance had for breakfast
> What my vague acquaintance had for breakfast
> What my vague acquaintance thinks about politics, which I need to grit my teeth and not reply to.
> Slightly amusing post from a well-known celebrity I follow, which someone will post on facebook later in the day anyway.
> Slightly amusing post from a well-known celebrity I quite deliberately don't follow, but which gets retweeted into my feed anyway.
> A politician I am starting to regret following wants my money.
> What some well-known celebrity I don't follow had for breakfast
Tools do something useful. Twitter doesn't -- at least, not for 95% of users.
> What my vague acquaintance had for breakfast
> What my vague acquaintance had for breakfast
> What my vague acquaintance thinks about politics, which I need to grit my teeth and not reply to.
> Slightly amusing post from a well-known celebrity I follow, which someone will post on facebook later in the day anyway.
> Slightly amusing post from a well-known celebrity I quite deliberately don't follow, but which gets retweeted into my feed anyway.
> A politician I am starting to regret following wants my money.
> What some well-known celebrity I don't follow had for breakfast
Tools do something useful. Twitter doesn't -- at least, not for 95% of users.
>Remember when every man and his dog had a blog? (Or possibly a livejournal?) Remember when the word "blogosphere" was all over the news? What happened to all the blogs?
They became listservs. Ironic huh?
They became listservs. Ironic huh?
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You're spot on about Twitter basically being far overvalued. However their problem isn't lack of real revenue. They're tracking to $2+ billion in revenue in the next four quarters. Assuming a significantly slowing growth rate, they can easily double that sales trajectory to $4 billion in three years.
Their problem is that costs are far out of line, which is why they're cutting. Twitter could turn a significant profit if they design for $3 or $4 billion in sales (rather than pretending they're heading toward $20 billion). Their margins should be comparable to Facebook's, their business is no more difficult to optimize.
They have 12% of the sales of Facebook, with ~38% of the employee base. It's an extremely poorly run, bloated business. They're built to scale to Facebook's size, but they will never achieve that size no matter what happens. Long-term they're a $20 or $40 billion market cap business, instead of $250 billion.
Their problem is that costs are far out of line, which is why they're cutting. Twitter could turn a significant profit if they design for $3 or $4 billion in sales (rather than pretending they're heading toward $20 billion). Their margins should be comparable to Facebook's, their business is no more difficult to optimize.
They have 12% of the sales of Facebook, with ~38% of the employee base. It's an extremely poorly run, bloated business. They're built to scale to Facebook's size, but they will never achieve that size no matter what happens. Long-term they're a $20 or $40 billion market cap business, instead of $250 billion.
You're seeing this from the wrong angle. Twitter's problem is NOT the lack of "real revenue" or "real profit." This is the sort of thinking that stagnates the platform.
Google's original investors were FUMING that the company didn't pursue ads earlier, following with what Yahoo did. In retrospect we now see the insight of that approach.
Twitter's problem is one of product. It's not innovating, it hasn't changed it's core formula in many years. Compare that to Google and Facebook which both made many bold improvements to their platforms after booming into success. (Though facebook one could argue has slowed down in its innovation.)
Google's original investors were FUMING that the company didn't pursue ads earlier, following with what Yahoo did. In retrospect we now see the insight of that approach.
Twitter's problem is one of product. It's not innovating, it hasn't changed it's core formula in many years. Compare that to Google and Facebook which both made many bold improvements to their platforms after booming into success. (Though facebook one could argue has slowed down in its innovation.)
>Companies need to have real revenue and produce real profit and then need a valuation based on sane multiples.
I wonder how many unicorns lack these criteria. Only Twitter has the discipline of public markets. If it doesn't deliver, public shareholders get burned.
If unicorns don't deliver, private investors get burned, but where do the losses go? VCs, founders, employees, as well as some family offices, banks, university endowments, pension funds...where else? And I sure am curious about the exposure of these last three groups.
I wonder how many unicorns lack these criteria. Only Twitter has the discipline of public markets. If it doesn't deliver, public shareholders get burned.
If unicorns don't deliver, private investors get burned, but where do the losses go? VCs, founders, employees, as well as some family offices, banks, university endowments, pension funds...where else? And I sure am curious about the exposure of these last three groups.
I don't use Twitter and don't have any friends that do. Am I just uncool, or is it super niche now?
Considering Twitter is still the first go-to social platform for reactions to news, I doubt it.
Nonetheless, I've had trouble convincing my parents why they should use Twitter.
Nonetheless, I've had trouble convincing my parents why they should use Twitter.
Do you get mostly opinions and reactions on Twitter or 140char reporting on breaking stories? I tried using it to follow the Arab spring and just couldn't.
Wish I could find it, but a couple weeks ago I saw someone posting a 20-ish part message on Twitter. At some point you've gotta think maybe this isn't the appropriate way to use the service.
@pmarca is famous for his multipart "tweet storms". Lots of others have followed suit (not sure if he started the trend, but was the first one I saw doing it).
Being a big sports fan (#phinsup) I find that I get breaking news first on Twitter. Player signings, coaches being hired (#dancampbell) and fired (#firephilbin), etc. I also find a lot of interesting links on Twitter, that are things I wouldn't necessarily have found otherwise, because they're from sites that weren't necessarily always on my radar.
Same here. I just don't see the value in Twitter when I can easily get personalized content from Facebook's news feed and use an RSS reader for the sites that I follow.
Now imagine you're yourself, but you don't know what an RSS feed is, like 99.9% of the population. Doesn't Twitter sound useful?
I see it used most heavily for, like, customer support... Surprised that's not a more core part of their business
Really? For who? That's super interesting
I agree with @bpicolo when it comes to support. If you have a problem with most of the big companies in terms of support and they are delaying a response, all you have to do is reach out to the support team on Twitter and they respond ASAP.
Companies such as AT& T, Chase, Citi, Bank of America, Amazon etc..
Companies such as AT& T, Chase, Citi, Bank of America, Amazon etc..
AT&T is truly the shittiest company I've ever dealt with. Maybe I should try the magic of Twitter...
@Bachmeier, I agree. And oh, they are right there with Comcast in my opinion when it comes to bad service. They are very good at making small mistakes like overcharging you know on a bill. So Twitter will do wonders for you :).
Even just setting up a Twitter account for a business feels like it's not something they've put any effort into. You can set up an advertising account with multiple users, but for a regular public-facing Twitter account it's either use TweetDeck or share passwords.
Yep. It sounds like a real, viable market too. They probably have a lot more insight into this than me, it's just something that surprises me as an external party
At first when it appeared I thought it was silly but now I like it since it's a quick simple way to get information without all the bloat. I never thought I'd like it, now I look forward to new technologies that don't exist yet but I think I will need when they arrive.
I have ditched Facebook that's a cesspool of humanity and HR magnet.
I have ditched Facebook that's a cesspool of humanity and HR magnet.
I hated the idea of twitter for a long time because I thought it was the shitty part of facebook (incessant updates from people whom I don't care about) x 10, because it's just a feed.
But since I started really getting into it last year, I've become so much more knowledgeable by following the best entrepreneurs, VCs, anyone with interesting insight. It's a surprisingly pure channel of news/knowledge if you use it correctly and not go on a follow spree.
It's definitely not the place for social networking as far as communicating with friends/family goes.
But since I started really getting into it last year, I've become so much more knowledgeable by following the best entrepreneurs, VCs, anyone with interesting insight. It's a surprisingly pure channel of news/knowledge if you use it correctly and not go on a follow spree.
It's definitely not the place for social networking as far as communicating with friends/family goes.
I've been a Twitter user since 2006 and mostly just use it to post sarcastic and pretentious remarks for my own enjoyment; the social aspect of it is almost meaningless to me. Many of my friends in tech do have Twitter accounts, of which they make varying degrees of use (though I'm not sure how many of them would regard it as essential - probably not many).
Most of my non-tech friends in real life broadly do not have Twitter accounts, or if they do, they follow about eight people (usually including Stephen Fry) and have either never tweeted, or only tweeted about four times, usually starting with, "Well, I'm on Twitter now. What do I do next?"
I'm talking about people in their 20s and 30s here. The same set of people do make a lot of use of Facebook (though a few, like me, find it vastly irritating and have deleted their accounts in recent years - but I'm not sure I know anyone female in that age bracket who doesn't have and use a Facebook account).
A bit more anecdata while I'm at it: Instagram seems pretty popular in cities, where people enjoy posting pictures of their pulled pork burgers and cocktails in jam jars - out here in the countryside, I don't hear much about it. The younger generation definitely do use Snapchat and the like, but I think most people over about 25 have no understanding at all of it. WhatsApp seems to have a very broad and universal appeal, and is a real common denominator for anyone who falls under the category of "I want to keep in contact with a friend who lives abroad" (I don't fully understand how it won out over Skype, apart from Skype being a very poor experience on mobile). Lastly, I'm not sure I know anyone who doesn't work in online media who actually uses Pinterest.
Most of my non-tech friends in real life broadly do not have Twitter accounts, or if they do, they follow about eight people (usually including Stephen Fry) and have either never tweeted, or only tweeted about four times, usually starting with, "Well, I'm on Twitter now. What do I do next?"
I'm talking about people in their 20s and 30s here. The same set of people do make a lot of use of Facebook (though a few, like me, find it vastly irritating and have deleted their accounts in recent years - but I'm not sure I know anyone female in that age bracket who doesn't have and use a Facebook account).
A bit more anecdata while I'm at it: Instagram seems pretty popular in cities, where people enjoy posting pictures of their pulled pork burgers and cocktails in jam jars - out here in the countryside, I don't hear much about it. The younger generation definitely do use Snapchat and the like, but I think most people over about 25 have no understanding at all of it. WhatsApp seems to have a very broad and universal appeal, and is a real common denominator for anyone who falls under the category of "I want to keep in contact with a friend who lives abroad" (I don't fully understand how it won out over Skype, apart from Skype being a very poor experience on mobile). Lastly, I'm not sure I know anyone who doesn't work in online media who actually uses Pinterest.
This is bad, if not entirely unexpected, news. What is out of the ordinary is the public markets' reaction: the stock is down 3% in after-hours trading.
Typically when a company announces layoffs its stock goes up. More mature companies have sometimes slashed headcount on the way to a better market situation. But when younger companies announce layoffs, the markets stop assuming they have lots of growth ahead and adjust expectations accordingly -- usually resulting in a significant drop in stock price.
Remember, back in July, Twitter announced earnings beating market estimates. This was at 4pm, its stock surged 4%. About half an hour later, CFO Anthony Noto said Twitter would not see "sustained, meaningful" user growth for a "considerable period of time." TWTR promptly plunged 10%.
http://www.cnbc.com/2015/07/28/twitter-earnings-7-cents-per-...
Typically when a company announces layoffs its stock goes up. More mature companies have sometimes slashed headcount on the way to a better market situation. But when younger companies announce layoffs, the markets stop assuming they have lots of growth ahead and adjust expectations accordingly -- usually resulting in a significant drop in stock price.
Remember, back in July, Twitter announced earnings beating market estimates. This was at 4pm, its stock surged 4%. About half an hour later, CFO Anthony Noto said Twitter would not see "sustained, meaningful" user growth for a "considerable period of time." TWTR promptly plunged 10%.
http://www.cnbc.com/2015/07/28/twitter-earnings-7-cents-per-...
I suspect that's just people having their delusions of rampant future growth and expansion of twitter being crushed in the gears of mundane reality. These moves are perfectly fine for a normal company that intends to continue operating at about the same level as it is currently indefinitely. But people view every tech company through the lens of apple, google, amazon, etc. They expect growth, they expect new stuff, and so on.
The truth is that with modern technology you can build a company that has hundreds of millions of high-volume users and yet is not very expensive to operate. Companies, and their revenue, don't necessarily scale the way we're used to from the experience of industrial companies.
The truth is that with modern technology you can build a company that has hundreds of millions of high-volume users and yet is not very expensive to operate. Companies, and their revenue, don't necessarily scale the way we're used to from the experience of industrial companies.
They turned off their APIs to application developers. What they should have done is ramp that shit up and figure out how to monetize the query traffic or figure out a way to decentralize their infrastructure to allow everyone to run Twitter together.
>What they should have done is ramp that shit up and figure out how to monetize the query traffic or figure out a way to decentralize their infrastructure to allow everyone to run Twitter together
So, I'm genuienly curious. How do they make money by "ramping that shit up"? I've seen a lot of companies that have 'get users' as their M.O., but I have no insight into the "profit!!!" phase. Opening their user base seems contary to "profit!!!", from a laymans perspective.
It seems to me like API/User info availability is their leverage w.r.t. profitability, much as it pains me as a potential developer who would like that information for free. How does decentralization make them (and their investors) money? I can't see a way to do both given the incentives.
So, I'm genuienly curious. How do they make money by "ramping that shit up"? I've seen a lot of companies that have 'get users' as their M.O., but I have no insight into the "profit!!!" phase. Opening their user base seems contary to "profit!!!", from a laymans perspective.
It seems to me like API/User info availability is their leverage w.r.t. profitability, much as it pains me as a potential developer who would like that information for free. How does decentralization make them (and their investors) money? I can't see a way to do both given the incentives.
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While not stated eloquently, I do think there's some truth in that.
1. Open API's, good documentation and community engagement goes a long way in establishing developer trust. I don't believe developer trust is correlated significantly with revenue (directly), but it's absolutely correlated with acquisition. I'd argue that Angular or React were partially successful because of the stickiness of their communities, and that's a powerful self-perpetuating force.
2. Monetization is in the queries. Facebook and Google know this. Throwing aside all of their auxiliary services, emerging markets, hardware, et al... between 70-90% of their respective revenue is from direct advertising. If there's a way to scale or "ramp" their revenue model, this would be the portion to focus on.
1. Open API's, good documentation and community engagement goes a long way in establishing developer trust. I don't believe developer trust is correlated significantly with revenue (directly), but it's absolutely correlated with acquisition. I'd argue that Angular or React were partially successful because of the stickiness of their communities, and that's a powerful self-perpetuating force.
2. Monetization is in the queries. Facebook and Google know this. Throwing aside all of their auxiliary services, emerging markets, hardware, et al... between 70-90% of their respective revenue is from direct advertising. If there's a way to scale or "ramp" their revenue model, this would be the portion to focus on.
Monetization of the queries doesn't appear to be a significant revenue opportunity for either Google or Facebook - why would this be different for Twitter? Not that this can't be a revenue source, but how big is it?
An alternative: I agree with everyone that they should have turned the APIs back on - they just should have made it mandatory to carry advertising as part of the feeds in order to access the feeds. They could have also layered on federated advertising for anyone consuming the API - meaning, allow those folks to show their own advertising in-stream. They simply pay Twitter a cut. Both of these may have helped them both grow the audience and advertising at the same time.
An alternative: I agree with everyone that they should have turned the APIs back on - they just should have made it mandatory to carry advertising as part of the feeds in order to access the feeds. They could have also layered on federated advertising for anyone consuming the API - meaning, allow those folks to show their own advertising in-stream. They simply pay Twitter a cut. Both of these may have helped them both grow the audience and advertising at the same time.
Monetization of the queries isn't a significant revenue opportunity because of scaling payment issues. Solve that, and you solve getting paid for doing something you are good at, which is throwing millions of statuses at millions of users.
I'm not getting why you think this data is so valuable or who you think the audience is - are you suggesting that millions of people would pay for the feed and it is just a problem of being able to pay?
The data is valuable only if someone has fair access to it. What an individual or a thousand may do with that data is an unknown and that is the real opportunity here, not the promise of a million subscribers paying you a dollar each. Twitter took that unknown, turned it off, and tried to own all the opportunity and all the answers. They did this because they IPO'd and then the need by investors to know what's going to happen took over even more than before. If there were answers to be had here, they'd already be doing it. I'm suggesting a move back to innovation, which is where they belong.
The desire by some individuals to make insane amounts of money on an idea are directly responsible for a massive SUCK experience for the end users of the software because those users are then forced to use the software in a way that makes the revenue predictable. I used to love to use Twitter because of all the wide variety of apps and things I could do with it with code. Now it's just unusable and dying. I would pay to make that different, but there isn't anything they offer that's worth my time and effort, so I'll go elsewhere.
The desire by some individuals to make insane amounts of money on an idea are directly responsible for a massive SUCK experience for the end users of the software because those users are then forced to use the software in a way that makes the revenue predictable. I used to love to use Twitter because of all the wide variety of apps and things I could do with it with code. Now it's just unusable and dying. I would pay to make that different, but there isn't anything they offer that's worth my time and effort, so I'll go elsewhere.
"The data is valuable only if someone has fair access to it. What an individual or a thousand may do with that data is an unknown and that is the real opportunity here, not the promise of a million subscribers paying you a dollar each."
Why is the data only valuable if someone has fair access to it? Right now, basically anyone can go license the Twitter data and have access to the full firehose. And I don't know how you know if the data is real opportunity here (vs. advertising).
"The desire by some individuals to make insane amounts of money on an idea are directly responsible for a massive SUCK experience for the end users of the software because those users are then forced to use the software in a way that makes the revenue predictable. I used to love to use Twitter because of all the wide variety of apps and things I could do with it with code. Now it's just unusable and dying. I would pay to make that different, but there isn't anything they offer that's worth my time and effort, so I'll go elsewhere."
Are you offering a better path for Twitter and their shareholders, or are you offering a path that feels better, but may have a much lesser outcome for those parties? If so, why would they take it?
And while I agree with you that Twitter is dying, it's not unusable, it's just not usable in the way that you want to use it.
Why is the data only valuable if someone has fair access to it? Right now, basically anyone can go license the Twitter data and have access to the full firehose. And I don't know how you know if the data is real opportunity here (vs. advertising).
"The desire by some individuals to make insane amounts of money on an idea are directly responsible for a massive SUCK experience for the end users of the software because those users are then forced to use the software in a way that makes the revenue predictable. I used to love to use Twitter because of all the wide variety of apps and things I could do with it with code. Now it's just unusable and dying. I would pay to make that different, but there isn't anything they offer that's worth my time and effort, so I'll go elsewhere."
Are you offering a better path for Twitter and their shareholders, or are you offering a path that feels better, but may have a much lesser outcome for those parties? If so, why would they take it?
