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No One Wants To Buy Twitter (theverge.com)
At one point, it seemed that many were interested in purchasing the micro-blogging social platform (which now calls itself a news service) Twitter, but its fate is quickly drying up. Salesforce (which couldn't buy LinkedIn) showed the most interest in Twitter, but this week its CEO Marc Benioff said his company has "walked away" from making a bid to buy it. The Verge sums up the situation: If you're keeping track, that's now... pretty much everyone who's said they're not interested in buying Twitter. Neither Google nor Disney plan to bid on Twitter, despite reports saying both were interested. Recode says that Apple is likely also out of the picture. And Verizon immediately dismissed speculation that it was considering a bid. Facebook is also said to be uninterested, according to CNBC. And while Microsoft's name has been tossed around, no one seems to think the acquisition would make any sense for an increasingly enterprise-focused company.The situation is so bad that as soon as the news of Salesforce withdrawing its name from the bidding race broke, its stock quickly went up by 6 percent, while Twitter's stock registered a 6 percent drop.
Why does Twitter need to be bought by anyone? What's with this endless obsession about mergers and acquisitions and consolidation and stock market riches the west has?
Let Twitter do Twitter.
While distributed social media (like Diaspora) has been an idea floating around for a while, something like the 'twittersphere' is where it could be most useful, having multiple interlinked 'twitterverses' where different rules on acceptability apply. The SJW's can have some, and the anti-politically-correct can run their own free-for-all zones, and so on. What is then needed is the distributed indexing and so on. But for a technology which is basically a glorified indexed array of char[140]'s, it has little that isn't easily copied in terms of functionality. Given that most users' number of followers is in the 100s, a simple PHP script spewing out RSS feeds is almost good enough for that task (and already way more complex than it needs to be). An aggregator simply needs to get a few KB of text from a few hundred URIs every few minutes, and then compose it into an aggregated feed. The trouble with modern social media is that they need to overcomplicate it in order to turn it into something they control. Then they need to give it away free, figure out how to make money from it, and so on. We really need an 'opentwitter' system. Twitter has demonstrated the need and power of this sort of communication, but cannot make a profitable business out of it. Just like email isn't owned, we need a twitter that isn't owned. And preferably before Twitter as a company tanks.
More generally, a rethink about internet communications would be welcome: having more fine grained control about who can send what to whom would make a lot of sense (and can essentially be done via things like cryptographic keys) -- then basic data and document types. (For example, a tweet is basically a char[140], most small things could be considered a json object fitting some schema, and for many web documents, the content part least, could make do with a far lighter weight document type than modern HTML: something where a high quality light-weight renderer wouldn't need something as complex as an operating system, as modern web browsers are.)
John_Chalisque
Twitter touted itself as the "free speech wing of the free speech party" and is now banning people for having opinions that the San Francisco loons disagree with.
However, you're right.
Banning a few people doesn't affect the stock price. But when you ban hundreds of thousands? Then the message gets around that your hard work building an audience can be pissed away by the decision of a blue-haired loon in San Francisco who thinks you used the wrong pronoun.
That's when your audience drops off and no-one wants to us it any more... and that does affect your stock price.
Welcome to the wonder world of Twitter. They committed suicide so that the world could see what pandering to social justice loons means for companies.
Why not?!
what is the use of a "micro-blogging social platform" or a "news service" that acts against free speech.
as a private company they are free to ban people for hurting others' feelings (btw nothing worse can happen in that platform), but must deal with consequences.
I tend to agree that the 'real' money, or rather the 'real' profit, is made by capitalising on tiny fluctuations in the share price over periods of less than a second. Tiny amounts of profit, times lots and lots of transactions, on a continuous basis = huge profits.
However, it doesn't add liquidity in any meaningful fashion, and it doesn't provide any benefit to the corporation whose shares are being traded or to a wider society. It is, purely and simply, economic parasitism.
The simple solution is a miniscule transaction tax on every share, either purchased or sold (your pick, my preference would be those sold, with the exception of the share offerings made by the company selling its shares for the first time - resales / reissues, after share buy backs would incur the tax).
With this system, since the purchaser doesn't face increased costs there's no practical reason for any reduction in available liquidity, and it effectively destroys the system that allows the parasites to exist, by adding proportionally significant costs to their existance, while adding, proportionally, no significant increase in cost to long term share investors.
The only remaining question in my mind would be whether to make the tax a flat, albeit very small, rate, which would affect the sales of lower value stocks slightly more than higher value ones (if only because of investor perception based primarily on lifetime percentage growth figures), or a variable rate tax based on the price of the shares in question, which, while removing this perceptual disparity, would slightly limit the effectiveness and removing all the parasites from the system.
I'd be happy to leave wiser minds than mine that decision though... if only governments (or even the exchanges themselves) had the courage to implement the system in the first place.