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Twitter Is 'Toast' and the Stock Is Not Even Worth $10, Says Analyst (cnbc.com)
Twitter is "toast" as a company and the stock is not even worth $10, according to a research note published Tuesday, following the departure of another top executive at the social media service. From a report on CNBC: The microblogging platform's chief technology officer, Adam Messinger, tweeted that he would leave the company and "take some time off", while Josh McFarland, vice president of product at Twitter, also said he was exiting the company. Both executives announced their departure on Tuesday. Meanwhile, last month, Adam Bain stepped down as chief operating officer last month to be replaced by chief financial officer Anthony Noto, who has yet to be replaced. Twitter has also lost leaders from business development, media and commerce, media partnerships, human resources, and engineering this year. The departures prompted Trip Chowdhry, the managing director of equity research at Global Equities Research, and a noted "uber-bear" on tech stocks, to issue a note on Tuesday claiming Twitter is "toast" and "not even a $10 stock." "Many investors were foolishly building (an) investment thesis based on complete stupidity," Chowdhry wrote. The analyst said that Twitter's data quality is "horrible". Chowdhry said that many pollsters used Twitter data to predict a Hillary Clinton win in the U.S. election but the fact that Donald Trump won shows that data quality is poor. One reason for this is too many fake users on the platform, Chowdhry claims.
Regardless of your opinions of Trump, it seems pretty ignorant to suggest that Twitter shutting down would completely de-fang him.
It is almost like you're implying that the shutdown of Twitter equates to the shutdown of social media as a concept.
Let us return to the times when a stock's value depended on the P/E ratio and not the mythical confidence fairy.
I have to agree with Trip Chowdhry on this. In my experience you don't see that many high level folks leaving a company if all is well.
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Sure, Twitter is most notable failure. Other social media is not categorically different and stock values are equally divorced from reality.
Donald Trump has (well, will soon enough) the presidential alert system, so he can message everyone's phone instead. With a piercing alarm, at 3AM, and you can't disable this (unless you root your phone). Trump will be fine.
But where will the Twitter hate mobs go to get their outrage on? What if a scientists wears the wrong shirt - how will they know to be outraged? How will they live if Twitter goes under?
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
We should be so lucky
"In America, first you get the sugar, then you get the power, then you get the women..." -H. Simpson
It's been clear to a number of us that Twitter's primary users are more on the social side of the spectrum, lean more to the left, are engaged more in arts and all that, but all of the news snippets over the past year or so seem to come out after the company articulated publicly that they are more or less an SJW platform, that they're going to selectively ban questionable comments under the guise of anti-racism, etc., etc.
Maybe I'm wrong but the timelines literally suggest that Twitter's failure was its political alignment rather than providing a neutral grounds for socializing.
Actually, this is very bad news. Loss of his Twitter outlet might cause le Grande Orange to take full advantage of the upcoming universal cell messaging push technology being rolled out to use in national emergencies. You want to get five messages every day from the brain of your dyehard leader - with no way to turn them off?
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
I think the unprofitable nature of the thing is what is not "a viable business," identity politics or no.
Populus vult decipi, ergo decipiatur...
"Force shits upon Reason's back." - Poor Richard's Almanac
The analyst said that Twitter's data quality is "horrible".
Using "twitter" and "data" and "quality" in the same sentence made me laugh.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
I've tried several Twitter alternatives some in beta some not and unfortunately, most of the things I dislike about Twitter I dislike about them as well. You can join a network that has a strong anti censorship stance and this seems like progress but then you end up with almost unending amounts of hate and vitriol in excess even of Twitter. Even on platforms populated by people on my side of the political isle (libertarian republican types)... it is just unpleasant and unhealthy and gets old fast. I don't know how you take a global broadcast like platform and make it into something palatable.
Doesn't Trump has to at least assume the office before he has means of enacting tyranny? It is still Obama's show for now.
Virtually everyone predicted a big Hillary win and virtually everyone was wrong.
I have a theory about that.
There was a palpable Anti-Trump PC thing happening. Anything that could possibly be interpreted as a Pro-Trump or Anti-Hillary statement could have ended in an online dogpile of people shouting "Racist, Sexist, Homophobic, Transphobic, Islamophobic, Xenophobic" so people kept their thoughts to themselves until they got to the one place where they could express themselves without external pressure, the voting booth.
You can't fault Twitter for misreading the tea leaves just like pretty much everyone else.
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
So not having any idea who this Chowdry is, how is Twitter supposed to make money? I don't value their 140-character service, but I at least see what it is. When you limit your message-length to something that a Motorola Alphapager or an SMS message can accommodate then I don't get how you can make money. Users aren't going to pay to send or receive tweets or for any kind of paid subscription, and I see no practical way to do advertising within the platform's current constraints without pissing off users and causing them to stop using the service.
Twitter has already established ways for their service to function without using client software that would deliver ads too.
If you can demonstrate how forwarding essentially telegrams for free can be profitable I'm sure the management at Twitter would love to talk to you.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
I say this as a non-user, so I acknowledge that I might be ignorant on the subject. But...
I never understood how/why Twitter (or really any messaging platform/app) is a business. I mean, tweeting does actually seem like a useful tool for certain communication needs, but I don't understand why it's handled through a single service. Why isn't the tweet simply a protocol, like email? People would then just build different clients/apps/platforms that utilize that protocol, just like we do with email.