And while I agree with you that Twitter is dying, it's not unusable, it's just not usable in the way that you want to use it.
I'm sorry but I'm not quite sure what you mean by this?
In 2011, 96% of Google's revenue was from AdWords -- in recent years that has lowered slightly due to their diversification and cloud services, but it's still at least a 70% share of their gross revenues.
Facebook is currently ~80%.
The money is in the ads.
In 2011, 96% of Google's revenue was from AdWords -- in recent years that has lowered slightly due to their diversification and cloud services, but it's still at least a 70% share of their gross revenues.
Facebook is currently ~80%.
The money is in the ads.
You and I agree.
The original poster is talking about queries in a difference sense than a Google query - he's referring to it as an API call in a "firehose" sense - so I'm buying access to the Twitter data for my application. I'm suggesting that the number of people who will pay for those API calls is limited.
But no doubt that money is in the ads - that's why I suggested that they should turn the API back on, but require clients to display the ads. Sadly, I think this opportunity is gone as they have killed their developer ecosystem.
The original poster is talking about queries in a difference sense than a Google query - he's referring to it as an API call in a "firehose" sense - so I'm buying access to the Twitter data for my application. I'm suggesting that the number of people who will pay for those API calls is limited.
But no doubt that money is in the ads - that's why I suggested that they should turn the API back on, but require clients to display the ads. Sadly, I think this opportunity is gone as they have killed their developer ecosystem.
I'm the original poster, and I was talking about ads, not metered queries. :)
[edit] and perhaps that was a poor choice of words. as a developer of high-volume low-latency exchange feeds, "query" has a bit of a different meaning to me.
[edit] and perhaps that was a poor choice of words. as a developer of high-volume low-latency exchange feeds, "query" has a bit of a different meaning to me.
Nope - the misinterpretation is my end - my bad. Re-reading your original I think we're on the same page. I think they need to reopen their API (if it isn't too late) and then just send ads as part of that package to clients and require them to display them.
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Facebook's token user API system has now created the billion dollar juggernaut that is Tinder. That app is now irrevocably linked to Facebook.
You are completely right, there is a huge strategic reason for promoting OAuth API's as a large company.
You are completely right, there is a huge strategic reason for promoting OAuth API's as a large company.
Trust initially makes you decide to use something (marketing) and trust also makes decide to stay with it (loyalty). Marketing itself is mostly related to raising interest, but it frequently 'hacks' trust by using biases to establish quick and cheap trust with consumers. If a company's product is trustworthy (real trust, not biased trust) then the loyalty becomes strong with the customer. Companies who acquire other companies regularly have identified their bad habits of using too much marketing to try to get more customers and instead focus on buying loyalty through an acquisition.
I think it's supposed to work like this: assuming more users == more revenue, then opening up and promoting the use of APIs creates alternative channels to acquire new users (partner apps have their own incentive to attract users etc). Where it can hurt is when the integrating apps either don't substantially move the needle on new user acquisition, or worse they cannibalize your user base by creating reasons for your users to NOT visit your site.
IMO though the API "shutdown" was shortsighted by Twitter. If people are using a competing interface instead of your own, then maybe you should fix your own rather than just shutting down the API. Of course that's easy to say as an outsider. I'm sure the truth is much more nuanced.
IMO though the API "shutdown" was shortsighted by Twitter. If people are using a competing interface instead of your own, then maybe you should fix your own rather than just shutting down the API. Of course that's easy to say as an outsider. I'm sure the truth is much more nuanced.
Facebook's API gave birth to the billion dollar juggernaut that is Tinder.
Tinder piggybacked off of Facebook OAuth logins in a useful way, and now Facebook has further cemented their permanence as it will now be very difficult for that dating app to sever themselves from Facebook OAuth.
Tinder piggybacked off of Facebook OAuth logins in a useful way, and now Facebook has further cemented their permanence as it will now be very difficult for that dating app to sever themselves from Facebook OAuth.
Note I said "or" there. Decentralizing the infrastructure would make things cheaper and might give you revenue opportunity (and growth) that you wouldn't have otherwise. For example, perhaps you get into the business of aggregating ad sales to downstream providers.
As for directly monetizing the APIs, one thought that springs to mind is charging for the firehose in a federated way. You could, for example, have a query endpoint that looks like this to guarantee standard issuance of data, identity and payment:
As for directly monetizing the APIs, one thought that springs to mind is charging for the firehose in a federated way. You could, for example, have a query endpoint that looks like this to guarantee standard issuance of data, identity and payment:
GET /api/v1/status/access
{
"payment_address": "13kU1qPtM3WWXrNugWfRPNM1BniMQDw9Ds",
"rate_bytes_sec": 50000000,
"ask_expires_at": 1444492687,
"access_token": "h458Yf301",
"ask_in_satoshis": 1000000,
"ask_window_secs": 3600
}
GET /api/v1/status/h458Yf301
{
"payment_address": "13kU1qPtM3WWXrNugWfRPNM1BniMQDw9Ds",
"payment_received_address": "13kU1qPtM3WWXrNugWfRPNM1BniMQDw9Ds",
"payment_received": 2000000,
"access_expires_at": 1444499887,
"identity_screenname": "kordless",
"status_data_begins": [
]
}
"Note I said "or" there. Decentralizing the infrastructure would make things cheaper and might give you revenue opportunity (and growth) that you wouldn't have otherwise. For example, perhaps you get into the business of aggregating ad sales to downstream providers."
Well, maybe, but you can't save your way to $2b in revenue. Stock prices don't generally go up on cost savings, they go up because of future revenue AND profit expectations. Silicon Valley and Wall Street both prize growth in revenue way over profit. But you're correct that they might discover another revenue stream - but now you're betting a lot on the value of federation.
"Make a payment to the address, then start querying at 50MB/sec for the duration of your valid token (in this example, 2 hours):"
I think you are vastly overstating the number of people or companies that would be willing to pay for this firehose. While it may be useful to some companies, overall the data isn't likely to be enough to be a $1b opportunity. More importantly, the number of people willing to buy isn't likely to grow - so a B2B play can be a minor part of their revenue but I don't believe they'd be able to depend on it for massive growth.
"And yes, I'm proposing Twitter should use Bitcoin to monetize query traffic. Even better, charge people for posting lots of statuses, or following and unfollowing lots of people. Link ask price to signal/noise ratio."
Given the current cost structure of other services (Facebook/Instagram/SnapChat), I'd argue you're unlikely to get anyone to pay for it, and you're reducing both the size and any potential growth of your audience dramatically.
Well, maybe, but you can't save your way to $2b in revenue. Stock prices don't generally go up on cost savings, they go up because of future revenue AND profit expectations. Silicon Valley and Wall Street both prize growth in revenue way over profit. But you're correct that they might discover another revenue stream - but now you're betting a lot on the value of federation.
"Make a payment to the address, then start querying at 50MB/sec for the duration of your valid token (in this example, 2 hours):"
I think you are vastly overstating the number of people or companies that would be willing to pay for this firehose. While it may be useful to some companies, overall the data isn't likely to be enough to be a $1b opportunity. More importantly, the number of people willing to buy isn't likely to grow - so a B2B play can be a minor part of their revenue but I don't believe they'd be able to depend on it for massive growth.
"And yes, I'm proposing Twitter should use Bitcoin to monetize query traffic. Even better, charge people for posting lots of statuses, or following and unfollowing lots of people. Link ask price to signal/noise ratio."
Given the current cost structure of other services (Facebook/Instagram/SnapChat), I'd argue you're unlikely to get anyone to pay for it, and you're reducing both the size and any potential growth of your audience dramatically.
> Data licensing and other revenue totaled $48 million, an increase of 95% year-over-year.
This is from their Q1 2015 report, so data licensing and other revenue is probably $200M ARR now. Clearly people are willing to pay for access. If they improve the way they provide that, it just might be bigger than a $1B opp.
I would be willing to pay for on demand abilities to control who I follow and unfollow without being throttled.
This is from their Q1 2015 report, so data licensing and other revenue is probably $200M ARR now. Clearly people are willing to pay for access. If they improve the way they provide that, it just might be bigger than a $1B opp.
I would be willing to pay for on demand abilities to control who I follow and unfollow without being throttled.
That's approximately 10% of total revenue. I also think you have the growth incorrect - in their 10Q, Twitter said the product was growing 65% YoY. So you're making two assumptions:
- That the opportunity is there - and that the growth will continue. This isn't a given, but it is possible. I think the fact that Twitter is obviously investing more in the advertising business tells us what we need to know about the data business - that it is good, growing, but will always remain a relatively small portion of their overall revenue mix. Now you may argue that that is because they're blocking it - but my assumption is that they are investing based on Total Addressable Market (TAM) and experience. - That the problem is the payment system. There's little to support this - there's little sign of demand or willingness from individuals or small companies to spend on this at scale.
The fact that you're willing to pay for on demand controls is great and fine, but it does not mean that anyone else is willing in the same way.
- That the opportunity is there - and that the growth will continue. This isn't a given, but it is possible. I think the fact that Twitter is obviously investing more in the advertising business tells us what we need to know about the data business - that it is good, growing, but will always remain a relatively small portion of their overall revenue mix. Now you may argue that that is because they're blocking it - but my assumption is that they are investing based on Total Addressable Market (TAM) and experience. - That the problem is the payment system. There's little to support this - there's little sign of demand or willingness from individuals or small companies to spend on this at scale.
The fact that you're willing to pay for on demand controls is great and fine, but it does not mean that anyone else is willing in the same way.
I thought they did exactly as you said: the APIs are available as long as you pay Twitter for them...
> The truth is that with modern technology you can build a company that has hundreds of millions of high-volume users and yet is not very expensive to operate.
Investors had to dump more than a billion dollars into Twitter to get it to where it is today.
Investors had to dump more than a billion dollars into Twitter to get it to where it is today.
Uh, most of that money was from the IPO and that was probably done because founders/early investors wanted to cash in. I'd say the vast majority of that funding was not necessary to scale to where they are today.
Really? Wikipedia shows they raised over a billion from investors before IPO (including individual rounds of $800M and $300M.) Of the $800M, half went to cash out.
I'd agree though that at least technically, to deliver the core user product, this money simply wasn't needed. (It might have been needed for advertising or building up contracts, etc.)
I'd agree though that at least technically, to deliver the core user product, this money simply wasn't needed. (It might have been needed for advertising or building up contracts, etc.)
It didn't help improve the interface much. For example, on this site the interface shows me quickly who is replying to whom. A billion dollars in and Twitter still can't do this. They tried to be the world's largest chat room and basically came up AOL.
And the UI changes they have made are demonstrably worse, such as their seemingly random threading, constantly losing page scroll position, and repeating earlier tweets.
1) Operating is not the same as building, especially if you have to figure things out.
2) Twitter reported half a billion in revenue last quarter.
2) Twitter reported half a billion in revenue last quarter.
>Twitter reported half a billion in revenue last quarter
And yet managed to lose 136 million dollars. While revenue is interesting, it just doesn't matter if you can't turn a profit.
And yet managed to lose 136 million dollars. While revenue is interesting, it just doesn't matter if you can't turn a profit.
How is it even possible for a company like twitter to spend a billion dollar and change in one quarter? That's enough to run a small country complete with golden bathroom for the dictator.
Time to go read about their OPEX I suppose. Anyone got a link to a good write-up?
Time to go read about their OPEX I suppose. Anyone got a link to a good write-up?
Half a billion but...
People are expensive, office space in their 30+ offices is expensive, hundreds of thousands of servers are expensive...
People are expensive, office space in their 30+ offices is expensive, hundreds of thousands of servers are expensive...
How in the world do they have hundreds of thousands of servers!
Twitter is notorious for being ridiculously frivolous[1]. They also pay their employees very very high wages[2], which isn't a bad thing, but I assume that doesn't scale well.
1. http://money.cnn.com/2014/03/06/technology/social/twitter-ca...
2. http://www.glassdoor.com/Salary/Twitter-Staff-Software-Engin...
1. http://money.cnn.com/2014/03/06/technology/social/twitter-ca...
2. http://www.glassdoor.com/Salary/Twitter-Staff-Software-Engin...
And? Aside from the fact that that's not really true, what does it matter? Twitter already IPO'd, the original investors got their money back, now it's just owners. And it doesn't require a team of 4000 to operate twitter. It requires far fewer, and as time goes on twitter will generally just get cheaper to operate.
Twitter can easily bring in enough revenue to keep doing what it's doing indefinitely. And that's totally fine. But it's unlikely they're going to grow by 10x in a few years or pivot drastically. Yet those unrealistic expectations were built into the current stock price.
Twitter can easily bring in enough revenue to keep doing what it's doing indefinitely. And that's totally fine. But it's unlikely they're going to grow by 10x in a few years or pivot drastically. Yet those unrealistic expectations were built into the current stock price.
That shows the company is stagnating.
Google's stock price would not be at where it is now if the company "just" stopped at search. It's everything else they kept pursuing that's allowed the company to reach stratospheric valuation heights relative to its real revenue.
Google's stock price would not be at where it is now if the company "just" stopped at search. It's everything else they kept pursuing that's allowed the company to reach stratospheric valuation heights relative to its real revenue.
> What is out of the ordinary is the public markets' reaction?
But is it? Maybe the public is realizing that tweets were just a cool fad for a while. For twitter to be profitable, I am guessing, there has to be people that want to use it, and (very important) people believing that people want to use it (so they'd pay Twitter for advertising).
Compare with Google. Google provides something momre back (gmail, search, calendar, docs, photo storage, directions + many other things I forgot about).
Twitter provides 140 status messages. There is nothing wrong it, that is very cool. But I think there is a realization that it just isn't as cool as it was in 4 years ago. And it just became 3% less cool.
But is it? Maybe the public is realizing that tweets were just a cool fad for a while. For twitter to be profitable, I am guessing, there has to be people that want to use it, and (very important) people believing that people want to use it (so they'd pay Twitter for advertising).
Compare with Google. Google provides something momre back (gmail, search, calendar, docs, photo storage, directions + many other things I forgot about).
Twitter provides 140 status messages. There is nothing wrong it, that is very cool. But I think there is a realization that it just isn't as cool as it was in 4 years ago. And it just became 3% less cool.
I don't know, I'd be willing to bet twitter usage is up compared to 4 years ago. Also, stock price != coolness, and further coolness != making more money. Isn't that what this story is about?
But then again stock price != making more money. Particularly for non-dividend-paying firms.
Would you care to expand on this one?
It seems to me that stock price is correlated with more money: if I have X stock options worth Y dollars each, I effectively have X*Y dollars worth of stock. If stock price increase by 1 dollars, I have X dollars more than I did before. No?
It seems to me that stock price is correlated with more money: if I have X stock options worth Y dollars each, I effectively have X*Y dollars worth of stock. If stock price increase by 1 dollars, I have X dollars more than I did before. No?
I think they mean the stock price of the company is not well correlated with the amount of money the company is making
Apple often beats expectations and trades lower after the earnings call.
No, Apple often outdoes its previous quarterly results, but fails to meet lofty analyst expectations, so its price falls after earnings.
Exceeding expectations with a price drop afterwards is inexplicable.
Exceeding expectations with a price drop afterwards is inexplicable.
I think I remember that happening to Google at least once. There are expectations and "expectations". Analysts' published expectations are often different than the ones they believe privately, and the expectation might be to exceed the "expectation".
Beating published analyst expectations isn't the same as beating the actual expectations of investors. One might reasonably expect the actual market expectations to be loosely correlated with analyst's published expectations, and they probably are, but its probably only loosely correlated.
If stock price increase by 1 dollars, I have X dollars more than I did before. No?
No. Only if you sell it right now. A lot of problems come from people thinking stocks are more liquid than they are.
No. Only if you sell it right now. A lot of problems come from people thinking stocks are more liquid than they are.
> It seems to me that stock price is correlated with more money: if I have X stock options worth Y dollars each, I effectively have XY dollars worth of stock
Sure, but the "market" price of stock isn't really the value of every* share, its roughly the marginal price of the last/next share purchased or sold, but the more you want to trade, the farther from the market price the value will be.
And changes to the market clearing price don't tell you about changes to the supply and demand curves, just where they intersect. So, for any but a small quantity of stock, you can't tell what the real change in the realizable value of your holdings is just from the change in the market price, since there's no guarantee that a change of $1 in market price equates to a change of $1/share in the price you'll get if you try to sell a particular quantity of a stock.
We tend to ignore that when placing a valuation on a portfolio because if you don't ignore it, you can't get a valuation. But those valuations are approximations, at best.
Sure, but the "market" price of stock isn't really the value of every* share, its roughly the marginal price of the last/next share purchased or sold, but the more you want to trade, the farther from the market price the value will be.
And changes to the market clearing price don't tell you about changes to the supply and demand curves, just where they intersect. So, for any but a small quantity of stock, you can't tell what the real change in the realizable value of your holdings is just from the change in the market price, since there's no guarantee that a change of $1 in market price equates to a change of $1/share in the price you'll get if you try to sell a particular quantity of a stock.
We tend to ignore that when placing a valuation on a portfolio because if you don't ignore it, you can't get a valuation. But those valuations are approximations, at best.
> bet twitter usage is up compared to 4 years ago.
It probably is. But probably not as much as everything believed it would be.
Coolness is about making money in case, but indirectly. If investors see others not being interested in Twitter and not regarding it as cool, they will pull out. I understand Twitter's primary revenue tool is advertisement. That requires users to advertise to.
It probably is. But probably not as much as everything believed it would be.
Coolness is about making money in case, but indirectly. If investors see others not being interested in Twitter and not regarding it as cool, they will pull out. I understand Twitter's primary revenue tool is advertisement. That requires users to advertise to.
> Twitter provides 140 status messages. There is nothing wrong it, that is very cool. But I think there is a realization that it just isn't as cool as it was in 4 years ago. And it just became 3% less cool.
I can't tell if you're being ironic or facile, but Twitter has become quite a bit more than "140 status messages"(sic). It's a medium where politicians, dissidents, celebrities, the hoi palloi, brands, and anarchists all interact. Its a place of record quoted in headline news briefs and long-form journalism. It is used to organize rebellion and restricting access to it is viewed by many as a human rights violation.
