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Twitter Says It Overstated Monthly-User Figures For 3 Years (nytimes.com)

Posted by BeauHD on from the earnings-trolls dept.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The New York Times (Warning: source may be paywalled; alternative source): Twitter said on Thursday that it had overstated its monthly-user figures since 2014 after mistakenly including data from third-party applications in its counting. The revelation came as the company reported that its net loss had narrowed in the third quarter and that its number of daily active users had risen 14 percent. The company said it had discovered that its measure of monthly active users had been improperly including figures from third-party applications that used Digits, a software-development program. Digits is part of the Fabric mobile application platform that Twitter sold to Alphabet, Google's parent company, this year. Digits allowed third-party applications to send authentication messages through Twitter's systems and did not reflect activity on the Twitter platform, the company said. As a result, the company lowered the number of monthly active users by two million for the first and second quarters of this year and by one million for the fourth quarter of 2016. Twitter said its data-retention policies made it unable to reconcile the figures for periods before last year's fourth quarter.

3 of 36 comments (clear)

  1. IPO by SimonTheSoundMan · · Score: 5, Insightful

    So, stats were overstated around the time they had their IPO.

  2. The First Desktop Publishing Software Was... by dryriver · · Score: 3, Interesting

    ...launched in 1985. It could combine images and text in various ways and do something magically called LAYOUT. Now if Twitter hired a few software engineers to plug a little DTP engine into its system, people could post something far more interesting that 140 character Tweets - messages with customized layout where text, images, vector and other digital wonders we've had since the 80s could come together on the internet in a much more appealing package. I really do not understand how long Twitter wants to be stuck with SMS-like mini messages with a rectangular image posted under it.

    --
    Why did the chicken cross the road? Because Elon Musk put an AI chip in its head.
    1. Re:The First Desktop Publishing Software Was... by alvinrod · · Score: 2

      If you've looked at the average twitter user, I'm not sure they could handle the sophisticated tool you're proposing. It would be like handing a retarded chimp a Stratovarius. Allowing 140 characters was clearly a mistake. 80 would have sufficed.