Slashdot Mirror
Facebook Nearly Added Twitter To Friends List
nandemoari writes "It seems the world's most popular social networking site was just moments away from acquiring another — and few of us ever knew about it. A Facebook executive has revealed that a planned takeover of Twitter only fell apart because of a disagreement over stock valuations.
Despite the rather miserable economy, Facebook is still looking to buy out other firms and says it could make a billion dollars a year from advertising.
Peter Thiel, a venture capitalist who put up some of the money behind Facebook, discussed the deal in a Business Week interview.
Thiel says the two sides agreed a $500 million purchase price and that Twitter would receive the payment in Facebook stock rather than cash — which is a common solution in large takeovers where there simply isn't the money available for a buyout."
Go on then.
I could say I can make eleventy dollars a furlong from my blog; that doesn't make it true. Only a dribbling moron would base a business decision (such as exchanging their website for stock) on such a claim.
http://twitter.com/onion2k
So much money for something to trivial and useless...
Makes me feel kind of sick...
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
Everyone is so hot for Facebook these days, but a year or two ago it was all anyone could do to not jizz themselves over MySpace. These things come and go, websites get hot, then fade away.
I just got a message from MSN groups that some group I had subscribed to a few years ago was going to be deleted. No big deal, I've moved on and found other places where I can post intelligent comments and engage in lively banter.
There is so little that is static about the Web. Facebook is right to strike now and make as much money as they can while the sun shines, because a year or two from now they will be a bad memory.
Hmmm?
Facebook? Or my blog? ;)
http://twitter.com/onion2k
sure facebook could make a billion of advertisements, but will they? and how much extra value would twitter add to the facebook advertisement driven plan? I follow twitter on my phone - i see no ads, and i seldom click on any on the web-based facebook. But, even if I did, twitter does not seem, to me at least, to conform easily into an ad-driven site, especially when people would be using it to update their tweet from their phone.
-- All this knowledge is giving me a raging brainer.
No matter how trivial and useless it may be, a lot people use the site. If a lot of people use the site, corporations want to advertise there. Thus the money thing....
Tweeter or Shiver or whatever the hell that inane "Now I'm on the bus and it's raining" service is called...
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
Okay, first a disclaimer: I'm not a marketing expert with five hundred years experience and zero percent APR. I am a graphic designer, however. Here's the thing about advertising revenue. There's payment for the ad to be displayed, and there's a return on investment. The cost to run an advertising campaign can be from a few hundred dollars to ten million dollars, depending on medium, placement, demographic, etc. And almost always, the revenue stream does grow from a well-done marketing campaign. But there is never a way to prove causation. That is to say, an external factor could have accounted for all the extra business that cannot be accounted for. There is not, and never has been, a direct link between advertising and improved revenue. Of course, there will be people who try to tell you otherwise -- and it's conventional wisdom that it does help. What nobody can predict though is impact. I can't say with a much confidence that if I invest 1 million dollars in a marketing campaign I will see a 3 million dollar increase in gross revenues over the next 12 months. Improve, yes, how much -- who knows.
My point is this -- nobody who knows what they're talking about will quote numbers, not this way at any rate. A billion dollars is a pipe dream.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
...Twitter would receive the payment in Facebook stock rather than cash -- which is a common solution in large takeovers where there simply isn't any intrinsic value in either company
There, fixed that for you
What is it about about your iPhone, Wii, BlackBerry or power locks on your car that aren't trivial?
Welcome to the economy where triviality is worth trillions of dollars a year.
52 52'23" W 47 32'07" N
Last time I checked, Twitter was free to use and does not have advertising. In other words, its income cannot be anything more than a trivial amount. It's true value is probably a lot closer to $0 than to $500 million.
This is how the dot.com boom of the 90's happened. Users != revenue or profitability.
Twitter *is* the poor man's Facebook. Whenever I introduce Twitter to people and they ask me what it is--I reply, "It basically only gives you the option of making status updates like Facebook, and that's pretty much it."