Twitter as a business has problems, but being a fad isn't one of them.
I can't tell if you're being ironic or facile, but Twitter has become quite a bit more than "140 status messages"(sic). It's a medium where politicians, dissidents, celebrities, the hoi palloi, brands, and anarchists all interact. Its a place of record quoted in headline news briefs and long-form journalism. It is used to organize rebellion and restricting access to it is viewed by many as a human rights violation.
Twitter as a business has problems, but being a fad isn't one of them.
They no longer allow sign ups via Tor, so I don't think it's as dissident friendly as it used to be.
That's more due to stupid retards abusing tor for spamming... with tor you have to draw the line somewhere.
> being a fad isn't one of them.
I'd heavily disagree with that. The fad's not over, but it is a fad. The reason it sticks around is that people have an easy way to communicate with celebrities/popular people, and that was certainly not twitter's goal. The moment something better for this comes along, the fad will quickly fade.
I'd heavily disagree with that. The fad's not over, but it is a fad. The reason it sticks around is that people have an easy way to communicate with celebrities/popular people, and that was certainly not twitter's goal. The moment something better for this comes along, the fad will quickly fade.
... in messages of 140 characters designed to provoke outrage and retweets, not to engage meaningfully with any of the complex issues of the day.
Their entire userbase could do a MySpace overnight.
Their entire userbase could do a MySpace overnight.
Twitter is actually becoming quite popular in science. It's a great tool to hear of new papers, find out about new findings reported in conferences you can't attend, and communicate in a public forum. Don't think you would have had much of that in MySpace...
> restricting access to it is viewed by many as a human rights violation.
Restricting access to any website (except in some extreme cases) is viewed by many as a human rights violation. I don't see how Twitter is unique in this respect.
Restricting access to any website (except in some extreme cases) is viewed by many as a human rights violation. I don't see how Twitter is unique in this respect.
Don't make the assumption that because you don't like, or see any use for, a particular product other people won't.
While I agree with you, with Twitter the opposite seems to hold true. Many people like Twitter and see it as an integrated part of how they work and interact and that has driven the evaluation of the company. Not once has I heard anyone in the tech press or end in the financial news question Twitter.
Twitter should never have been a publicly listed company. They don't have a business plan, there was never any prof that they would be profitable. But Silicon Vally types, news media and bankers liked using the platform so: hey presto Twitter is a billion dollar company.
Twitter could be profitable if each user paid just $10 per year, but sadly I don't think people like it enough to pay up.
Twitter should never have been a publicly listed company. They don't have a business plan, there was never any prof that they would be profitable. But Silicon Vally types, news media and bankers liked using the platform so: hey presto Twitter is a billion dollar company.
Twitter could be profitable if each user paid just $10 per year, but sadly I don't think people like it enough to pay up.
> the stock is down 3% in after-hours trading.
Any fluctuation within 5% is perfectly normal and totally meaningless.
Any fluctuation within 5% is perfectly normal and totally meaningless.
Especially when the stock was up the day before
> Typically when a company announces layoffs its stock goes up.
They haven't announced layoffs. The article is very clear about this.
They haven't announced layoffs. The article is very clear about this.
Twitter is suppose to be a growth company. Layoffs and downsizing are not what growth investors want to see. Thats why it went down.
4100 employees for a service dedicated to moving around 140 character messages? Yeah, there might be a little fat to trim there.
thats a naive assumption, there could be a lot of hidden scaling issues when you think deeper about how it works
I don't doubt it's challenging to keep the thing up, but 4100 employees? And meanwhile WhatsApp has 50 or so employees in total.
It's crazy that it makes sense a billion+ company would need that few people now
Well a lot of other people are saying "It's crazy that a company with that few people and that little profit can be worth that many billions." Hence Twitter's problem at the moment.
Somewhat curious if this is the beginning of the unicorn pop.
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Twitter is doing something vastly more technically challenging that WhatsApp. WhatsApp just delivers messages. It doesn't store them, and it certainly doesn't, say, try to make them available in a searchable away to everyone in the world.
This isn't a knock on WhatsApp -- I use WhatsApp and don't use Twitter -- but Twitter's scale challenges are vastly more complex than WhatsApp's, which doesn't have many features that can't just very simply horizontally scale.
This isn't a knock on WhatsApp -- I use WhatsApp and don't use Twitter -- but Twitter's scale challenges are vastly more complex than WhatsApp's, which doesn't have many features that can't just very simply horizontally scale.
I'm still not sure how that requires a number of employees comparable to, say, NASA JPL.
> It doesn't store them, and it certainly doesn't, say, try to make them available in a searchable away to everyone in the world.
Back of the envelope calculation: If your messages are 256 char messages, on a 128GB ram server you can fit 500 billion of them in memory; incidentally, that's one day's worth of tweets these days. I recently got a quote for a beefy 256GB ram server from Dell for $6,000. To make things easier, let's assume $10,000 with redundant 1TB SSD and everything else you might need. The data is extremely easy to shard.
With proper caching, you can probably keep 99.9999% of all tweets shown in just one such servers, and serve them within a few ms. I don't have recent experience with web frontends, but a properly configured nginx could probably server on meager hardware can do a few tens-of-thousands requests per second. a Seastar server on beefy hardware can probably handle a significant percentage of Twitter's load.
Search is a little harder, but not by much.
Is this engineering trivial? Far from it. But I've worked with stunt programmers who can build this in a few months with a 3 person team. At least one of them commands a salary of about $500K last I heard.
Is that all Twitter is doing? No, I'm sure they have 10 backend "things" for every user visible "thing". They needed something like Bootstrap for internal use, after all. I don't really believe you can run Twitter with just $1M/year in capex, just $1M/year in opex and just $1M/year in engineering salary - you need a whole lot more than that; In fact, to pull in revenue of $2B/year (which Twitter seems to be on track for), you probably need 50 people just in accounting.
What I am saying, though, is that the technical challenges faced by Twitter (at least those that are visible to users) are highly overrated. If you know what you are doing, Twitter can be run on $50,000 worth of hardware; This has been true since 2007 - Computers were weaker and had less memory then, but Twitter had much less traffic too. I've looked at the numbers every single year since 2007, and at any point in time, the "bare bones essential hardware for interactive response" was in the $50,000 range. Which probably means if they spent more than $1M/year on hardware (or depreciation-equivalent-hosting) at any point in time, they should have hired better engineers.
Back of the envelope calculation: If your messages are 256 char messages, on a 128GB ram server you can fit 500 billion of them in memory; incidentally, that's one day's worth of tweets these days. I recently got a quote for a beefy 256GB ram server from Dell for $6,000. To make things easier, let's assume $10,000 with redundant 1TB SSD and everything else you might need. The data is extremely easy to shard.
With proper caching, you can probably keep 99.9999% of all tweets shown in just one such servers, and serve them within a few ms. I don't have recent experience with web frontends, but a properly configured nginx could probably server on meager hardware can do a few tens-of-thousands requests per second. a Seastar server on beefy hardware can probably handle a significant percentage of Twitter's load.
Search is a little harder, but not by much.
Is this engineering trivial? Far from it. But I've worked with stunt programmers who can build this in a few months with a 3 person team. At least one of them commands a salary of about $500K last I heard.
Is that all Twitter is doing? No, I'm sure they have 10 backend "things" for every user visible "thing". They needed something like Bootstrap for internal use, after all. I don't really believe you can run Twitter with just $1M/year in capex, just $1M/year in opex and just $1M/year in engineering salary - you need a whole lot more than that; In fact, to pull in revenue of $2B/year (which Twitter seems to be on track for), you probably need 50 people just in accounting.
What I am saying, though, is that the technical challenges faced by Twitter (at least those that are visible to users) are highly overrated. If you know what you are doing, Twitter can be run on $50,000 worth of hardware; This has been true since 2007 - Computers were weaker and had less memory then, but Twitter had much less traffic too. I've looked at the numbers every single year since 2007, and at any point in time, the "bare bones essential hardware for interactive response" was in the $50,000 range. Which probably means if they spent more than $1M/year on hardware (or depreciation-equivalent-hosting) at any point in time, they should have hired better engineers.
> you can fit 500 billion of them in memory
You will also need space for fulltext indexes, indexes per hashtag (a set which grows constantly and never shrinks, but has a power distribution, meaning that some hot tags will overwhelm any single machine and it constantly changes), the ability to call up any tweet from any point in history (growing by one beefy Dell server per day), the ability to fan out to 1 or 10 or 10 million followers and so on. The fanout problem turns sharding into a lumpy problem because again, there is a power law distribution that can overwhelm any single machine.
Then there's the fun part that Twitter is so reliable these days that when something else on the internet breaks, we check Twitter for updates. Robustness at that scale is more than buying a pair of SSDs and setting up RAID.
One thing I've learnt from being a consulting engineer is to stop assuming other engineers are morons. Sometimes we do things out of ignorance, or out of fear, or out of necessity. But often, when you inquire, there is a solid non-obvious reason for non-trivial diversions from the simplest thing that could possibly work.
I always find it useful to give the benefit of the doubt.
You will also need space for fulltext indexes, indexes per hashtag (a set which grows constantly and never shrinks, but has a power distribution, meaning that some hot tags will overwhelm any single machine and it constantly changes), the ability to call up any tweet from any point in history (growing by one beefy Dell server per day), the ability to fan out to 1 or 10 or 10 million followers and so on. The fanout problem turns sharding into a lumpy problem because again, there is a power law distribution that can overwhelm any single machine.
Then there's the fun part that Twitter is so reliable these days that when something else on the internet breaks, we check Twitter for updates. Robustness at that scale is more than buying a pair of SSDs and setting up RAID.
One thing I've learnt from being a consulting engineer is to stop assuming other engineers are morons. Sometimes we do things out of ignorance, or out of fear, or out of necessity. But often, when you inquire, there is a solid non-obvious reason for non-trivial diversions from the simplest thing that could possibly work.
I always find it useful to give the benefit of the doubt.
I do not claim it is trivial.
But .. fulltext index done right, including per hashtag, doubles the storage requirements at most. And the ability to call up any tweet from history does not need to be as instantaneous is recent tweets (It's ok to wait 5 seconds for a tweet from 5 years ago).
> The fanout problem turns sharding into a lumpy problem because again, there is a power law distribution that can overwhelm any single machine.
Not really, in the case of twitter (where you only trace edges, not edges-of-edges and edges-of-edges-of-edges like Facebook and Linkedin do). In the simplified model I described, the web frontends all pull from the backend, but for the hot 10-million account followers -- of which there aren't that many --, you can just push them to the webservers so they don't even need to query)
> Robustness at that scale is more than buying a pair of SSDs and setting up RAID.
I most definitely agree. But it is cheaply doable when everything is so perfectly shardable as it is in Twitter.
> Then there's the fun part that Twitter is so reliable these days that when something else on the internet breaks, we check Twitter for updates.
That's possibly an illusion. Yes, Twitter is mostly reliable - but do you have any latency stats? e.g., would you know if, on a daily bases, 10% of tweets take 60 seconds until they appear on a viewer's refresh? The "hot" accounts would be cached and immediately updated, but the long tail might have minutes delay and almost no one would notice.
> But often, when you inquire, there is a solid non-obvious reason for non-trivial diversions from the simplest thing that could possibly work.
> I always find it useful to give the benefit of the doubt.
I do not assume other engineers are morons. In my experience as a consultant, though, those solid non-obvious reasons for non-trivial diversions are much more often than not "historical, do not apply any more", "we didn't have time or resources to do it the right way", "the guy who did the initial design did it wrong for whatever reason, and now we are stuck with it", "there's a legal reason that's not obvious why we can't do it that way", and a few others.
Twitter had the resources to do it better from very early on, and they didn't (I think it was 2012 or so before Twitter became reliable). For all I know, their system now could be the most efficient beast ever, and run on a ZX81 with 1K Ram with ultimate reliability, way better than I could ever hope to build.
I was just pointing out that the user facing side of twitter, technically speaking, is not very impressive. I've been doing it for a while on various technical forums - and not once did anyone offer a reason for why it's much harder than it would seem -- most of the responses were along the lines of "but mysql/pgsql/oracle can't take the firehose load, I tried!". Which is correct, but irrelevant.
But .. fulltext index done right, including per hashtag, doubles the storage requirements at most. And the ability to call up any tweet from history does not need to be as instantaneous is recent tweets (It's ok to wait 5 seconds for a tweet from 5 years ago).
> The fanout problem turns sharding into a lumpy problem because again, there is a power law distribution that can overwhelm any single machine.
Not really, in the case of twitter (where you only trace edges, not edges-of-edges and edges-of-edges-of-edges like Facebook and Linkedin do). In the simplified model I described, the web frontends all pull from the backend, but for the hot 10-million account followers -- of which there aren't that many --, you can just push them to the webservers so they don't even need to query)
> Robustness at that scale is more than buying a pair of SSDs and setting up RAID.
I most definitely agree. But it is cheaply doable when everything is so perfectly shardable as it is in Twitter.
> Then there's the fun part that Twitter is so reliable these days that when something else on the internet breaks, we check Twitter for updates.
That's possibly an illusion. Yes, Twitter is mostly reliable - but do you have any latency stats? e.g., would you know if, on a daily bases, 10% of tweets take 60 seconds until they appear on a viewer's refresh? The "hot" accounts would be cached and immediately updated, but the long tail might have minutes delay and almost no one would notice.
> But often, when you inquire, there is a solid non-obvious reason for non-trivial diversions from the simplest thing that could possibly work.
> I always find it useful to give the benefit of the doubt.
I do not assume other engineers are morons. In my experience as a consultant, though, those solid non-obvious reasons for non-trivial diversions are much more often than not "historical, do not apply any more", "we didn't have time or resources to do it the right way", "the guy who did the initial design did it wrong for whatever reason, and now we are stuck with it", "there's a legal reason that's not obvious why we can't do it that way", and a few others.
Twitter had the resources to do it better from very early on, and they didn't (I think it was 2012 or so before Twitter became reliable). For all I know, their system now could be the most efficient beast ever, and run on a ZX81 with 1K Ram with ultimate reliability, way better than I could ever hope to build.
I was just pointing out that the user facing side of twitter, technically speaking, is not very impressive. I've been doing it for a while on various technical forums - and not once did anyone offer a reason for why it's much harder than it would seem -- most of the responses were along the lines of "but mysql/pgsql/oracle can't take the firehose load, I tried!". Which is correct, but irrelevant.
> I do not claim it is trivial.
By saying it can be done with $12,000 of hardware, you essentially claim it is trivial.
> everything is so perfectly shardable as it is in Twitter.
Shardability, or partitionability, depends on the underlying distribution. It's only "perfectly" partitionable if that distribution is perfectly uniform.
Twitter's traffic patterns are power-laws. Some tags vastly outnumber others. Some users have vastly more followers. Those distributions are unstable across time and space in surprisingly short order.
> Twitter had the resources to do it better from very early on, and they didn't (I think it was 2012 or so before Twitter became reliable).
Twitter wasn't interested in a contest to use the least hardware. They were in a race to keep up with surging load, while migrating from Rails to something that didn't exist yet. Meanwhile they have, under the hood, built infrastructure that could not be bought off the shelf from anyone at the time.
We can't actually come to a conclusion here, because you're arguing a counterfactual. It's always easy to have the ideal solution to a problem you never actually solved yourself, because the visible features of a problem are obvious and the many, many invisible problems are where the bulk of the effort are hiding.
If you want to prove that Twitter doesn't need such large and complex distributed systems, you can probably round up a few hundred thousand in angel funding and sell yourself to Twitter for a nice return.
By saying it can be done with $12,000 of hardware, you essentially claim it is trivial.
> everything is so perfectly shardable as it is in Twitter.
Shardability, or partitionability, depends on the underlying distribution. It's only "perfectly" partitionable if that distribution is perfectly uniform.
Twitter's traffic patterns are power-laws. Some tags vastly outnumber others. Some users have vastly more followers. Those distributions are unstable across time and space in surprisingly short order.
> Twitter had the resources to do it better from very early on, and they didn't (I think it was 2012 or so before Twitter became reliable).
Twitter wasn't interested in a contest to use the least hardware. They were in a race to keep up with surging load, while migrating from Rails to something that didn't exist yet. Meanwhile they have, under the hood, built infrastructure that could not be bought off the shelf from anyone at the time.
We can't actually come to a conclusion here, because you're arguing a counterfactual. It's always easy to have the ideal solution to a problem you never actually solved yourself, because the visible features of a problem are obvious and the many, many invisible problems are where the bulk of the effort are hiding.
If you want to prove that Twitter doesn't need such large and complex distributed systems, you can probably round up a few hundred thousand in angel funding and sell yourself to Twitter for a nice return.
[deleted]
> By saying it can be done with $12,000 of hardware, you essentially claim it is trivial.
Not at all. What I'm saying is that, with the proper software (which is not trivial to write), you can do it with very little hardware. I know stunt programmers making $500K/year, and they are in some senses infinitely (not just x10) more productive than bad and even average programmers - because they quickly produce working systems that others just can't.
Whether it makes sense to pay $50K/hardware and $500K/programmer or $2M/hardware and $100K/programmers depends on how you run your business, though - and in many cases, the $2M/hardware+$100K/programmers are the more economical choice (because you risk starving for stunt programmers choosing the first)
> Some users have vastly more followers. Those distributions are unstable across time and space in surprisingly short order.
And yet, as a system designer you actually get to choose what the distribution is of - and a good choice makes it uniform. The power laws may or may not favor sharding on uid specifically, but usually there's a simple way to shard uniformly. And if you can't find a way to programmatically shard uniformly, then shard using a lookup table on the userid - 8 billion user ids require all of 8GB of ram if you have 256 shards or less (and if you bundle users in groups of 256, 32MB is suddenly enough). Migrate around to keep balanced. This has been a solved problem for years. Really, even migration patterns. Look at "consistent hashing" literature -- (it's not the fundamental issue that consistent hashing solves, but the peripheral solutions are well known, common, and apply here: migration, redistribution, redirection).
> Twitter wasn't interested in a contest to use the least hardware.