Just think how this will stimulate the economy. People will be constantly destroying their phones... flinging them across the room in disgust. Instant bump
"In America, first you get the sugar, then you get the power, then you get the women..." -H. Simpson
stupid TFA didn't even mention the VALUATION (who cares about the price of a single share?)...should be around $7.1B at $10/share.
Regardless of your opinions of Trump, it seems pretty ignorant to suggest that Twitter shutting down would completely de-fang him.
It is almost like you're implying that the shutdown of Twitter equates to the shutdown of social media as a concept.
Gab.ai is a twitter replacement that has started up recently and is collecting a lot of interest.
Their product advantage - the thing that differentiates them from the rest of the market - is that they enforce free speech. So long as the speech isn't something that's patently illegal in the US, it's allowed on their site. (Disallowed: illegal pornography, threats and terrorism, doxing/publishing private information.)
Twitter seems to be taking sides with half of it's userbase, and driving the other half away. I've always felt that taking sides in customer arguments (against other customers) was a bad thing, but they're vigorously doing that so I'm sure there's some corporate benefit that I'm missing.
Gab allows each user to filter out anything they don't want to see, either other users or specific words. This seems like it's the right solution, because it allows people to use the system without seeing things they find distasteful, while not infringing on other peoples' free speech. I can only imagine that people will put together recommended word lists in topics such as pornography, or vulgarity, or meanness, that others can download and install.
So if you're concerned about twitter shutting down, check out Gab.ai as an alternate system.
The carrier jobs was possible because Mike Pence (the VP-Elect) is currently the Governor of Indiana, where those jobs are.
As fuck fucking up relations with China, the fact that they are building military installations off the Philippine coast suggests that ship sail long ago.
I have messed around with data mining tweets for sporting events and no matter how I sliced and diced the info it is hard to get anything of value. A high profile event like the SuperBowl will generate tens of thousands of tweets in a 2 hour span. After you filter out all the words like "the", "it", "shit" and "fuck" etc etc etc its just pile of steaming crap. It was fun to fool around with but it was hard to gauge anything from it. Only 1 to 2% of users actually share their geo coordinates. The location field is a mess of "NEW YORK", "NYC", "big apple" and that sort of thing. You could clearly see increased spikes after big plays...but no shit...people are excited so the frequency chart spikes after a touchdown...do tell. I have tried using it to gauge sentiment in my home town on various issues....absolutely worthless.. although some of that might be just me as well.
Consider in comparison the Slashdot rating system: it is primitive and flawed, but its is the right kind of approach and more-or-less sort of works to permit free speech while de-emphasizing crap.
This argument would be a lot stronger if the Slashdot comment sections weren't mostly nonsensical circular arguments and insistence that imaginary "SJW"s were at the root of all the world's ills. You have people in the comments of this very article claiming that "political correctness" is to blame for Twitter's situation (a stock price which, let's remember, means a valuation of roughly $7,000,000,000; that's a problem I'd love to have), with no understanding of how Twitter's business model works (or doesn't) and with no ideas about how the company's political or social views could possibly affect their income.
Twitter's problem is that they never bothered to come up with a way to be profitable in the long-term, because the creators were riding the same wave that a lot of tech startups do: create a thing, create buzz about the thing, and then get bought out and get out of there before you have to figure out the logistics of making the thing long-term financially viable. This has nothing to do with their policies on whether or not you can call someone racial slurs and direct hate mobs on the platform. Even if they were completely hands-off and let people tweet whatever they wanted, Twitter still wouldn't be a good business. The two things are completely unrelated.
Slashdot commenters throw shade because Twitter's views disagree with their own, not because they have any understanding of the actual facts, and that's how it works with everything that's posted here. People who disagree get downvoted and their comments get hidden, even if their arguments are well thought-out and supported by facts. That's not what "working" means, and it's obviously not the right kind of approach, and it definitely emphasizes crap as long as it's the kind of crap that people can get angry while agreeing with, because this audience would rather get their hate on than be right.
Allowing people to say what they think while actually facilitating discussion that leads toward people being more correct (being disabused of false notions, coming to understand where they were wrong, learning new things, etc.) is a very hard problem and I don't have a good solution to put forward, but Slashdot is doing a particularly bad job.
I'm so ready for Twiiter to die. The whole concept-—reducing all content to 140 character sound bytes suitable for a child's consumption, is insulting and doing real damage to the world and people's ability to communicate. It almost single-handedly allowed the election of a tyrant to the highest office in the world. Its users need to learn how to write in *complete paragraphs*, with spacing, punctuation, and everything else that makes language worth using in the first place.
From the first day the service was announced, a lot of us "long timers" in computers and I.T. were left scratching our heads, wondering what the point was in the entire thing? I mean, Twitter was essentially nothing more than yet *another* IM client of sorts, except with arbitrarily short limits on the length of messages.
Twitter is more than just another IM client. They invented, or at least brought to mainstream popularity, the concepts of the follow and the timeline, which were imitated by Facebook, Instagram, and a number of blogging platforms. Companies and users love the follow, because it realises the ancient mindshare goal of finely-controlled (voluntary) content push, without the clunkiness of channels and email notifications. Once you have permission to push, revenue options open up.
Twitter is not exploiting this power well. They could be earning a cut of the sales made, valuable insights gained, and joy discovered when the information channeled through their platform helps someone choose a product, make a decision, or find something entertaining. I'm not talking about ads and affiliate links.