Twitter is a bit more professional for updating coworkers, relatives, friends, and generally everyone by the single fact that you're also not able to look at last weekend's crazy drunk fest. I don't understand why Facebook would want to take over Twitter, except for the fact of spreading around more ownership and advertisements.
The most perfidious way of harming a cause consists of defending it deliberately with faulty arguments. - Nietzche
Is that Peter "there's absolutely no bubble in technology" Thiel? Good luck with that...
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Go on then.
I'm pretty sure they're referring to the amounts of money they'll get if/when they sell all the users' private data to those online pharmacies and the likes.
98.5% of companies got this takeover wrong. Are you smarter than Facebook? Take our survey to find out!
90% of the peopel that use twitter never go to the site they use the API to post and read the messages through an application.
Any ad's would not be seen unless they start figuring they will simply spam all the users as ad tweets.
The next day twitter will have no users.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/12/03/why-twitter-turned-down-facebook/
Who would want facebook stock? It's like being bought with sub-prime mortgages as the payment. "They're worth it, I swear!"
For context, click Parent.
hey, did you know they beam radio and television signals out in the air for free?
and its an profitable venture
twitter, as a new kind of media, is simply in the stages of establishing itself
google also was heavily used and made no revenue for a long time
once a media's userbase is large and stable enough, advertising can be injected, and lots of cash can be made
the media business is not like manufacturing, like making and selling cupcakes, where you spend a little money and immediately get a little money back
its more like mining gold: you have a huge upfront investment in infrastructure, but then, over time, the initial investment begins to pay off, in dribs and drabs at first, but then to an increasingly louder roar, for a very long time
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
What is it about about your iPhone, Wii, BlackBerry or power locks on your car that aren't trivial? Welcome to the economy where triviality is worth trillions of dollars a year.
My what?
Sorry, don't own any of that junk. Power locks... that's funny, I haven't locked a door in years.
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
all they are doing is trying to increase the market value of their company before getting bought up.
Read radical news here
'... all the users' private data ...
Private data? On Facebook?
What are you smoking? ;^)
From TFS:
Y'know, I'm getting tired of this... Yeah, the economy is bad - but life goes on people. You won't survive the bad economy, let alone grow when times turn good again, if you just circle the wagons and try to ride it out.
I think there was a (mostly popped) bubble of speculative investment in Web 2.0 type companies, where VCs would throw money at anything with "social media" in the title. Around 2006-2008 it didn't take a lot of effort or a very plausible-sounding business plan to get backing in that space.
It's less visible in valuations than the late-90s bubble was, because this time around most of the companies never IPOd, and there were fewer to begin with. But I guess we could speculate as to their current values. Bebo was acquired for $850m; what's it worth today? What about Skype; is it still worth the $2.5b that it was acquired for? Many of the companies that did IPO in the past few years are down much more than the stock-market average; e.g. VMWare is down 80%.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Go on then.
I could say I can make eleventy dollars a furlong from my blog; that doesn't make it true. Only a dribbling moron would base a business decision (such as exchanging their website for stock) on such a claim.
Twitter doesn't know how to make money either. Twitter's best hope is to be bought by some other company so the owners can cash out. Of course, if they're bought by someone who only makes "theoretical" money like Facebook, and only paid in stock, they won't be any better off. However, if they never get bought out by anyone, their theoretical billions of dollars will never materialize into real money, because their service is very difficult to monetize.
Facebook is at least still mostly accessed via web browser, so there's the opportunity for ad revenue there. Twitter, on the other hand, is mostly accessed via small mobile phone apps, where it's much more difficult to advertise without causing the users so much pain that they end up dropping the service.
A website with millions of daily visitors has some non-zero intrinsic value, even without considering any potential revenue streams, just due to the fact that there are a lot of people out there who like soapboxes, and something with millions of visitors has value as a good soapbox.
I would personally pay at least $50 for Twitter if nobody else outbid me, just so I could own it and fuck around with it. Probably other wealthy people would pay more for similar vanity or having-fun-with-it reasons.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
...'tis easier to blame than to improve.
Related to facebook.... (I won't bother posting in my journal since i won't get the opportunity/fact of being presented anyway...)