> We can't actually come to a conclusion here, because you're arguing a counterfactual. It's always easy to have the ideal solution to a problem you never actually solved yourself,
First, I basically agree with you, if it wasn't clear. I know not what problems twitter were facing. I suspect that they weren't technical in nature, though -- because the technical issues have been solved before them. It might be management issues, it might be ego issues. I've seen more projects fail or stumble on those than on technical issues.
I actually did solve those problems myself, on a smaller scale (hence my interest, but with perfect sharding that would have scaled to any size, live migration and redistribution and all). But that startup folded because we sucked at getting traction - which only shows to go you that technical prowess matters not in these issues, or at least not much.
> many invisible problems are where the bulk of the effort are hiding.
Again, to be clear - I totally agree with you. I'm just disagreeing with the aura of engineering excellence that Twitter gets in this (and many other threads). They may have it, or may not - I haven't seen evidence that they do. They can keep twitter running well in the last 3-4 years, which means they are reasonably competent. That's all I have evidence for.
> If you want to prove that Twitter doesn't need such large and complex distributed systems, you can probably round up a few hundred thousand in angel funding and sell yourself to Twitter for a nice return.
As I have mentioned several times in other replies (and other discussions) - twitter's problem is not, in fact, engineering, and hasn't been since 2012 at least (it definitely was 2007-2009). They threw enough money/people at the problem, and solved it.
Right now, they are bringing in $2B/year, but spending $2.5B/year. If they are spending more than $200M/year on user facing hardware at this point, I'd be surprised. I'd even be surprised if they are spending $100M/year. But let's assume that I can save them $200M - that's nice, but won't actually save them - the company needs much more significant changes than that. And that part of the infrastructure only brings in users. I know not what systems they use to actually bring in money -- which is actually much more important to optimize.
And ... what I'm doing now is more profitable than what I can likely get from such a project (and I don't have to gamble or raise money). So, thanks, but I'll pass.
Let me ask you this, though: Look at the healthcare.gov debacle. I assume our discussion would have essentially been the same (including the counterfactuals) up until the point where a team rewrote it in a fraction of the time, with a fraction of the resources, and much much better - and I guess at that point we would be able to agree factuals.
Would you consider the discussion futile in either case? I don't care about agreement (factual or counterfactual), I'm trying to learn about the problems that are invisible to me. So far with Twitter, I've learned non so far over 8 years of the (more or less twice annual) discussion.
Again, I've mentioned several times: Whether or not they now run their infrastructure efficiently is very unlikely to matter -- unless they are horribly incompetent, which I assume they are not. I'm just trying to understand the aura of excellence (or alternatively, the depth of the problems) that Twitter deals with technically.
Not at all. What I'm saying is that, with the proper software (which is not trivial to write), you can do it with very little hardware. I know stunt programmers making $500K/year, and they are in some senses infinitely (not just x10) more productive than bad and even average programmers - because they quickly produce working systems that others just can't.
Whether it makes sense to pay $50K/hardware and $500K/programmer or $2M/hardware and $100K/programmers depends on how you run your business, though - and in many cases, the $2M/hardware+$100K/programmers are the more economical choice (because you risk starving for stunt programmers choosing the first)
> Some users have vastly more followers. Those distributions are unstable across time and space in surprisingly short order.
And yet, as a system designer you actually get to choose what the distribution is of - and a good choice makes it uniform. The power laws may or may not favor sharding on uid specifically, but usually there's a simple way to shard uniformly. And if you can't find a way to programmatically shard uniformly, then shard using a lookup table on the userid - 8 billion user ids require all of 8GB of ram if you have 256 shards or less (and if you bundle users in groups of 256, 32MB is suddenly enough). Migrate around to keep balanced. This has been a solved problem for years. Really, even migration patterns. Look at "consistent hashing" literature -- (it's not the fundamental issue that consistent hashing solves, but the peripheral solutions are well known, common, and apply here: migration, redistribution, redirection).
> Twitter wasn't interested in a contest to use the least hardware.
> We can't actually come to a conclusion here, because you're arguing a counterfactual. It's always easy to have the ideal solution to a problem you never actually solved yourself,
First, I basically agree with you, if it wasn't clear. I know not what problems twitter were facing. I suspect that they weren't technical in nature, though -- because the technical issues have been solved before them. It might be management issues, it might be ego issues. I've seen more projects fail or stumble on those than on technical issues.
I actually did solve those problems myself, on a smaller scale (hence my interest, but with perfect sharding that would have scaled to any size, live migration and redistribution and all). But that startup folded because we sucked at getting traction - which only shows to go you that technical prowess matters not in these issues, or at least not much.
> many invisible problems are where the bulk of the effort are hiding.
Again, to be clear - I totally agree with you. I'm just disagreeing with the aura of engineering excellence that Twitter gets in this (and many other threads). They may have it, or may not - I haven't seen evidence that they do. They can keep twitter running well in the last 3-4 years, which means they are reasonably competent. That's all I have evidence for.
> If you want to prove that Twitter doesn't need such large and complex distributed systems, you can probably round up a few hundred thousand in angel funding and sell yourself to Twitter for a nice return.
As I have mentioned several times in other replies (and other discussions) - twitter's problem is not, in fact, engineering, and hasn't been since 2012 at least (it definitely was 2007-2009). They threw enough money/people at the problem, and solved it.
Right now, they are bringing in $2B/year, but spending $2.5B/year. If they are spending more than $200M/year on user facing hardware at this point, I'd be surprised. I'd even be surprised if they are spending $100M/year. But let's assume that I can save them $200M - that's nice, but won't actually save them - the company needs much more significant changes than that. And that part of the infrastructure only brings in users. I know not what systems they use to actually bring in money -- which is actually much more important to optimize.
And ... what I'm doing now is more profitable than what I can likely get from such a project (and I don't have to gamble or raise money). So, thanks, but I'll pass.
Let me ask you this, though: Look at the healthcare.gov debacle. I assume our discussion would have essentially been the same (including the counterfactuals) up until the point where a team rewrote it in a fraction of the time, with a fraction of the resources, and much much better - and I guess at that point we would be able to agree factuals.
Would you consider the discussion futile in either case? I don't care about agreement (factual or counterfactual), I'm trying to learn about the problems that are invisible to me. So far with Twitter, I've learned non so far over 8 years of the (more or less twice annual) discussion.
Again, I've mentioned several times: Whether or not they now run their infrastructure efficiently is very unlikely to matter -- unless they are horribly incompetent, which I assume they are not. I'm just trying to understand the aura of excellence (or alternatively, the depth of the problems) that Twitter deals with technically.
500M tweets per day, not 500B: http://www.internetlivestats.com/twitter-statistics/
Assuming 100 Bytes per message gives 50GB of messages per day.
Thanks. I wrote 500B, but I did do the calculation with 500M; I used much larger estimates (as is always recommended in back-of-the-envelope calculation) - namely, 256 bytes per tweet - which, in addition to 140 bytes of text[0], leaves e.g. 8 bytes for user id (2 billion uids for every living person on earth), 8 bytes for microsecond timestamp, and 80 more bytes for pointers/caching/stats/whatever. (Those 16 bytes, incidentally, are enough to have a unique identifier for every tweet)
I assume the average tweet is closer to 80 bytes, and taking advantage of that can let you store twice as much tweets in memory.
[0] Does twitter count utf-8 bytes, code points, graphemes, or something else towards the 140-"char" limit? Regardless, the computation would not yield materially different results.
I assume the average tweet is closer to 80 bytes, and taking advantage of that can let you store twice as much tweets in memory.
[0] Does twitter count utf-8 bytes, code points, graphemes, or something else towards the 140-"char" limit? Regardless, the computation would not yield materially different results.
Ok. I was assuming the average tweet is < 144 chars, and that there would/could be compression applied.
In fact I would guess that the effective average information content in a tweet is very low :) (~10-20 bytes?)
WhatsApp can't tell me how many users were talking about Peanut Butter Sandwiches 30 seconds ago. WhatsApp can't alert me when people suddenly start talking about earthquakes, super bowls, or Elon Musk. WhatsApp doesn't need to fanout a message to millions of consumers, millions of times a day (and with multi-second latency to boot!).
WhatsApp also doesn't provide a CDN, mobile analytics/monetization/debugging platform. WhatsApp also doesn't contribute to open source like Twitter does (Storm, Bootstrap, Aurora).
Describing twitter as a "140-char" mailing list is very reductionist. OTOH WhatsApp problem is very well served by Erlang/Mnesia an open source distributed messaging library developed by telecommunications company who were likely doing WhatApp-scale 10 yeas before WhatsApp came around. While WhatsApp engineers are great, there is very much a "standing on the shoulders of giants" - giants who have well researched the problem of building a system that lets two or three individuals communicate. There wasn't anyone doing Twitter 10 years ago (well, maybe Google).
I don't mean to imply that Twitter is an efficient well oiled machine, but the comparison to WhatsApp is daft.
WhatsApp also doesn't provide a CDN, mobile analytics/monetization/debugging platform. WhatsApp also doesn't contribute to open source like Twitter does (Storm, Bootstrap, Aurora).
Describing twitter as a "140-char" mailing list is very reductionist. OTOH WhatsApp problem is very well served by Erlang/Mnesia an open source distributed messaging library developed by telecommunications company who were likely doing WhatApp-scale 10 yeas before WhatsApp came around. While WhatsApp engineers are great, there is very much a "standing on the shoulders of giants" - giants who have well researched the problem of building a system that lets two or three individuals communicate. There wasn't anyone doing Twitter 10 years ago (well, maybe Google).
I don't mean to imply that Twitter is an efficient well oiled machine, but the comparison to WhatsApp is daft.
You're underestimating the difficulty of scaling Mnesia the way WhatsApp did (one source says "In-memory Mnesia database using about 2TB of RAM sharded across 16 partitions to store about 18 billion records." [1]). The prevailing wisdom in the Erlang community was that Mnesia could not be made to do such things. The only well-known user of Mnesia at anywhere near this scale prior to WhatsApp was Klarna. To achieve this, Klarna employed at least one of the original Mnesia developers who wrote proprietary patches for their system [2]. So while you accuse parent of being reductionist, your views of WhatsApp's engineering challenges also seem reductionist. Erlang/OTP software doesn't write and scale itself ... large-scale distributed systems are decidedly non-trivial no matter what tools you've chosen.
[1] http://highscalability.com/blog/2014/3/31/how-whatsapp-grew-...
[2] https://www.erlang-factory.com/upload/presentations/601/EUC2...
[1] http://highscalability.com/blog/2014/3/31/how-whatsapp-grew-...
[2] https://www.erlang-factory.com/upload/presentations/601/EUC2...
When I checked this post, you were below zero - I'm not sure why you are downvoted.
In any case, my main point isn't that that WhatsApp is simple. When I said the parent posted was being reductionist, I was referring to Twitter's product offering. AFAIK (I could be wrong) WhatsApp is a messaging backend and multiple client frontends. The "50" engineers is deceiving becaus, despite the fact that Mnesia could or couldn't have scaled, there is a very non-trivial amount of engineers who worked on it and Mnesia is a good & proven system. In a similar light, Instagram was 13 engineers (or was it employees) and hundreds of django instances - and that maybe all you need for a photo feed, however Instagram didn't have a trending feature until earlier this year and how knows how many engineers that took.
If WhatApp hired another 200 engineers, likely 195 would either be twiddling their thumbs or working on new features outside what was needed in that acquisition to Facebook. Now we can make the argument that Twitter is bloated because they have too many products (Fabric, Vine, Crashlytics, and their numerous other acquisitions) - and the scaling back of those engineers may mean sunsetting those products - and thats fair. To imply they have 4000 engineers building a glorified 140-char mailing list is not.
In any case, my main point isn't that that WhatsApp is simple. When I said the parent posted was being reductionist, I was referring to Twitter's product offering. AFAIK (I could be wrong) WhatsApp is a messaging backend and multiple client frontends. The "50" engineers is deceiving becaus, despite the fact that Mnesia could or couldn't have scaled, there is a very non-trivial amount of engineers who worked on it and Mnesia is a good & proven system. In a similar light, Instagram was 13 engineers (or was it employees) and hundreds of django instances - and that maybe all you need for a photo feed, however Instagram didn't have a trending feature until earlier this year and how knows how many engineers that took.
If WhatApp hired another 200 engineers, likely 195 would either be twiddling their thumbs or working on new features outside what was needed in that acquisition to Facebook. Now we can make the argument that Twitter is bloated because they have too many products (Fabric, Vine, Crashlytics, and their numerous other acquisitions) - and the scaling back of those engineers may mean sunsetting those products - and thats fair. To imply they have 4000 engineers building a glorified 140-char mailing list is not.
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> 4100 employees for a service dedicated to moving around 140 character messages? Yeah, there might be a little fat to trim there.
Absolutely! You could probably get a single rack to handle storage and broadcast of millions of tweets per minute, perhaps hook it up to a Teradata appliance to handle search and storage at that throughput. Throw it in a nice distributed database indexed by user. Then just another couple of indices for the hashtags and mentions, and the follows/follower graph. Throw in another few tables for handling API permissions, managing schema migrations while ensuring that data from day 1 is still as transparent as yesterday's logs, a highly replicated ad server hooked up to a realtime recommendation engine that analyzes an active user's current stream and recommends the most relevant ad (to maximize revenue of course), set up a few staffed policy teams to comply with the differences in global regulations, handle lawsuits and legal requests, and of course keep competing for more revenue with the likes of Facebook and Google.
It's pretty trivial.
Absolutely! You could probably get a single rack to handle storage and broadcast of millions of tweets per minute, perhaps hook it up to a Teradata appliance to handle search and storage at that throughput. Throw it in a nice distributed database indexed by user. Then just another couple of indices for the hashtags and mentions, and the follows/follower graph. Throw in another few tables for handling API permissions, managing schema migrations while ensuring that data from day 1 is still as transparent as yesterday's logs, a highly replicated ad server hooked up to a realtime recommendation engine that analyzes an active user's current stream and recommends the most relevant ad (to maximize revenue of course), set up a few staffed policy teams to comply with the differences in global regulations, handle lawsuits and legal requests, and of course keep competing for more revenue with the likes of Facebook and Google.
It's pretty trivial.
OK, I'm hearing a lot about hardware there but not seeing where thousands of people are needed to keep it all up. Again, WhatsApp -- 50 employees.
Whatsapp is an outlier in many ways and comparing them with any company will make that company seem bloated. As for the comparison, Whatsapp has no monetization model, no marketing and a simpler product.
WhatsApp charges a subscription fee after the first year of $1/year.
When you have several hundred million users, that adds up. An effective monetization model, if unusual in SV.
When you have several hundred million users, that adds up. An effective monetization model, if unusual in SV.
But it actually doesn't charge that subscription fee. At least not to the overwhelming majority of its users.
I really do not understand what the logic is here. They already have your loyalty presumably, and it's not a high sticker price.
They used to send me messages about that yearly few but they always ended up extending my membership for free every few months. Then they stopped asking. WhatsApp is de facto free.
In 2014, WhatsApp reportedly made $14 million in revenue. By comparison, Twitter made $479 in revenue in just Q4 2014. I think company size generally scales super-linearly with revenue, so a total staff in the thousands seems reasonable for a post-IPO company.
Are you suggesting that WhatsApp's model of organization is the norm for a sustainable organization? I think it's a clear outlier in many respects.
Are you suggesting that WhatsApp's model of organization is the norm for a sustainable organization? I think it's a clear outlier in many respects.
Does it really matter what WhatsApp made in revenue? The owners got a $16 BILLION payout.
Are you suggesting that WhatsApps business model was based on annual revenue?
Are you suggesting that WhatsApps business model was based on annual revenue?
> Does it really matter what WhatsApp made in revenue? The owners got a $16 BILLION payout.
Silicon Valley mentality at its finest.
Silicon Valley mentality at its finest.
> I don't want to make a little bit of money every day. I want to make a fuck ton of money all at once.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BzAdXyPYKQo&t=15
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BzAdXyPYKQo&t=15
What do you mean? This is just a fact.
The company existed to make a return for the owners. The owners exited with $16 billion. That was the motivation of the owners/employees, not $14 million in annual revenue.
The company existed to make a return for the owners. The owners exited with $16 billion. That was the motivation of the owners/employees, not $14 million in annual revenue.
The $14 million is what justifies the $16 billion.
I guess that is the argument anyway. FB also recorded it's estimate of the useful lifetime of the WhatsApp users it acquired as a finite intangible asset worth over $2 billion.
My point is that the transaction must be analyzed from the viewpoint of the owners (as that is what the poster I was responding to cared about, viz a viz total profit/revenue to Twitter). When you do that, WhatsApp cashed (well, assuming FB stock can be treated as cash) out more per employee than Twitter.
My point is that the transaction must be analyzed from the viewpoint of the owners (as that is what the poster I was responding to cared about, viz a viz total profit/revenue to Twitter). When you do that, WhatsApp cashed (well, assuming FB stock can be treated as cash) out more per employee than Twitter.
No, it doesn't. I strongly believe there are many other important factors like user base, growth ratio and active users than define the real value.
Sure, lots of other factors are important, but ultimately factors like user base growth and active users are just showing WhatsApp gaining a larger revenue stream.
No, the half billion plus user base, consisting almost entirely of non-Facebook users, is what justified that purchase to Facebook.
WhatsApp's revenue that they earned from that user base is what was driving the valuation from the perspective of everyone not in Facebook's camp. Facebook woukdnt have been able to buy WhatsApp if WhatsApp thought they could make more money off that username than Facebook.
> Are you suggesting that WhatsApps business model was based on annual revenue?
Since WhatsApp was a revenue-generation corporation with a board of directors, like any other corporation, before their acquisition, and since I don't like to indulge in conspiracy theories, I'm going to assume that yes -- their business model was based on annual revenue.
Since WhatsApp was a revenue-generation corporation with a board of directors, like any other corporation, before their acquisition, and since I don't like to indulge in conspiracy theories, I'm going to assume that yes -- their business model was based on annual revenue.
> I'm going to assume that yes -- their business model was based on annual revenue.
Then you'd assume wrong. The goal of the board is to maximize return for investors. In WhatsApp case, it's not hard to see that their goal was to grow as fast as possible, revenue be damned, so they could be a very attractive takeover target for a company like Facebook who could eventually hope to monetize that user base.
