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A Customer-Driven Business Model For Twitter (jeffreifman.com)
reifman writes: As revolving door of Twitter executives makes headlines and its $100+ million quarterly losses continue, it's not clear the company will survive the year without being acquired for a quarter of its offering price. The solution for Twitter's business challenges could be to adopt an engaging feature rich subscriber model that reaffirms its status as the platform of a global democratic communication hub. Here are fifteen ideas for Twitter to transform into a profitable user-centered business including integration of open source Signal for secure phone calls and direct messaging, Stellar for payments and domain mapping and blog hosting with your feed front and center.
me neither
Not being a shitty service catering to every whiny shitbag SJW on the planet would be a good start to recovery.
What do they spend these millions on? Taking ludes on a superyacht in the Bahamas?
It is just a service that takes in bits of plaintext and spits them out to multiple users, most of them are using an app so no huge bandwidth cost (although still not as efficient as it could be) there is no valid technical reason for it to cost 100's of millions. A system like Twitter could be completely decentralised and P2P based and nobody would have to spend any extra to run it, the corporation behind Twitter doesn't serve any purpose as far as I can tell.
"global democratic communication hub" my ass.
It's an online place for celebrities to primp and preen. Charge B.o.B 20 bucks to post about flat earth. Charge Neil deGrasse Tyson and his nephew 20 bucks to feed the troll.
Or go away.
Unfortunately this is exactly what twitter is not. Since it has started to enforce its own policy more and more as time goes on it could be considered anything BUT democratic. It's not like the people are voting for the policy.
Who writes like that? Did they ever go to school?
I have no clue how they can not be making money with a user base that huge and advertising on it. I'm utterly baffled. It's like the management want it to fail so it can be sold in an acquisition for far less than it's actual value to the people they rub shoulders with while they inflate their own salaries by huge factors with no comeuppance or risk to themselves personally.. ...
Oh, right.
Give Twitter's servers a firey death and be done with it. It's always been a shitty thing with no point and yes, if it shut down tomorrow, not a single thing of value would be lost.
And what would the advertising agencies (ie, Twitter's customers) get for subscribing to them? Or have they been confusing their customers and their product again?
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
Make it a "pay for play" platform. The second they start selling subscriptions for use is the second they start dying, and competitors snap up those leaving. It's simply not a valuable enough service provided.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
I wish the guy said he paid $85/mo for cell service up front - would have demonstrates his disconnect from reality right there.
$10/mo for Twitter would be $10 too much. I've already quit reading any Twitter feeds (noise to signal makes it a poor use of time) and just use a free HootSuite account to schedule enough of my own tweets to keep my marketing folks off my back. (I wonder if Twitter's traffic would drop on half if it disappeared from job responsibilities.)
Its hard to contain or spin changes to terms and conditions on users to fit global standards for jurisdictions that have no freedoms.
Users have a lot of traditional computing services for "work" or other than work activities to keep communications bland.
A walled garden is great for a set of users with the same views who have to live under their theocracy, monarchy, court systems or repressive governments.
The more a brand been about about open, free communications hopes to shape, contain, report, track freedom of speech, the harder it gets to attract interesting, creative people.
Once the tend setters feel they are been herded into something chilling they will move on. The herd of users will follow to more free platforms that respect their views and thoughts.
So what can future web 2.0 and social media creators learn?
If you start your company in the USA, allow freedom of speech and let users speak their minds. The rest of the world can opt to join in or not.
Users globally already have their own free gov sanctioned web 2.0 sites that are full of tracked accounts swapping everyday content.
Once a brand clamps down on freedom of speech, can the user base from nations with no freedoms be a useful long term user base?
Sell the amazing role of freedom of speech to the world, trying to keep censors happy just makes users look for any better platform.
Also open the platform to other people and OS's. Having your brand all over brands hardware and software is a plus.
As for profit, good to have that in place to that during the design stage, ready to go, not as a new project years later.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Twitter could easily be run by the government as a public service.
There are a lot of arguments you can make about whether OUR government is responsible enough,
but in my opinion, Twitter would run a lot better if the need to turn a profit was off the table.
Twitter has been taken over by public relations firms, minor celebrities, and social justice warriors. Besides simple trolling, insults, and social signaling, its contents consist largely of republished headlines and self promotion. People aren't interesting in having that bullshit pushed on them in 160 character chunks, and they are certainly not going to pay for it. That's why Twitter is pretty much doomed.
...and the resulting company will be known as YouTwitFace.
Q: What does the "B." in Benoit B. Mandelbrot stand for? A: Benoit B. Mandelbrot
"The solution for Twitter's business challenges could be to adopt an engaging feature rich subscriber model that reaffirms its status as the platform of a global democratic communication hub."
As long as fucking Twitter fails to control it's SJW employee population and try to enforce its own internal 'policies', it will continue to lose money. Period. We're getting sick and tired of weak-ass Social Justice Warriors and their bullshit low-rank purely-for-idiots nonsense.
Are you listening, Twitter?
The US gov recently deployed an extensive botnet onto twitter designed to break up groups on Twitter. Looks like it was a little too successful and is causing the business to fail. There is also speculation of tampering with traffic too, but no solid evidence yet.
Yep i didnt understand myspace nor facebook nor twiter. No content, only ad laden mix between irc ytalk and icq. Thx but fuck no...
Yet another service which made billions when it went IPO but which nonetheless has no real business model.
I mean, why do people keep valuing these things as being worth zillions of dollars when they have no meaningful revenue? It's not like this is the first one of these.
These things were never worth billions, and then all of a sudden people start to realize that, and everyone panics and goes all boo hoo ... on behalf of those of us who always thought Twitter was just another overhyped stock ... ha ha.
That $18 billion IPO? That was always bullshit. And, as usual, the big financial institutions cashed out on day one, and the poor schmucks left holding the bag now can't understand why they're not making huge profits.
I'm sorry, but if the stock market is going to continue to ignore basics like revenue, I'm going to keep laughing when people realize they've been conned.
The IPO of a tech company like Twitter is a fucking ponzi scheme, and this was entirely predictable.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Twitter's single biggest mistake, in my humble opinion, was overlooking ride sharing. I don't want to use a paid ride sharing service where I don't know the people, the driver, or what kind of music I will hear during the ride. I would prefer to twit my ride and go with someone I know something about.
They can monetize this quite easily by charging the regulated Taxi industry a small percentage when a twitter user summons their service and pays through their Twitter account. You don't always have a twitter friend nearby when you need a ride. It would be a shame to see a company with so much momentum and promise fail due to hubris.
Success without humility is an indulgence in arrogance
"an engaging feature rich subscriber model that reaffirms its status as the platform of a global democratic communication hub"
FOAD
The cool thing was when I heard it live and immediately Googled the word to find zero results.
It occurred to me that anyone who attended the recording before it aired might have of the joke already. Google spiders watch certain sites and index a post within minutes. Try it the next time you see a unique Slashdot headline or comment string..
Days later there were some bloggers using it and someone even registered it as a half-joke.