"Facebook users suffer viral surge "
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7918839.stm
Once a frackingain, facebook needs to get off its ass and create a better, more public, more user-controlled anti-rogue apps procedure. It's NOT enough to "refer to the user security/privacy guide.
facebook's rank policy of allowing any app you add ALL ACCESS to your profile, friends, and such is specious and set up for sheer access to advert revenues. There should be granular access control for EACH AND EVERY APP USERS ADD. NO EXCUSES.
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
As inane as it is, you have to admit that when you have Senators and Representatives in DC , it's worth money.
Furby's were inane too.
It doesn't matter; bridges traditionally aren't built with doors. Having a troll living under them makes them inherently secure.
Twitter and the twits that use it can be used to do incredibly powerful data mining and forecasting. If you just analyze the twits coming in (I like to refer both to users and their messages by this term, it is slightly confusing but makes sense in its own way - and often, the difference is unimportant) then you can find out all kinds of things, like (to borrow from your example) where in a city it is raining, or where automobile accidents have occurred, or where the police are beating someone to death, or where the police are being beaten to death, or whatever the fuck is going on! Forget predicting flu outbreak with google, that is way too slow and has far too little resolution. :)
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I think that's what he was implying by the power locks bit...
Well thanks for correcting that - I shudder to think what would've happened if I continued to not know about annoying internet thing A's thoughts on annoying internet thing B.
sic transit gloria mundi
I'm not sure if it's worth the $500m price being thrown around, but if Twitter's only goal was to make some money without totally alienating its users, it doesn't seem that hard. Put a few ads on the website, and even if only 10% of users go to the website, it's still quite a few. Offer a few minor premium services for $5/mo. Etc.
It's not really that hard to make money at Web 2.0 (or even Web 1.0). The companies that fail are the ones that try to exploit it too greedily and drive off their users. I mean, Craigslist is probably a poster boy for the totally minimalist style of monetization (i.e. do it as little as possible), and they still pull in a good $200m a year or so.
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sorry, i had to take a dump.
"Hegelians, who love a synthesis, will probably conclude that he wears a wig." - Bertrand Russell
Can't they take the stock, then immediately sell it? (I have no idea how stocks work)
Emphasis mine.
"At that point, Facebook offered Twitter around $100 million in cash, with the rest of the deal in stock. Facebook said it would come up with the $100 million by selling more of its stock to outside investors. Twitter agreed on one condition: that the Facebook stock it received be valued at the price company shares garnered on the open market. Facebook blinked and the deal talks ended. "They wanted to buy us but there was not much conviction," the person says."
"Analytics Web site Compete shows Twitter has 6 million unique users, up from around 800,000 last year. Yet Twitter doesn't generate any revenue, despite its surge in popularity."
And finally the best quote of all from Portfolio's interview with Twitter's CEO:
I can't imagine how many times you've been asked, "But how will you make money?"
We will make money, and I can't say exactly how, because we can't predict exactly what's going to work.
Would you mind citing your source for that "90% of Twitter users use the API" fact?
The deal only fell apart because... they did not agree on the price. Bummer!
\u262D = \u5350
> Taking a shit > Boy I'm constipated > Damn, this log just won't come out! > It's finally crowning... > OUT, it's finally OUT!!! > Wiping my ass > Flushing the toilet Anonymous Coward is relieved to have finished pooping.
Don't forget using Twit data mining to determine facility usage!
DEMETRIUS: Villain, what hast thou done?
AARON: Villain, I have done thy mother.
Shakespeare invents 'your mom'
What happens to all these internet sites when reality finally sets in and its realized that for the most part internet advertising is over valued. At some point advertisers will have to cut back on marketing that is over priced and in my opinion largely inaffective. Just like Chrysler cancelled their advertising campaign with Tiger, and BoA won't be the name of the new Yankee Stadium. Nobody bought a Chrysler who wouldn't have already bought one just because tiger is seen in a commercial driving one. Certainly not enough extra profit can be tied to him to justify his contract.