Then you'd assume wrong. The goal of the board is to maximize return for investors. In WhatsApp case, it's not hard to see that their goal was to grow as fast as possible, revenue be damned, so they could be a very attractive takeover target for a company like Facebook who could eventually hope to monetize that user base.
[deleted]
> recommends the most relevant ad
They're nowhere near relevant. I keep getting local-to-US ads, and I'm in UK (and geolocate as in UK too). Not as bad as showing alcohol ads to 5 year old children, but still pretty bad.
They're nowhere near relevant. I keep getting local-to-US ads, and I'm in UK (and geolocate as in UK too). Not as bad as showing alcohol ads to 5 year old children, but still pretty bad.
> They're nowhere near relevant.
This doesn't mean that there aren't teams of people trying to constantly make those ads more relevant. And since not everyone at a Twitter can statistically be incompetent, I'm going to assume that the problem is actually quite difficult, and perhaps requires a large team.
This doesn't mean that there aren't teams of people trying to constantly make those ads more relevant. And since not everyone at a Twitter can statistically be incompetent, I'm going to assume that the problem is actually quite difficult, and perhaps requires a large team.
True. But where is the focus on making money?
IIRC Instagram had ~13 employees when they were acquired by FB, and they were obviously already huge.
WhatsApp had ~30 when they were acquired, and were also huge. ("Huuuuuge!", says The Trump)
Those teams are gods of scalability. Twitter is.... kinda the opposite.
WhatsApp had ~30 when they were acquired, and were also huge. ("Huuuuuge!", says The Trump)
Those teams are gods of scalability. Twitter is.... kinda the opposite.
Did WhatsApp have much in the way of storage needs? I don't think that they did. This is where the cost goes, durability. They were basically just a giant switchboard with some buddy lists (aka glorified MSN Messenger with SMS gateways). It's no wonder they were able to keep costs down and grow. They didn't have a lot of storage and persistence needs, just passing datagrams around the Internet between phones.
Edit: My apologies if I've offended the HN mystique surrounding the god-like status of WhatsApp. Ask Jan yourself, they weren't geniuses. I know Jan. He won't claim to be this exalted persona.
Edit: My apologies if I've offended the HN mystique surrounding the god-like status of WhatsApp. Ask Jan yourself, they weren't geniuses. I know Jan. He won't claim to be this exalted persona.
We are discussing the need for 4100 engineers, not storage costs.
It takes engineers to run and utilize all that stuff. You don't need a back-end scaling team you're only throwing around XMPP in Erlang.
Edit: I know b/c I've done that before in $previousjob. Storage is hard. Storage is where the money goes. Durability is expensive. Storing ephemeral stuff in a non-durable KV store is easy, cheap, and trivial to scale. This is why WhatsApp didn't have so many people, not because they were geniuses.
Edit: I know b/c I've done that before in $previousjob. Storage is hard. Storage is where the money goes. Durability is expensive. Storing ephemeral stuff in a non-durable KV store is easy, cheap, and trivial to scale. This is why WhatsApp didn't have so many people, not because they were geniuses.
Also, they have 4100 employees, not engineers. You know, legal, HR, finance, oh and engineers.
The need for consistent, highly available persistent storage in a distributed system with a heavy write workload vastly complicates engineering effort. You're fighting fundamental issues like the CAP theorem. When you can't "just use Postgres" everything else gets a lot harder. Companies that have this problem tend to have a lot of engineers: Facebook, Google, Uber, etc.
Disks are slow. If you don't need to wait for disk, then you can handle a great deal more req/s per node, which means the point at which you need to become a distributed system is further away. Without the state synchronization problem, converting to a distributed system consists of little more than adding a load balancer.
Even in an environment that needs synchronized state, the services that can be stateless are much easier to deal with (and you try to make as much of your infrastructure stateless as possible).
Storage costs are not relevant compared to the costs of engineering distributed systems.
Disks are slow. If you don't need to wait for disk, then you can handle a great deal more req/s per node, which means the point at which you need to become a distributed system is further away. Without the state synchronization problem, converting to a distributed system consists of little more than adding a load balancer.
Even in an environment that needs synchronized state, the services that can be stateless are much easier to deal with (and you try to make as much of your infrastructure stateless as possible).
Storage costs are not relevant compared to the costs of engineering distributed systems.
I agree with the concept but I don't think Uber falls nearly in the same ballpark as something like Twitter on scalability needs. IIRC Uber's huge headcount is due to it having local recruiting/marketing teams pretty much everywhere
It doesn't matter that you personally know him and that he's a humble guy. They scaled to mega-usage with a small eng team --> scalability genius.
This is just rubbish from developers that don't know what they are doing. I run Sublevel on a $5 VPS from DigitalOcean. Guess what, I optimized it to run smoothly in any situation.
Indeed, you could have done Twitter in a single rack with Tibco RV too.
4100 employees is completely out of whack with reality. And for those saying they are incorrectly trying to scale to $20 billion...thinking you will be a $20 billion dollar company in the future (even if it were true) would not justify hiring that many people now.
Without knowing the breakdown I assume that there are a lot of people working in marketing type roles where they are working with big business and celebrities to get them using the platform.
[deleted]
Their website says that 50% percent of their employees are engineers. (https://about.twitter.com/company)
The engineers may still work to support advertising/marketing/sales.
Deciding which ad is the most optimal to show benefits from every input (metadata?) you can make available and analyze.
That must require some multiple of effort vs. making sure 140 chars get shown where they're directed to go.
Deciding which ad is the most optimal to show benefits from every input (metadata?) you can make available and analyze.
That must require some multiple of effort vs. making sure 140 chars get shown where they're directed to go.
I completely agree. Twitter was never really a technology company to me considering it was essentially just a mimic of a wrapper around an email list.
Any company that operates at web scale is a technology company. Besides that look at their opensource contributions. Twitter has/had some impressive engineering talent.
But is it "has" or is it already "had"?
Try duplicating Google algorithms compared to Twitters wrappers and other functionality that can be easily duplicated.
Please don't post dismissive comments to Hacker News.
finally.
completely incomprehensible why they needed such a large headcount. ten times more than whatsapp would be ok - but not this behemoth.
all these designers do what exactly? ignore ipads, macs, etc.
i love twitter, use it constantly to follow journalists, vcs, basically to get faster news than any site. i hope twitter can be cut back to the bone.
completely incomprehensible why they needed such a large headcount. ten times more than whatsapp would be ok - but not this behemoth.
all these designers do what exactly? ignore ipads, macs, etc.
i love twitter, use it constantly to follow journalists, vcs, basically to get faster news than any site. i hope twitter can be cut back to the bone.
I'm not sure why you're being downvoted; their head count was absolutely insane. Yes Twitter has some insane needs for scaling but 4,100 employees for a 140 character service with some basic ads? Absolutely far too many.
Do you really think it's all just tweets and ads? Spoiler art: it's much, much, much more than that. Massive analytics stack, tons of distributed computing needs, lots of well-maintained OSS projects (Mesos, Aurora, Finagle, Pants, Bootstrap, Zipkin). I could name about 20 other things. The headcount may be a bit excessive but this is a caricature.
> Do you really think it's all just tweets and ads
No but that's the majority; I simplified on purpose but obviously they have far, far more people there than necessary.
> lots of well-maintained OSS projects (Mesos, Aurora, Finagle, Pants, Bootstrap, Zipkin)
As much as I love OSS it does not pay the bills.
No but that's the majority; I simplified on purpose but obviously they have far, far more people there than necessary.
> lots of well-maintained OSS projects (Mesos, Aurora, Finagle, Pants, Bootstrap, Zipkin)
As much as I love OSS it does not pay the bills.
I have to jump in and side with the grandparent. Despite everything you just mentioned, if it isn't about "tweets and ads" I would contest that it is exactly about them. Do whatever you want back-end, but that doesn't matter if my front-end experience is not so great. For example, they are terrible with spam bots. I mean when super-model-quality photos suddenly follow me, and the bot is posting shortened URLs, it makes me feel like they aren't on the ball at all.
Those 4,100 people are not just facebooking all day. The question isn't whether they produced anything - it's whether it is actually needed to run twitter. And personally, I believe the answer is "not really".
As an example, they could have gone with Zurb Foundation instead of doing Bootstrap. They could have used (redo, cmake, tup, a hundred of other tools) instead of doing Pants.
If Twitter was non-profit, their breadth of products would have been awesome. But it's for-profit, and most of these projects are negative on the P&L summary, even if you favourably take into account intangibles like "help in recruiting people" and "coolness of brand".
As an example, they could have gone with Zurb Foundation instead of doing Bootstrap. They could have used (redo, cmake, tup, a hundred of other tools) instead of doing Pants.
If Twitter was non-profit, their breadth of products would have been awesome. But it's for-profit, and most of these projects are negative on the P&L summary, even if you favourably take into account intangibles like "help in recruiting people" and "coolness of brand".
Well sure. I don't think many people think all those people were sitting around twiddling their thumbs all day, but none of those open source projects ultimately benefit Twitter. If those had been OS api clients it would seem prudent (except twitter doesn't like third party integrations any longer).
my guess this worldview on for-profit companies is google's fault.
google ads is funding the other google, which behaves like a non-profit. and it works, as their ad business is amazing.
but, it sets a really bad example to follow. twitter thought a long time they could operate like google it seems. time to bring back reality.
google ads is funding the other google, which behaves like a non-profit. and it works, as their ad business is amazing.
but, it sets a really bad example to follow. twitter thought a long time they could operate like google it seems. time to bring back reality.
rise of cockroaches was the techcrunch headline, arguably this is a bit of a nod to that.
Would you care to explain the cockroaches metaphor? I'm confused.
Cockroaches can survive extremely hostile environments that more "advanced" creatures cannot. They might not be pretty like unicorns, but they are extremely well adapted to resource-poor environments.
@dmritard96, care to elaborate a bit on your post?
sure. There was what seems to be a correction in the PE market where funding become a bit more difficult to get a hold of. As such, an article came out suggesting that unicorns would have problems but cockroaches would survive. While the unicorn portion is a bit silly, the cockroach part is reasonable. Essentially, the companies with low burn rates and actual, real, cashflow will be more likely to survive.
@Dmritard96, thanks for clarifying:).
That's truly surprising. I don't recall Facebook ever resorting to layoffs?
Facebook's never been in as bad a spot as Twitter's in now.
Yet.
Facebook has 3 properties which have more users than Twitter (Facebook, Whatsapp, Instagram). Facebook itself has more active users than Google and has another property, Whatapp which is also close to or just over that billion user mark.
And they are already reporting profits.
I doubt they will go the way of Twitter.
And they are already reporting profits.
I doubt they will go the way of Twitter.
Nothing lasts forever in tech. How will they monetize Instagram and WhatsApp? Don't show me users. Show me profits from those users if you want to count them.
True, but thus far Facebook has responded well to existential threats by buying companies like Instagram, WhatsApp, etc.
Is that how it works now? Companies with great products but not a sustainable long-term biz plan exit by getting bought out, and larger companies with a greater product but also no far-long-term biz plan buy those companies and survive by having them as fallback products?
It's acquihires all the way down.
[deleted]
Sounds like the beer industry. Five companies own half the world market. And new breweries are easy to start. If yours gains traction, you get acquired.
And that's in an industry where the products are close to fungible, without depending on network effects.
And that's in an industry where the products are close to fungible, without depending on network effects.
People go to the store and exchange money for beer. You seem to be missing the point.
[deleted]
I take offence to the notion that beers are fungible.
That's how most industries are. Pharma/biotech is all about this
I guess the one upside about tech is that ideally you're in a field with technology that can tie together disparate products into one ecosystem, so it's not simply about making megacorps that are essentially giant holding companies that own random products and patents.
On the other hand, one binding ecosystem with disparate products can easily become either walled gardens or badly-fragmented loose confederations, so it's not the best situation, either.
On the other hand, one binding ecosystem with disparate products can easily become either walled gardens or badly-fragmented loose confederations, so it's not the best situation, either.
Facebook (the service) itself can maintain the company as is, but they have ads on Instagram at least. FB currently makes several dollars per user per quarter in revenue (or profits), with that value depending on what number you go by, but the smallest number you could pick is 1B+. No business is guaranteed to last forever, but there is really no reason to think that they have any real trouble ahead.
The easiest solution would be to expand Whatsapp to support mobile payments. A lot of commerce in countries in Africa and Asia is already conducted over the phone using SMS and other similar technologies, and FB could fairly easily have Whatsapp play that role and earn a decent chunk of money.
Inserting ad images into Instagram would be fairly trivial. Given the large number of celebs on Instagram, shared revenue on product placement is another option. Promotion of high profile Instagram accounts (say, a new movie) etc
Instagram already does this since a couple of weeks ago.
Instagram is pretty trivial: ads. AFAIK, their user base is largely female, and this catalog of inventory is very much desired by advertisers.
In terms of Whatsapp, micro-transaction maybe? That I am not quite sure, it is not going to be as straight-forward as Instagram.
In terms of Whatsapp, micro-transaction maybe? That I am not quite sure, it is not going to be as straight-forward as Instagram.
Whatsapp used to be monetised before Facebook bought them, so in theory it shouldn't be that difficult to go back...
At some point the "throw ads in it" model is going to stop working.
If you think profits are still the driving force of what matters, then you will never build an Instagram or WhatsApp at the exit values they achieved.
This sounds like 90's bubble talk, but "eyeballs" do matter. Investors and the market care about the current social value of a product in terms of the value / growth of their user base.
Ask many millenials/teens and they say they more meaningfully interact with Instagram than Facebook. That fact about social trends is worth its weight in gold in terms of its user base.
This sounds like 90's bubble talk, but "eyeballs" do matter. Investors and the market care about the current social value of a product in terms of the value / growth of their user base.
Ask many millenials/teens and they say they more meaningfully interact with Instagram than Facebook. That fact about social trends is worth its weight in gold in terms of its user base.
That is the exact cargo cult bullshit thinking that got Twitter and many other companies into this situation in the first place.
Was Google cargo culting by turning down efforts by its early investors to have them show banner ads like Yahoo?
Their willingness to hold off for many many years without revenue was now brilliant in hindsight, given they found a much better way to make money on advertising than how Yahoo ever imagined it. But they wouldn't have got there if they caved into short-term thinking obsessed investors who think you need to post immediate revenue.
Twitter's issues are more to do with a lack of product innovation or evolution, not that it has gotten too large. Its problem is that it has gotten too large without expanding its product base to support or justify that growth.
Their willingness to hold off for many many years without revenue was now brilliant in hindsight, given they found a much better way to make money on advertising than how Yahoo ever imagined it. But they wouldn't have got there if they caved into short-term thinking obsessed investors who think you need to post immediate revenue.
Twitter's issues are more to do with a lack of product innovation or evolution, not that it has gotten too large. Its problem is that it has gotten too large without expanding its product base to support or justify that growth.
> Ask many millenials/teens and they say they more meaningfully interact with Instagram than Facebook. That fact about social trends is worth its weight in gold in terms of its user base.
Ask how many millenials or teens have bought something or spent money because of an ad on Facebook or Instagram.
Ask how many millenials or teens have bought something or spent money because of an ad on Facebook or Instagram.
Massive profits in fact:
http://www.wikinvest.com/stock/Facebook_(FB)/Data/EBITDA
http://www.wikinvest.com/stock/Facebook_(FB)/Data/EBITDA
Facebooks acquisitions of users overlap. Think about that. They have nowhere near as many users as Google.
Facebook is building the most sophisticated AI Research Lab in the world. I think they'll be okay.
No where near as sophisticated as Google's or IBM's. These companies were not founded by rebranding MySpace as Facebook did. Google was founded based on a sophisticated algorithm that had its roots in AI while facebook was copying and pasting text entry boxes.
Vladimir Vapnik and Yann Lecun would beg to differ.
[deleted](1)
The second dotcom boom is coming to an end. Have fun everyone
Not necessarily. They have 4000 employees, which probably has a number of non-revenue-generating positions that many SV companies are wont to have. Like Python API WebSockets Diversity Developer Envangelists with full travel budgets to go to 49 conferences a year. (I just made that up, but you get the idea)
Maybe judging a boom by twitter layoff is a bit too soon. However, the underneath mindset rings a bell: people starts to realize winter is coming, but not sure when...
Definitely. Now, if you're an evangelist who hasn't written production code in years, then maybe you should start brushing up on your skills :-)
Um, no. The OSS evangelism team is three people total.
For many businesses, that might be 2 or 3 too many.
Also, that was just an example I pulled out of the air. It could be middle management, or a documentation expert whose role is regulating font size. The point is that for a company with a simple product, an API and clients for that API, and monetization through advertising, that's a lot of employees. If the money's not there, cut the fat.
Also, that was just an example I pulled out of the air. It could be middle management, or a documentation expert whose role is regulating font size. The point is that for a company with a simple product, an API and clients for that API, and monetization through advertising, that's a lot of employees. If the money's not there, cut the fat.
I used to be a Google Reader/Google Buzz addict. And was interacting with a very living community through those tools.
I now use twitter as my exclusive medium for both mainstream and "niche" news.
I appreciate the wide availability of content, but still think they are much too conservative with their user experience.
The inability to browse tweets by topic is sometimes a pain.
The inability to connect with the right people and build a discussion about topics you discover and find interesting.
Basically twitter should have a chatroom. And propose you conversations about (your) trending topics.
So a more public/global Slack with recommendations and intelligently aggregating channels by hash tag?
the limitation of which is that most content on a user stream is pulled passively by the users or is a paid advertisement.
as a discovery/exploration tool sucks.
if it had interesting suggestion based on hashtags and followers beyond 'follow this three more person' daily mail it could be a nice networking/news tool, but so far it cannot really help me navigate in the millions streams that might be interesting but are accessible only knowing that exact hashtag
I followed a couple news outlet, I guess there are many more that may interest me but I can't be assed to search them and if I discover them myself they go by preference into feedly, not twitter.
on the other hand, it had been great to follow this and that indie game developer :D
as a discovery/exploration tool sucks.
if it had interesting suggestion based on hashtags and followers beyond 'follow this three more person' daily mail it could be a nice networking/news tool, but so far it cannot really help me navigate in the millions streams that might be interesting but are accessible only knowing that exact hashtag
I followed a couple news outlet, I guess there are many more that may interest me but I can't be assed to search them and if I discover them myself they go by preference into feedly, not twitter.
on the other hand, it had been great to follow this and that indie game developer :D
Google Reader got so much right, except maybe feed discovery. Google could have incrementally morphed Reader, something that worked. Twitter is like RSS for regular people.
And yet no one avail to fix the mobile Twitter website. It just does not work. Get enraged everytime I click on a tweet from Safari.
Sexagesimal(1)
Maybe it's finally dawning on investors that nobody wants to pay money for #sarcastic #selfpromoting #hottakes #mixingcontentandmetadata
I would not go that far, but I can certainly say -- seems like half the accounts are re-tweet bots and random products I have no interest in trying to follow me.
Genuine question - why do recruiters hire new people when the company is laying off?
JSno(1)
@Whitenoice, recruiters hire them mainly because of their skill set. Keep in mind, most layoffs are because a department is being eliminated and the is no where for the employee to go but to take a severance and leave.
Not their fault they are being laid off you know.
Not their fault they are being laid off you know.
They don't always, but I can think of a few reasons why they would:
- they're hiring for different specialties and departments than what's being cut
- at least in theory, they're hiring people who would be above-average workers while laying off those below average
- they still need to compensate for normal churn, which is probably exacerbated by the layoffs
- they can try giving new candidates weaker compensation to save costs
Ultimately, workers are not fungible and it requires active effort to maintain a team as people come and go. This doesn't change during layoffs.
- they're hiring for different specialties and departments than what's being cut
- at least in theory, they're hiring people who would be above-average workers while laying off those below average
- they still need to compensate for normal churn, which is probably exacerbated by the layoffs
- they can try giving new candidates weaker compensation to save costs
Ultimately, workers are not fungible and it requires active effort to maintain a team as people come and go. This doesn't change during layoffs.
This is a good list. Two more reasons:
- Corporations are inefficient, sometimes the HR department is not even aware layoffs are coming
- Corporations are sometimes unethical, they don't care about the unfairness of hiring a new worker rather than trying to re-place a worker about to be laid off
One more reason - new hires can be cheaper.
Or can appear cheaper to bean counters, at least.
Or can appear cheaper to bean counters, at least.
Because their job is to hire people?
[deleted]
"Moments" tab gives a good indication that Twitter has no idea where to go and is the sum of boring meetings with marketing consultants.
Twitter had potential, but it appears stagnate as all they've done is created a new version of an AOL instant messenger chatroom with hashtags and 128char limit. Limiting the API tokens for 3rd party developers was a really foolish move.
Twitter had potential, but it appears stagnate as all they've done is created a new version of an AOL instant messenger chatroom with hashtags and 128char limit. Limiting the API tokens for 3rd party developers was a really foolish move.
How do you mean? I think of Moments are formalizing something that Twitter does well: conversations/stories around topics of current interest. Sure, you'll engage your connections on these topics. But it's nice to see a broader view of them as well.
Checking it showed no relation to anything in my feed, friends, or posts.
Additionally it brought up nonsense click bait.
It looked like they just fed in the front page of yahoo.
Additionally it brought up nonsense click bait.
It looked like they just fed in the front page of yahoo.
Completely agree. "Moments" just has that damn indicator showing stuff is unread on it and it drives me nuts but NOTHING is EVER relevant to any of my interests or even the people I follow. I don't even understand what the point of it is; shouldn't it just be displaying things it thinks I want to look at? At least that makes the most sense to me...
Oh well, I don't think Twitter is going away any time soon but I don't really understand some of the steps they've been taking...and 4,100 employees? Yikes!
Oh well, I don't think Twitter is going away any time soon but I don't really understand some of the steps they've been taking...and 4,100 employees? Yikes!
it's because you're not their target. Their goal with these features is not to retain existing users but to acquire ones who wouldn't have otherwise used Twitter.
> it's because you're not their target
Fair enough. That probably goes for almost everyone on HN as well I would think but obviously we're an edge case.
> Their goal with these features is not to retain existing users but to acquire ones who wouldn't have otherwise used Twitter.
Hmm, how would this attract new folks? Like Facebook tries to show you things you care about but this I'm not sure how it's really sold to perspective users. Since it's a social network I'm guessing much will be word of mouth but that requires support from existing users.
I wonder if things like increasing the character amount and offering a better, maybe threaded conversational way of interacting with folks would bring in more people. Granted those may not be the best choices philosophically but I wonder if they've done any A/B testing where certain areas got different features like more character counts and how it turned out.
Fair enough. That probably goes for almost everyone on HN as well I would think but obviously we're an edge case.
> Their goal with these features is not to retain existing users but to acquire ones who wouldn't have otherwise used Twitter.
Hmm, how would this attract new folks? Like Facebook tries to show you things you care about but this I'm not sure how it's really sold to perspective users. Since it's a social network I'm guessing much will be word of mouth but that requires support from existing users.
I wonder if things like increasing the character amount and offering a better, maybe threaded conversational way of interacting with folks would bring in more people. Granted those may not be the best choices philosophically but I wonder if they've done any A/B testing where certain areas got different features like more character counts and how it turned out.
If they're really going toward content, I think Moments is a good idea with a questionable name. Something like Super-GoogleNews could eventually evolve, Sprinkle a little recommendation engine over and you got yourself a custom page full of wordstuff.
I agree. Add in the proper personalization and some kind of Twitter-unique algorithm that almost serves as a voting system (perhaps based on favorites, retweets, replies, etc), and you've got yourself a Reddit replacement. Which could be nice, now that Reddit has decided to become a censored safe place and it's core users are leaving.
I'm not much of a user of "Moments" myself, but I'm guessing it is primarily targeted at new users who sign up and go "what now" and don't know who to follow, etc.
One of the interesting parts about Moments, is that I used TweetBot and that feature is nowhere to be found. That being said, I don't even feel like I'm missing anything. It seems like ownership of the product experience is fragmented and the best implementors of the product experience aren't Twitter.
The most innovative technology to have come out of chat programs is Slack's feature that let's you EDIT chats in real time, and leave reactions.
This is such a crazy innovation to the structure of chat programs, that it blows my mind other real time communication platforms haven't incorporated it. Even Facebook Messenger and GChat feel inadequate now that I'm consciously aware that they don't let me edit my chat messages after sending them. It's such a no brainer innovation that nobody has ever done, likely because when you're building a chat program the idea of letting people edit chats after they send them makes the brain of any engineer hurt -- but there's an untapped value to allowing it that many products haven't realized yet.
This is such a crazy innovation to the structure of chat programs, that it blows my mind other real time communication platforms haven't incorporated it. Even Facebook Messenger and GChat feel inadequate now that I'm consciously aware that they don't let me edit my chat messages after sending them. It's such a no brainer innovation that nobody has ever done, likely because when you're building a chat program the idea of letting people edit chats after they send them makes the brain of any engineer hurt -- but there's an untapped value to allowing it that many products haven't realized yet.
Skype has had that functionality for a very long time, well before Slack was conceived.
my IRC client had s/wrong phrase/correct phrase/ for quite a while before Skype was a thought in the KaZaA developer's head.
I'm surprised it took so long. Hopefully the other social-networking giants follow suite and we start getting more companies that have actual sustainable business models.
I see this as a good sign (other than for those laid off of course), Twitter is fantastic but they don't need half as many people as they currently employ for their product. As companies get larger their agility and ability to change decreases. What's important is if they're laying off the right people.
I think it's a good moment for Twitter to get back in track, Moment is a great feature and it shows that more good stuff is coming.
Has someone told their recruiting team? My twitter feed today was about 30% "join the flock" tweets.
Guess they didn't get the tweet about cover sheets on the TPS report.
I got an email from a Twtr recruiter two days ago and now am trying to word my polite reply that now doesn't look like the best time to be quitting a good job to join a company that's in the middle of layoffs. I guess they didn't get the word.
Oh god. My roommate was literally offered a position at their Boulder office last week. I wonder how systemic cuts will be?
...I heard they're gonna fire 140 characters
There's a popular meme "If you're not paying, then you're the product". I think an exception is " or they're just not making any money".
Or, in the case of Twitter, both.
Note that it is "if", and not "if and only if". Basically, if you can be tracked or advertised to ("advertracked"), you ARE the product whether you pay or not.
Money has to come from somewhere; if it is not from you, it is by monetizing you. But ... why not monetize the user even when they did pay? It's a whole new revenue stream, that's often orthogonal to the payment stream.
Paid Hulu has ads. Windows Solitaire has ads now. Movie theatres have been showing ads since forever. Cable TV is showing ads.
Money has to come from somewhere; if it is not from you, it is by monetizing you. But ... why not monetize the user even when they did pay? It's a whole new revenue stream, that's often orthogonal to the payment stream.
Paid Hulu has ads. Windows Solitaire has ads now. Movie theatres have been showing ads since forever. Cable TV is showing ads.
And now, thanks to the hobby of one developer, my phone blocks ads in /etc/hosts, preventing even in-app ads from appearing. My web browser on my laptop does just as well with a plugin.
All that's left in my browsing experience to hint that sites are trying to maintain themselves on advertising are reels of clickbait stories that come at the side and bottom of every traditional media article. I can't help but hope they are only a technocultural shift away from the abyss of anachronism.
The technology can be used to target us, but in the end machines do the work and they are very predictable. We also have machines, and knowledge, and can stand up against the bullshit.
> Paid Hulu has ads. Windows Solitaire has ads now. Movie theatres have been showing ads since forever. Cable TV is showing ads.
The problem with my idealistic vision of the near future is that we are just as likely to accept this as normal. We habitually pay for stuff and still get ads. We have the tools to block the crap but it's much more important that we decide to.
Millions of people gave up eating gluten because they learned about celiac disease. I'd like to imagine that we are just a few headline-grabbing research papers away from swaying the public about the healthiness of exposing ourselves to psychological bombardment.
All that's left in my browsing experience to hint that sites are trying to maintain themselves on advertising are reels of clickbait stories that come at the side and bottom of every traditional media article. I can't help but hope they are only a technocultural shift away from the abyss of anachronism.
The technology can be used to target us, but in the end machines do the work and they are very predictable. We also have machines, and knowledge, and can stand up against the bullshit.
> Paid Hulu has ads. Windows Solitaire has ads now. Movie theatres have been showing ads since forever. Cable TV is showing ads.
The problem with my idealistic vision of the near future is that we are just as likely to accept this as normal. We habitually pay for stuff and still get ads. We have the tools to block the crap but it's much more important that we decide to.
Millions of people gave up eating gluten because they learned about celiac disease. I'd like to imagine that we are just a few headline-grabbing research papers away from swaying the public about the healthiness of exposing ourselves to psychological bombardment.
How do you block in app adds?
Most apps use 3rd-party libraries and servers to show those ads, so they can be blocked at the network connection level (e.g. the hosts file) if you have control over your phone's OS. Having Android helps with that.
The apps need to handle it gracefully because they can't tell whether the ad server is legitimately down or just blocked. I've never had an app work any worse with blocked ads.
The apps need to handle it gracefully because they can't tell whether the ad server is legitimately down or just blocked. I've never had an app work any worse with blocked ads.
You pay for your ticket, you pay for your popcorn, and yet the cinema still shows you ads before the main feature.
I remember the outrage the first time they did it. After about 10 years, it crossed the lagging edge of the Overton window.
Windows Solitaire has ads now. Movie theatres have been showing ads since forever. Cable TV is showing ads.
Although if I were trying to think of business models that seem to be struggling, those would probably have been among the first examples that came to mind. Windows 10 so far appears to be another Windows Vista/8. The movie theatres around here seem to operate under constant fear of closure. We don't have a complete equivalent of US cable TV here, but I get the feeling that on-line, on-demand services are threatening that model as well. In each case, I can't help suspecting that the degree of customer exploitation/price gouging has a lot to do with the waning popularity.
Although if I were trying to think of business models that seem to be struggling, those would probably have been among the first examples that came to mind. Windows 10 so far appears to be another Windows Vista/8. The movie theatres around here seem to operate under constant fear of closure. We don't have a complete equivalent of US cable TV here, but I get the feeling that on-line, on-demand services are threatening that model as well. In each case, I can't help suspecting that the degree of customer exploitation/price gouging has a lot to do with the waning popularity.
> There's a popular meme "If you're not paying, then you're the product".
Popular and irritating since (a) it's incomplete (if you're paying, you're increasingly product, too, since companies aren't going to leave rifling through your data as a way of making money alone), and (b) it's become a kind of astroturf ad campaign for certain companies.
Popular and irritating since (a) it's incomplete (if you're paying, you're increasingly product, too, since companies aren't going to leave rifling through your data as a way of making money alone), and (b) it's become a kind of astroturf ad campaign for certain companies.
You are the product. But apparently a poor one.
So it is possible the ceo switch happened now since the board was willing to reduce company size, instead of the other way around? I can imagine markets to take it better if this appears to be the first wise move of a very capable ceo.
Non paywalled article at http://recode.net/2015/10/09/twitter-is-planning-company-wid...
This sort of thing can happen when society insists on building multi-billion-dollar businesses around stuff that should have been an RFC.
On the plus side, shorting TWTR has been rewarding. Won't be doing it any more with a founder at the helm, of course.
On the plus side, shorting TWTR has been rewarding. Won't be doing it any more with a founder at the helm, of course.
Twitter is undervalued, Jack Doresey can't run two stagnating companies in parrallel. Cut jobs, merge the companies (because Square's IPO isn't going to be successful and combine core competencies.
Square has been focusing on invoicing, cash advances, appointment scheduling, marketing features, and slicing and dicing business data, among others[0]
Strip these companies down to core competencies:
* Communications
* Real time information broadcasting
* Financial infrastructure
* Global penetration
* Advertisers/Brands/Companies
Not PG's What Microsoft is this the Altair Basic of?", but "What Apple is this the Ipod of?"* I don't know, but as someone who never got into twitter, I'm interested to see Jack take a shot with:
* both sides of the market in one place
* financial infrastructure
* customer tracking
* brand participation.
Likely result is a Merger of equals with no power struggle at the top levels. Everyone expecting this anyway so expect it to happen soon.
[0]http://fortune.com/2015/08/02/square-reinvention-ipo-dorsey/
Square has been focusing on invoicing, cash advances, appointment scheduling, marketing features, and slicing and dicing business data, among others[0]
Strip these companies down to core competencies:
* Communications
* Real time information broadcasting
* Financial infrastructure
* Global penetration
* Advertisers/Brands/Companies
Not PG's What Microsoft is this the Altair Basic of?", but "What Apple is this the Ipod of?"* I don't know, but as someone who never got into twitter, I'm interested to see Jack take a shot with:
* both sides of the market in one place
* financial infrastructure
* customer tracking
* brand participation.
Likely result is a Merger of equals with no power struggle at the top levels. Everyone expecting this anyway so expect it to happen soon.
[0]http://fortune.com/2015/08/02/square-reinvention-ipo-dorsey/
In the public markets, you announce your bad news after the market closes on a Friday. If this were good news, it would have been announced on a Monday, Tuesday or Wenesday and before the market opens.
Not happy to see any company have to cut its staff but Twitter is in trouble and some big changes need to be made.
Twitter's IPO stock price reflected the promise that the service previously showed. The company was drowning in the possibilities provided by the incredibly valuable real time data it holds. It's not an easy task but what they've failed to do is organise and deliver all that data in a way that provides value.
Specifically, the user experience is horrible. The argument from people who love Twitter is that those who don't enjoy Twitter need to refine their stream, follow carefully and proactively curate their feed. In my opinion that's bullshit, and the onus should not be on users to find value in Twitter's data! Instead they should be able to enter their interests and Twitter should do the heavy lifting to give them relevant and interesting information.
If every time I open my Twitter feed I find interesting news, information and new contacts I'm going to keep coming back and engage with the platform.
Twitter's IPO stock price reflected the promise that the service previously showed. The company was drowning in the possibilities provided by the incredibly valuable real time data it holds. It's not an easy task but what they've failed to do is organise and deliver all that data in a way that provides value.
Specifically, the user experience is horrible. The argument from people who love Twitter is that those who don't enjoy Twitter need to refine their stream, follow carefully and proactively curate their feed. In my opinion that's bullshit, and the onus should not be on users to find value in Twitter's data! Instead they should be able to enter their interests and Twitter should do the heavy lifting to give them relevant and interesting information.
If every time I open my Twitter feed I find interesting news, information and new contacts I'm going to keep coming back and engage with the platform.
I find it impressive that a basic feature of the interface that makes HN usable is completely avoided on Twitter. The platform provides absolutely no way to follow the thread of a conversation! To ensure that this mistake is permanent, they've made it practically impossible to use third-party interfaces on top of their API, so no one else could develop and distribute a solution to this.
Totally. People keep talking about removing the 140 character limit. That's just one of the many UX problems they need to address.
You're right and by extension you have to put together a search in order to see exactly what someone has tweeted to someone else, by which I mean you have to pro-actively search in order to truly follow someone.
For instance, during the recent downtime I wanted to see what Squarespace was saying and what others were tweeting to them. There's now way to do that without doing a search for their username.
Tweets and replies only show replies to what an account tweets, which is virtually redundant when sat alongside the full 'tweets' stream. There was no quick click way to see what others were tweeting to them.
This compartmentalisation is a constant attribute of Twitter that they seem to actively maintain and even design towards. They expect you as a user to know what you want to see.
They need to be much more active about presenting data views to the user and take away the need for the user to try and extract meaning and relevance from the constant stream of data.
For instance, during the recent downtime I wanted to see what Squarespace was saying and what others were tweeting to them. There's now way to do that without doing a search for their username.
Tweets and replies only show replies to what an account tweets, which is virtually redundant when sat alongside the full 'tweets' stream. There was no quick click way to see what others were tweeting to them.
This compartmentalisation is a constant attribute of Twitter that they seem to actively maintain and even design towards. They expect you as a user to know what you want to see.
They need to be much more active about presenting data views to the user and take away the need for the user to try and extract meaning and relevance from the constant stream of data.
I keep trying to use it, and I simply can't. I use Facebook all the time and have since 2005.