10% of a lot is still a lot and most of the 90% at least occasionally hit the website. As a network those 90% add a lot of value even if they are not advertised to directly, and as the system gets more mainstream it will also get more webbased, so that 10% could grow to 20 or even 50%.
additionally twitter ads can be very targeted .'. profitable
IranAir Flight 655 never forget!
Are you disputing their figure or just saying you don't believe any numbers anyone says? What's your point?
That's the combination on my luggage!
exactly. i just wish i could come up with a trivial and inane idea that would make ME rich. remember the guy with the pet rock? i'd have to say the iphone app store is full of pet rocks. sure, bash the people that use/buy these things, but the developer is laughing all the way to the bank...
Furbys were inane too.
And look what happened to them...
Fads are great if you think you will be able to capitalize quickly on your investment, but you don't want to be stuck holding the bag when it's all over. Web fads are even more volatile because, unlike tangible goods, there is no "collector's market" after popularity wanes. All you have is a defunct, devalued service that can no longer command the ad revenue to support itself.
I'm always positive; it's my nature.
"The actual value of a company or an asset based on an underlying perception of its true value including all aspects of the business, in terms of both tangible and intangible factors."
A site with millions of daily visitors has a non-zero intangible value.
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Portfolio's interview with Twitter's CEO:
I can't imagine how many times you've been asked, "But how will you make money?"
We will make money, and I can't say exactly how, because we can't predict exactly what's going to work.
Twitter adopts a new user policy: "You hereby grant Twitter a perpetual, irrevocable license to sublicense, retain, publish, edit, use, alter, fondle, misrepresent, [...] any information you tweet, your personal information stored in user settings, your IP address(es), your pictures, your mother, your car [...], by breathing you accept the above terms."
That's how they'll make money. It's how Facebook "makes" money.
of a misleading title.
I thought they almost added twitter as an app in facebook.
weinersmith
http://twitter.com/public_timeline
Although it looks like about 75% of users are using the API.
Follow me
If you figure that between FaceBook and Twitter users you've got the largest collection of narcissists with the shortest attention spans.
I am not positive, but...
1) Even if Facebook were a public company, there may be a limitation on how soon they can sell (e.g. similar to selling limits after an IPO).
2) Since Facebook isn't sold publically, at best I believe they could sell to other insiders, but even that is limited.
Get it right? Hardly. Facebook is no different than MySpace and other johnny-come-latelys that define the internet.
When you make sweeping changes to your site and receive nothing but criticism from the majority of users (think less Terms of Service fiasco, more "we changed the layout to serve more advertisements" fiasco), it is obvious you are on the outs and hit your peak a while back. In sites that are "up-and-coming," those kind of big changes are welcomed as the, "We're getting bigger and better," scenario instead of f-ups.
Being popular with the older crowd doesn't give you staying power (typically means you are going to stagger on like a zombie for a while until these newer members move on). How well did AOL do with the green Internet users this decade? I'd say the acceptance of Facebook by greater numbers is the ultimate sign that the original members already moved on and the death knell has begun.
Have you ever tried clicking the thumbs down button under on of the ads?
I did for one of the ads and now it's the ONLY AD I SEE!
Facebook has a sick sense of humor.
Facebook is at least still mostly accessed via web browser
I don't use facebook or twitter but whenever my sister uses my wifi to access facebook her phone goes nuts with sms messages. Being a twit, she is right in the target demographic for both applications so a merger would seem to make sense.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
I thought the messages were twits, and the users were twats.
When you make sweeping changes to your site and receive nothing but criticism from the majority of users (think less Terms of Service fiasco, more "we changed the layout to serve more advertisements" fiasco), it is obvious you are on the outs and hit your peak a while back. In sites that are "up-and-coming," those kind of big changes are welcomed as the, "We're getting bigger and better," scenario instead of f-ups.
I would argue that people get in a tizzy about these changes because they feel personally invested in Facebook and care about it a great deal since it's part of their daily lives. People who are apathetic to a product or service wouldn't raise such a furor.
No, I'm not a Facebook shill, but I find it enviable that they have a user base that's so clearly passionate about their service.
Why doesn't Facebook just write their own Twitter like system? Fritter, AboutFace, Yadda-Yadda, Blah-Blah, or some such.