The twitter feed reminds me of when GMail did away with colors and made it hard to tell at a glance when one message ended and a new one began. It's difficult to parse tweets vs retweets vs replies at a glance. The UI is somehow both cluttered and a huge waste of space, at the same time.
My feed was boring, so I added people I wanted to follow; race drivers and commentators, tech commentators, etc. Now it's just a firehose of junk.
Yes, if I tried harder, I could make it work. But that's not my problem -- I don't make money from my Twitter use. That's Twitter's problem to solve if it wants to attract more growth.
The twitter feed reminds me of when GMail did away with colors and made it hard to tell at a glance when one message ended and a new one began. It's difficult to parse tweets vs retweets vs replies at a glance. The UI is somehow both cluttered and a huge waste of space, at the same time.
My feed was boring, so I added people I wanted to follow; race drivers and commentators, tech commentators, etc. Now it's just a firehose of junk.
Yes, if I tried harder, I could make it work. But that's not my problem -- I don't make money from my Twitter use. That's Twitter's problem to solve if it wants to attract more growth.
I think the general market could learn a thing or two from WhatsApp: 55 people powering a platform used by 800 million _active_ users across many different platforms. And WhatsApp has innovated, e.g. the new video and calling system works very well.
I have often wondered what thousands of Twitter employees are doing all day long? Their platform and apps have been stale for a long time.
I have often wondered what thousands of Twitter employees are doing all day long? Their platform and apps have been stale for a long time.
The new video and calling system, innovation? Skype, Hangouts and Viber have had those features for years...
I don't think WhatsApp introduced any innovation at all, its popularity is derived from network effects, together with the questionable practice of using phone numbers as public ID and automatically adding all your phone contacts as chat contacts without them having any say in the matter.
I don't think WhatsApp introduced any innovation at all, its popularity is derived from network effects, together with the questionable practice of using phone numbers as public ID and automatically adding all your phone contacts as chat contacts without them having any say in the matter.
I am an active user of WhatsApp and their service is much more reliable than Skype or Hangouts. There's a reason why 800 million people are using it and it's not only because of network effects, it's because the base product and service is rock solid.
Their innovation is evolution of WhatsApp past text messages. And in the end, nothing is a true innovation -- most things build on past ideas.
Their innovation is evolution of WhatsApp past text messages. And in the end, nothing is a true innovation -- most things build on past ideas.
I bought an Ubuntu phone, and here its the netwok effect that stops my friends switching to Telegram or anything else.
"Reliable" is a relative term for WA. Everybody I know has a random delay in messages, the browser "thing" is mostly not usable, no desktop app, etc. You can not use WA for productivity.
but productivity never was it's intended target - skype was killed on mobile because of shitty notification requiring the app to be on for the longest time, call dropping, software block to 3g calls.
basically they shot themselves in the foot on the mobile market with an half assed implementation, and even today the notification system on skype mobile apps is dumb, especially how they handles balloons (the only app that could do worse on notification balloons is facebook)
whatsapp may not be a cornerstone of reliability, but it has an incredibly frictionless mobile user experience.
basically they shot themselves in the foot on the mobile market with an half assed implementation, and even today the notification system on skype mobile apps is dumb, especially how they handles balloons (the only app that could do worse on notification balloons is facebook)
whatsapp may not be a cornerstone of reliability, but it has an incredibly frictionless mobile user experience.
Phone numbers as ID is actually a really important innovation. I worked in Kenya for quite a while, and found that many people had email accounts they had no idea how to actually access. Email-based authentication doesn't work for a considerable proportion of the world's population. But cell phones are pretty ubiquitous: This ease of authentication is a big part of why whatsapp is kicking ass in the developing world.
> they had no idea how to actually access.
My mom back in India finds email address and passwords confusing but she immediately understood watsapp and how to send messages to her sister in US.
My mom back in India finds email address and passwords confusing but she immediately understood watsapp and how to send messages to her sister in US.
"email accounts"
The plural is an important side issue. I only have one phone and one public phone number. I'm not sure how many email addresses I have, its definitely more than five but less than two dozen? I do know my broadband provider theoretically gave me an email address about a decade ago that I've never used. I hope no one is sending email to that address...
The plural is an important side issue. I only have one phone and one public phone number. I'm not sure how many email addresses I have, its definitely more than five but less than two dozen? I do know my broadband provider theoretically gave me an email address about a decade ago that I've never used. I hope no one is sending email to that address...
Interesting. If you think from the UX point of view the cell number is much more convenient than email as people generally have multiple email ids but 1/2 phone ids. Also obviously the fake account issue is much much lower in phone's case compared to email ids.
Watsapp works for me without any issues and its so simple, even my mom could understand it pretty fast.
Skype sometimes hangs on my pc and on the phone. Both my pc and phone have a good configuration yet Skype does not play nice.
Skype sometimes hangs on my pc and on the phone. Both my pc and phone have a good configuration yet Skype does not play nice.
Innovation = How reliable their calling system is. Even with proper networks it works very well. I call my family back in india and it works so well without any disturbances.
Innovation for whatsapp = Simplicity + Reliability
Innovation for whatsapp = Simplicity + Reliability
Why this is an innovation though? Just because they have fewer engineers to repeat the work that has been done by so many other companies?
>I have often wondered what thousands of Twitter employees are doing all day long? Their platform and apps have been stale for a long time.
They are adding new complicated features that all users hate to "increase engagement".
They are adding new complicated features that all users hate to "increase engagement".
I mostly agree, but the scale of what Twitter is doing technically is very different.
Network size is not as important as how messages are distributed within it. Whereas most WhatsApp messages are one to one, on Twitter they're almost always one-to-very-many.
If 10000 Twitter users with 1000 followers each send a tweet, that's 10000000 messages hitting queues. 10000 WhatsApp users sending a single message each are likely to result in 10000-20000 messages (sometimes people have group conversations).
Network size is not as important as how messages are distributed within it. Whereas most WhatsApp messages are one to one, on Twitter they're almost always one-to-very-many.
If 10000 Twitter users with 1000 followers each send a tweet, that's 10000000 messages hitting queues. 10000 WhatsApp users sending a single message each are likely to result in 10000-20000 messages (sometimes people have group conversations).
Perhaps that is the lesson to be learned? That technology with limits... scales?
If you want to "do social", do it for small groups. Nobody really has 40 000 friends, so why bother with the use-case that is literally only used by advertising companies?
If you want to "do social", do it for small groups. Nobody really has 40 000 friends, so why bother with the use-case that is literally only used by advertising companies?
Perhaps because providing ad companies with the tools like these is the way to monetize the service?
Well, it seems that idea has failed now. Why else would they be cutting costs?
I don't think the final question is realistic. I have 20K followers (not huge, but far beyond who I could realistically ever "know") and get huge value from it as an individual, not as a business. It would be so boring (to me) to only be able to talk to people one knows closely.
There are numerous non-company non-celebs-in-the-Hollywood-sense-of-the-word people who have huge followings on Twitter who get a lot of value from that and who their followers also appreciate: people like DHH, John Carmack, Marco, Sam Altman, Scoble..
There is a definite space between "people you know personally" and "blast ads to 2 million customers" in social and Twitter fills it really well.
There are numerous non-company non-celebs-in-the-Hollywood-sense-of-the-word people who have huge followings on Twitter who get a lot of value from that and who their followers also appreciate: people like DHH, John Carmack, Marco, Sam Altman, Scoble..
There is a definite space between "people you know personally" and "blast ads to 2 million customers" in social and Twitter fills it really well.
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Soooo... RSS? Isn't that what you've just described? You could run that on a pretty small web server....
That's ignoring the network effect and centralized environment that Twitter provides, without which GP might not have those 20k followers.
All "social media" services are fundamentally "RSS feeds for humans". It's the same concept, with an easier interfaces and discovery mechanisms, and within a walled garden.
Well, we did. I was a blogger for about 7 years before Twitter came along. Twitter pretty much killed it for me as the masses went there.
So you're not wrong, but the people went to Twitter. Even Google killed Reader. I go where my audience is.
So you're not wrong, but the people went to Twitter. Even Google killed Reader. I go where my audience is.
RSS lacks one-click follow, recommendations, favorites, push of new updates, native replies, and uniformity of message size, and if you could sweep those things under the rug, Twitter wouldn't be as large as it is.
RSS is fine for plumbing and pros but has not evolved into anything resembling a user-friendly system.
RSS is fine for plumbing and pros but has not evolved into anything resembling a user-friendly system.
> * RSS lacks one-click follow, recommendations, favorites, push of new updates, native replies, and uniformity of message size, and if you could sweep those things under the rug, Twitter wouldn't be as large as it is.*
Twitter has way more features than RSS, but do people really use "favorites" that often? The tweets I "fav'd" I don't really go back and check later, or maybe I'm not the targeted demographic
Twitter has way more features than RSS, but do people really use "favorites" that often? The tweets I "fav'd" I don't really go back and check later, or maybe I'm not the targeted demographic
For "friends", there is Facebook. You don't do " friends" on twitter, except if the friends are hackers or marketing types.
Twitter is more for information
Twitter is more for information
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Very few innovative startups have ever succeeded by declaring that "technology has its limits, we better work within them!"
To be successful, you usually have to do something outside the comfort limits of existing technology.
To be successful, you usually have to do something outside the comfort limits of existing technology.
WhatsApp innovated by smart use of technology within the limits of how real social interaction works.
Twitter innovated by redefining how social interaction works - and then proceeded to slowly grow bloated and cashless.
Twitter innovated by redefining how social interaction works - and then proceeded to slowly grow bloated and cashless.
Because the ad companies with 40k are the one that will pay the bills
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In a certain sense, twitter's one-to-many messaging is simpler, because it is a smaller volume of messages that have to be served.
Not at all. Have you ever thought about caching Twitter? It's an archetypical example of a site that's extremely difficult to cache well, which is the source of so many of its scaling problems.
Every person's new feed is uniquely generated based on their followers. That means you can only at best cache at the individual tweet level -- you still need to uniquely generate a news feed for each user. This means that for every user you need to individually grab information simultaneously from the same high velocity tweets, while still being able to present information to each user uniquely based on conditions regarding how twitter should display tweets for that specific user individually. That's incredibly demanding data wise because it makes horizontal distribution of load much more difficult --- a huge number of people are all making demands on the same set of data resources, and you can't easily cache that data because of how real time and quickly updating it is.
In comparison WhatsApp on Erlang is basically just an example of extremely dramatic real time horizontal scaling. Hosting hundreds of millions of simultaneous chats is relatively trivial in Erlang, given each one is operating under its own separately scalable chat process. Since very few chats share data with one another, horizontal scaling is easy because you don't have the issue of the same resource getting called simultaneously by millions of unique users at the same time, who all need that resource represented back to their own news feed in differently categorized ways.
tl;dr: WhatsApp with the right technology is WAY easier to scale than Twitter.
---------------
(Speaking of the magic of Erlang for chat programs, this funny video "for Ruby/Node.js hipsters" explains how Erlang does this magic quite well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rRbY3TMUcgQ) )
Every person's new feed is uniquely generated based on their followers. That means you can only at best cache at the individual tweet level -- you still need to uniquely generate a news feed for each user. This means that for every user you need to individually grab information simultaneously from the same high velocity tweets, while still being able to present information to each user uniquely based on conditions regarding how twitter should display tweets for that specific user individually. That's incredibly demanding data wise because it makes horizontal distribution of load much more difficult --- a huge number of people are all making demands on the same set of data resources, and you can't easily cache that data because of how real time and quickly updating it is.
In comparison WhatsApp on Erlang is basically just an example of extremely dramatic real time horizontal scaling. Hosting hundreds of millions of simultaneous chats is relatively trivial in Erlang, given each one is operating under its own separately scalable chat process. Since very few chats share data with one another, horizontal scaling is easy because you don't have the issue of the same resource getting called simultaneously by millions of unique users at the same time, who all need that resource represented back to their own news feed in differently categorized ways.
tl;dr: WhatsApp with the right technology is WAY easier to scale than Twitter.
---------------
(Speaking of the magic of Erlang for chat programs, this funny video "for Ruby/Node.js hipsters" explains how Erlang does this magic quite well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rRbY3TMUcgQ) )
There are many well understood approaches to scaling this. There are operational challenges to it, but it's not that hard. E.g. decompose large follower lists by using reflectors, and cap the size in the messaging system to a suitably low number. Now you've reduced the issue to one of sharding it over enough machines.
Hubris, much?
He's actually dead on. After that it's a 'mere matter of programming', so there's plenty of work to be done but that's the exact way how you tackle this particular problem.
so in order to do what Twitter has done it is a mere matter of doing what Twitter has done, plus handwaving. how useful!
The "handwaving" here are simple, well understood problems both on the development side and operational side. As I've mentioned elsewhere: Twitters message volume or messaging patterns are nothing special. And it's a problem that is trivial to subdivide into manageable chunks.
Experience with messaging platforms. Keep in mind that Twitters platform is not particularly high volume for messaging systems. It is reasonably high volume for messaging between people. But people tweet rarely enough for Twitters overall volume to be all that special.
And Twitters core message exchange functionality is conceptually extremely simple.
You need to be able to take a message, and put it into the set of targets, T.
Problem is T can be "unreasonably big". E.g. millions of followers. Solution? If something is too big, see if you can divide the problem. Split T into smaller chunks t1..tn, and distribute them. If those chunks are still too large, split them again.
This reduces your problem to figuring out how to insert and remove and balance a tree, and how to process two kinds of message deliveries: Insert into timeline or reflect message to specified set of targets (each of which can be another reflector, or a final target timeline)
We all know of and use a system that does this at massive scale: E-mail w/forwarding and mailing lists. If you really wanted to (though it'd be extremely inefficient) you can do this with off the shelf mail-servers and other e-mail software. Using mail servers as messaging middleware might sound weird (and there are certainly better alternatives today), but it works just fine.
At Twitter scale there's certainly enough savings to be made from figuring various obvious and not so obvious optimizations (off the top of my head: for some of the users with the really extremely follower counts, it may make sense not to push their messages, but to push them to caches and weave them in dynamically) to justify the salaries of a few software developers to cut down on hosting and ops costs, but the basic problem is not hard.
And Twitters core message exchange functionality is conceptually extremely simple.
You need to be able to take a message, and put it into the set of targets, T.
Problem is T can be "unreasonably big". E.g. millions of followers. Solution? If something is too big, see if you can divide the problem. Split T into smaller chunks t1..tn, and distribute them. If those chunks are still too large, split them again.
This reduces your problem to figuring out how to insert and remove and balance a tree, and how to process two kinds of message deliveries: Insert into timeline or reflect message to specified set of targets (each of which can be another reflector, or a final target timeline)
We all know of and use a system that does this at massive scale: E-mail w/forwarding and mailing lists. If you really wanted to (though it'd be extremely inefficient) you can do this with off the shelf mail-servers and other e-mail software. Using mail servers as messaging middleware might sound weird (and there are certainly better alternatives today), but it works just fine.
At Twitter scale there's certainly enough savings to be made from figuring various obvious and not so obvious optimizations (off the top of my head: for some of the users with the really extremely follower counts, it may make sense not to push their messages, but to push them to caches and weave them in dynamically) to justify the salaries of a few software developers to cut down on hosting and ops costs, but the basic problem is not hard.
I'd like to learn more about this. Any links/ resources you'd care to share ?
I tried Googling reflectors but nothing relevant turns up.
I tried Googling reflectors but nothing relevant turns up.
> I mostly agree, but the scale of what Twitter is doing technically is very different.
If anything, Twitter's operation is significantly easier.
If anything, Twitter's operation is significantly easier.
In what sense? Technically? Business? Why is easier?
WhatsApp also appears, at the moment, to have a much simpler business model - you buy it. No advertising technology, no audience/data teams and, probably most significantly, no sales team to go out and get people to use the platform. And no big agency handholding people, no data scientists, no customer success account managers. I'd be curious to see what the breakdown is between tech and sales at Twitter.
That business model is almost certainly out the window after the Facebook acquisition. They renewed everyone's license automatically, and are probably going to remove it entirely.
Agreed - but this is about the number of employees based on their original business model, not what the future holds.
They renewed licenses before the acquisition
Number of employees doesn't scale up with the number of messages hitting queues.
No those acres of employees at Twitter are showing each other powerpoint presentations, ordering lunch for each other, and subdividing again and again tiny slivers of functionality into more and more product management teams, none of whom have sufficient authority to make any material improvement to the product.
No those acres of employees at Twitter are showing each other powerpoint presentations, ordering lunch for each other, and subdividing again and again tiny slivers of functionality into more and more product management teams, none of whom have sufficient authority to make any material improvement to the product.
I can't you upvote more than one time, unfortunately. I can't speak for Twitter, but this is very true of many companies. As they grow, they start structuring the product development into multiple verticals with specific specializations like "UX design", "graphic design", "user engagement", "backend team", "frontend team", "devops team" and so on, but they fail in creating enough horizontal cross-contamination and the central direction gets weaker and weaker; the teams start to segregate and blame each other (frontend team says that backend team is providing them with bad apis, devops team complain that backend team is using too many different technologies, ux team complain that graphic design hasn't followed their advices, etc.), and many meetings are setup to solve these conflicts, and to implement new processes and new information workflows that are ever more complex (and thus slow) to make sure that everyone is useful. The end result is that product development gets slower and slower; theoretically, the end result should be that releases have superior quality (when you eventually get around making one), but it's hard to justify the differential costs compared to shipping fast and iterating.
>If 10000 Twitter users with 1000 followers each send a tweet, that's 10000000 messages hitting queues.
if your system design is actually done that way, i.e. that that amount of actual msgs, in one shape or another, hitting actual queues... well, you would definitely inflicted "scale" onto your system. It is like for any powerful data system there is always possible to make a cartesian query that will kill it :)
if your system design is actually done that way, i.e. that that amount of actual msgs, in one shape or another, hitting actual queues... well, you would definitely inflicted "scale" onto your system. It is like for any powerful data system there is always possible to make a cartesian query that will kill it :)
How else would you process notifications, etc?
Well, you can do write fanout, or you can do read fanout.
But at some point you will need to send a push notification to my devices. You're going to do that in the same process that is reflecting the message to all recipients?
You've "inflicted scale" but with constraints that makes it reasonable to handle:
As long as you first write the tweet to a durable canonical datastore, you can recover from the loss of any queue for individual users by re-processing the timelines of the accounts they follow. Hence you don't need those queues to be particularly durable. You can afford to cache a lot of data in memory, and write compressed updates to disk lazily. How durable you make the system is a tradeoff between the frequency of node failure and the cost of recovering from it vs. the cost of more nodes to handle lower write rates.
The alternative is to pull, but then you inflict polling costs + a lot of caching hassle.
As long as you first write the tweet to a durable canonical datastore, you can recover from the loss of any queue for individual users by re-processing the timelines of the accounts they follow. Hence you don't need those queues to be particularly durable. You can afford to cache a lot of data in memory, and write compressed updates to disk lazily. How durable you make the system is a tradeoff between the frequency of node failure and the cost of recovering from it vs. the cost of more nodes to handle lower write rates.
The alternative is to pull, but then you inflict polling costs + a lot of caching hassle.
I'm sure you can take a guess as to what Twitter employees do, what with the ad platform, firehouse access, APIs, infrastructure, frontends, celebrity management, support, and then the fact that it's a giant company, so HR, marketing, sales, finance...
I mean, it's obvious. And WA isn't necessarily a replicable model for all companies.
I mean, it's obvious. And WA isn't necessarily a replicable model for all companies.
Several SF tech companies have been polluted by former investment bankers. I presume pushing paper and face time have become even more important.
Not to mention Twitter got a lot of its early success from making connections to media companies in television.
That may have worked for them, but I suspect it's filled the company with many media-only types in a toxic way similar to how Yahoo got hurt by thinking of themselves as only a media/ads company. That killed them against Google, who as Paul Graham pointed out, was a company that was still successful in feeling like a startup technology company well after becoming large.
Given Twitter's lack of technology innovations, I'm inclined to think they are more towards Yahoo than they are towards Google.
That may have worked for them, but I suspect it's filled the company with many media-only types in a toxic way similar to how Yahoo got hurt by thinking of themselves as only a media/ads company. That killed them against Google, who as Paul Graham pointed out, was a company that was still successful in feeling like a startup technology company well after becoming large.
Given Twitter's lack of technology innovations, I'm inclined to think they are more towards Yahoo than they are towards Google.
Doesnt anyone think that twitter laying off is an attempt by Dorsey to "streamline" and "focus on core competency" as he takes the official CEO reigns again?
Like he wants to come in with a drop in OPEX such that he has some flexibility with finances by dropping some staff?
Like he wants to come in with a drop in OPEX such that he has some flexibility with finances by dropping some staff?
I agree @amix. More often than not it's asign of poor vision and leadership.
800 million users where? I've never seen anyone using it.
Twitter's third-quarter revenue is expected to be around $560 million USD. WhatsApp is certain to be a major source of revenue for Facebook, but right now it's de minimis.
Well, there goes my weekend/week.
As someone who joined Twitter recently this sucks. I left a great job to come work at Twitter because I believe in what they're building and now a few months in I might be looking again. :-(
To be fair, the first week I was asking myself what all of these people do. I wish the company had been more transparent with this but I understand why they can't start telling people there will be layoffs, people panic and worry like all 4000+ employees are doing now.
Think before you type a rude comment too, most Twitter people read HN and will see it. :-/
As someone who joined Twitter recently this sucks. I left a great job to come work at Twitter because I believe in what they're building and now a few months in I might be looking again. :-(
To be fair, the first week I was asking myself what all of these people do. I wish the company had been more transparent with this but I understand why they can't start telling people there will be layoffs, people panic and worry like all 4000+ employees are doing now.
Think before you type a rude comment too, most Twitter people read HN and will see it. :-/
Also, it's amusing yet disturbing the disconnect.
Just three days before this leak everyone was told we're doing well, we're going to grow and hire more people and build these great new things. They also had a big talk about leaks and then went on to show 4000+ people the full product plans for the next year. Then, sorry, we're firing a bunch of you. Oh yeah, don't leak anything we just told you. :-O
Just three days before this leak everyone was told we're doing well, we're going to grow and hire more people and build these great new things. They also had a big talk about leaks and then went on to show 4000+ people the full product plans for the next year. Then, sorry, we're firing a bunch of you. Oh yeah, don't leak anything we just told you. :-O
> They also had a big talk about leaks and then went on to show 4000+ people the full product plans for the next year. Then, sorry, we're firing a bunch of you. Oh yeah, don't leak anything we just told you. :-O
I find this mindset frankly mind-boggling. I work for a significant corporation, and we recently changed CEOs. The trade press was reporting the change three months in advance; and anyone who cared to know about it on the shop floor probably did. But they didn't tell us ... presumably because it would get leaked. Which it, of course, did anyway. It seems to be almost an unconscious corporate reflex to treat the bulk of your staff like morons.
My feeling about Twitter is that there was an opportunity to seriously monetise it around the moment it started getting serious traction for PR. The celebs had given it critical mass, and Coke and McDonalds had to follow.
Now, however, the shills are basically just given an enormous amount of free advertising space with a not-great premium option on top of that. (A promoted tweet is not as good as an embedded tweet in a 'proper' news outlet, which will be part of the PR package, sold together to a client as advertising-equivalent exposure.)
They could still do something like start charging per tweet per thousand followers for content promoting a specific product or service (a made up back-of-the-fag-packet example, I'm sure there are better ways), of course, but it would be much harder given the expectations that have built up around what the platform is.
EDIT: clarity
I find this mindset frankly mind-boggling. I work for a significant corporation, and we recently changed CEOs. The trade press was reporting the change three months in advance; and anyone who cared to know about it on the shop floor probably did. But they didn't tell us ... presumably because it would get leaked. Which it, of course, did anyway. It seems to be almost an unconscious corporate reflex to treat the bulk of your staff like morons.
My feeling about Twitter is that there was an opportunity to seriously monetise it around the moment it started getting serious traction for PR. The celebs had given it critical mass, and Coke and McDonalds had to follow.
Now, however, the shills are basically just given an enormous amount of free advertising space with a not-great premium option on top of that. (A promoted tweet is not as good as an embedded tweet in a 'proper' news outlet, which will be part of the PR package, sold together to a client as advertising-equivalent exposure.)
They could still do something like start charging per tweet per thousand followers for content promoting a specific product or service (a made up back-of-the-fag-packet example, I'm sure there are better ways), of course, but it would be much harder given the expectations that have built up around what the platform is.
EDIT: clarity
> It seems to be almost an unconscious corporate reflex to treat the bulk of your staff like morons.
My understand is that there are laws about the disclosure of market-moving information make a lot of C-suites paranoid.
The thing is that refusing to answer, or being vague, is itself an answer. The incentives are to lie. If you equivocate, the effect is frequently more destructive because of the amount of rumour and innuendo that builds up.
This is why changes of policy in business and politics are often sudden and contrary to previous promises.
My understand is that there are laws about the disclosure of market-moving information make a lot of C-suites paranoid.
The thing is that refusing to answer, or being vague, is itself an answer. The incentives are to lie. If you equivocate, the effect is frequently more destructive because of the amount of rumour and innuendo that builds up.
This is why changes of policy in business and politics are often sudden and contrary to previous promises.
Ex-Tweep here. You'll probably be fine. You'll probably continue to do meaningful work at twitter. I hope they cut people who have done nothing for a long time, not people who joined recently.
If not, there is a vibrant alumni community who is happy to welcome you and help you network and adjust, even if you were only working at twitter for a week. If you don't find it, email me (in my profile) and I'll help you find it.
Good luck (but you don't need it)!
If not, there is a vibrant alumni community who is happy to welcome you and help you network and adjust, even if you were only working at twitter for a week. If you don't find it, email me (in my profile) and I'll help you find it.
Good luck (but you don't need it)!
> Think before you type a rude comment too, most Twitter people read HN and will see it. :-/
No criticism? Is it bad if I say that they have a very simple product that doesn't need so much people? Is it bad if I say every feature they add they ruin it more? Is it bad if I say I would rather go back to 2010 Twitter?
No criticism? Is it bad if I say that they have a very simple product that doesn't need so much people? Is it bad if I say every feature they add they ruin it more? Is it bad if I say I would rather go back to 2010 Twitter?
I'm talking about rude comments about the intelligent people that work there.
Where do you work, lets compare products/people and the impact the product makes on the world shall we?
Where do you work, lets compare products/people and the impact the product makes on the world shall we?
Engineering team is impressive. Such a website at such scale works very well, I must say I'm amazed (compared to around six years ago when the website was down daily).
Product team: not so much.
Product team: not so much.
I would be grateful if people could now leak what's up with all the racist/misogynist terrorist bullying, which I constantly see when looking at Twitter responses. (I'm sure many would defend Twitter's actions despite getting fired, but there's gotta be a couple ethical people who wanted to seriously act.)
That's called life, it's not unique to Twitter. How would one "leak" such information?
> I'm talking about rude comments about the intelligent people that work there.
There are intelligent people that work at many companies. You should avoid rude comments about people in general. Twitter is not special in this.
> Where do you work, lets compare products/people and the impact the product makes on the world shall we?
This is fairly egotistical. Twitter doesn't solve all problems for the world. It's a great service, but your comment is fairly negative and insulting. Especially for someone that only recently joined.
There are intelligent people that work at many companies. You should avoid rude comments about people in general. Twitter is not special in this.
> Where do you work, lets compare products/people and the impact the product makes on the world shall we?
This is fairly egotistical. Twitter doesn't solve all problems for the world. It's a great service, but your comment is fairly negative and insulting. Especially for someone that only recently joined.
Is there enough demand in the San Francisco area to absorb say 20% of Twitter employees? It always feels like everyone is hiring out there.
Absolutely. And if this is a sign of a few unicorns starting to drop, you're better off being one of the first ones to go than the last.
This is probably a very wise move. 4000 employees is just insane for what they do. Grow wisely.
This is probably a very wise move. 4000 employees is just insane for what they do. Grow wisely.
> 4000 employees is just insane for what they do.
Yes and no. Twitter will make ~$2 Billion in revenue this year (and it's their massive revenue growth that's kept the stock price where it's at). That takes a LOT of sales and marketing people to achieve.
Yes and no. Twitter will make ~$2 Billion in revenue this year (and it's their massive revenue growth that's kept the stock price where it's at). That takes a LOT of sales and marketing people to achieve.
They have over 30 offices so some if not most will be in other offices around the world.
I'd guess that most are in the SF office, but I didn't know that had 29 other offices until 5 seconds ago.
I predicted Twitter would be the next unicorn to cut staff and offices ten days ago (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10300002). To be honest, I didn't think it would happen quite this fast.
But 4K employees, 2K engineers to support Twitter? If they were still in a rapid growth/innovation phase, perhaps they could get away with this. But rapid growth is over.
But 4K employees, 2K engineers to support Twitter? If they were still in a rapid growth/innovation phase, perhaps they could get away with this. But rapid growth is over.
zer0defex(2)
But how many engineers if they were still on Ruby? Perhaps they can drop Scala for Erlang and get down to 100 engineers?
I wonder if this will have an effect on private equity for startups immediately, and have an effect on what some see as a VC bubble. Twitter was often hailed as an example of a company that didn't need - not just profit - even a monetisation strategy, because growth! Ads! User data! You're the product! It's becoming more obvious that this may be a hollow way to speculate about returns.
Is it true that they will - to further cut down costs - also limit the number of characters per tweet to 72?
Its not about Twitter. The whole economy is shrinking because people have taken the idea of sustainability to heart.
Our economic system needs revision to be able to handle a non-growth mode.
Our economic system needs revision to be able to handle a non-growth mode.
> costs and expenses totaled $633 million
WTF do they spend that much money on?
WTF do they spend that much money on?
Honestly, this is really bad news for Twitter. A tech company is all about finding and retaining top technical talent. That's what enables you to "build fast teams that learn even faster".
As far as I'm concerned, I would not want to go to work for Twitter. Whenever I hear about layoffs, I think of mismanagement. When the managers have run the ship aground to the extent that capable engineers that were hired to build product are now going to loose their jobs, there have been some huge errors and missteps. Getting back from that is going to be very difficult, and imagine now trying to attract technical talent to a company that has just cut technical staff; the best and brightest are going to have better options so Twitter is going to be at a disadvantage in the general labor market. This means they will have a harder time finding people, keeping people, staffing projects. And they will have a harder time completing the projects they do have and with enough speed, creativity and quality to compete against startups and other companies with more agility, motivation and access to better workers.
As far as I'm concerned, I would not want to go to work for Twitter. Whenever I hear about layoffs, I think of mismanagement. When the managers have run the ship aground to the extent that capable engineers that were hired to build product are now going to loose their jobs, there have been some huge errors and missteps. Getting back from that is going to be very difficult, and imagine now trying to attract technical talent to a company that has just cut technical staff; the best and brightest are going to have better options so Twitter is going to be at a disadvantage in the general labor market. This means they will have a harder time finding people, keeping people, staffing projects. And they will have a harder time completing the projects they do have and with enough speed, creativity and quality to compete against startups and other companies with more agility, motivation and access to better workers.
When the creators of Bootstrap framework left Twitter, I took that as a bad sign. Creative people easily get bored and need to challenges.
With Jack coming back as CEO, I don't necessarily agree with layoffs overall being bad. He could have a solid plan and reorganizing and prune workers who perhaps have atrophy from lack of excitement or whatnot can be healthy - even though surely disappointing and upsetting to some.
With Jack coming back as CEO, I don't necessarily agree with layoffs overall being bad. He could have a solid plan and reorganizing and prune workers who perhaps have atrophy from lack of excitement or whatnot can be healthy - even though surely disappointing and upsetting to some.
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When Twitter got going, RSS was marred by political infighting:
http://www.smashcompany.com/technology/rss-has-been-damaged-...
And that is part of the reason why walled-gardens like Twitter sometimes do well. Sometimes open technologies are crippled by politics. Sometimes centralized decision making is faster, and can get more innovative stuff out the door. It took many years for specifications like Atom to mature. Meanwhile Twitter developed a huge eco-system of 3rd party apps.
But there is a counter-argument. Twitter later killed off much of the eco-system of 3rd party apps. And that suggests the weakness of central decision making. No one has the authority to kill RSS. And that suggests the strength of decentralized decision making.
But it seems clear, when an idea is young and immature, centralized decision making often has a speed advantage over what committees the industry sets up to try to work out a specification.
http://www.smashcompany.com/technology/rss-has-been-damaged-...
And that is part of the reason why walled-gardens like Twitter sometimes do well. Sometimes open technologies are crippled by politics. Sometimes centralized decision making is faster, and can get more innovative stuff out the door. It took many years for specifications like Atom to mature. Meanwhile Twitter developed a huge eco-system of 3rd party apps.
But there is a counter-argument. Twitter later killed off much of the eco-system of 3rd party apps. And that suggests the weakness of central decision making. No one has the authority to kill RSS. And that suggests the strength of decentralized decision making.
But it seems clear, when an idea is young and immature, centralized decision making often has a speed advantage over what committees the industry sets up to try to work out a specification.
Twitter may be worse for developers (more's the pity, I was at Chirp in 2010), but it's a vastly better platform in terms of content discovery, curation and consumption. I fail to see how any amount of cohesion from the RSS community could have overcome that, even in a world of simple, ubiquitous pub-sub, or whatever ideal one might imagine for syndication technology. I'd be really happy to hear how that battle could have been won, though.
Content discovery and curation for RSS were the issues that startups like Technorati focused on. Their failures were partly failures of management. My startup wanted to build its business using Technorati data, circa 2006, but their sales strategy was bizarre. The API was supposedly pay-for-use, and I was happy to pay, but instead of offering an automated system for creating an api account, they asked that you write to their sales team. I wrote to their sales team at least a dozen times, and I tracked down the personal email address of the CEO, but no one ever responded to me. I was convinced then that they could have made a lot of money if they had made it easier for developers like me to give them money. But they made it impossible. And now it seems they gave up on RSS aggregation. They seem to be in a different business now:
http://technorati.com/
http://technorati.com/
Ha, similar stories - I'm aware of Technorati, they really should have been the firehose of their day (I guess Wordpress.com is the closest thing now). I was building a feed reader that would cluster conversations around the blogosphere so you'd get a better sense of the daily zeitgeist than just following quotes or trackbacks. Which brings me to the more direct comparison - comments and trackbacks to replies and retweets. Finding new content branching from what you're already reading, and frankly the experience was just clunky and terrible compared to Twitter. And that's assuming you've even _found_ a feed reader and subscribed to some feeds. And even if _that_ was easy, where are you yourself publishing? Every task was harder, and only Tumblr has really come close to replicating Twitter's level of integration on a blog-like platform.
Tons of Twitter's best features were stumbled upon by accident, but a lot of their decisions, especially around limiting third-party clients, were justified in their minds by their user testing that showed just how confusing it was to locate and install a useful Twitter client and sign up for an account. The control they had allowed them to reduce friction to nearly zero. For anyone like Technorati to replicate that with open standards, they would have just exercised the same level of ownership.
This is all a shame, I'm sure there's some alternative universe in which longform content has been saved from invasive advertising by a frictionless, open system. And I certainly don't think Twitter is going to come up with a particularly interesting or successful business model. But I open my Twitter app more than my feed reader, and I think I'm happier for it.
Tons of Twitter's best features were stumbled upon by accident, but a lot of their decisions, especially around limiting third-party clients, were justified in their minds by their user testing that showed just how confusing it was to locate and install a useful Twitter client and sign up for an account. The control they had allowed them to reduce friction to nearly zero. For anyone like Technorati to replicate that with open standards, they would have just exercised the same level of ownership.
This is all a shame, I'm sure there's some alternative universe in which longform content has been saved from invasive advertising by a frictionless, open system. And I certainly don't think Twitter is going to come up with a particularly interesting or successful business model. But I open my Twitter app more than my feed reader, and I think I'm happier for it.
Scaling twitter is fucking overrated if you look at the work engineers at WhatsApp did. There's a reason why a whatsapp engineer is worth 100 more than the average twitter engineer.
The twitter tears are flowing in this thread
The twitter tears are flowing in this thread
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