It's such a shame, really; arguably Twitter, much more so than their competitors, tries to stick as close to the original form of their product as they can. I admire that.
Facebook (and Instagram) and Snapchat have both transformed from their original incarnations, in ways that have improved the companies' valuation, but have not always improved the experience of users. It seems every single social network is trending towards feature parity with each other -- Facebook now has streaming video, Snapchat now has a decent text chat with messages that need not disappear, Instagram has an algorithmic no-longer-timeline wall and private messaging, they all have ads, even Tumblr now has IM and livestreaming. Some (important) differences remain, but from an observer time-travelling forward from 2012, the social networks of today would appear nearly interchangeable.
But there's Twitter. All these years, it has stayed remarkably close to the original concept of microblogging. Instead, it developed (or acquired) other formats and cultivated them as separate services, separate communities. It's unfortunate that not even wide societal impact can make a service profitable, or at least quell the pressure to feature-creep outside of your original scope.
Consider that two major newsworthy events in the US in the past week (Philando Castillo killing and Dallas attack) were live-streamed on Facebook rather than Periscope.
Facebook already has a huge advantage with 10x the active users of Twitter, AND they integrated live video directly into the app that many of those users already have, rather than a separate app most of them don't.
"App constellations" may be a better user experience... if you bother to download the whole constellation... but I think a similar principle to "the best camera is one you have with you" applies.
> AND they integrated live video directly into the app that many of those users already have, rather than a separate app most of them don't.
> "App constellations" may be a better user experience... if you bother to download the whole constellation... but I think a similar principle to "the best camera is one you have with you" applies.
I agree. Why does Facebook insist on Messages being a separate app then? They should re-integrate it into the main app for all the reasons you wrote.
I am often in and out of the messenger app without being interrupted by the clutter of FB itself. I look at FB when I have some time (maybe waiting in line or whatever) while I actually use messenger for, you know, messaging. The app has its own message count badge, for instance, while FB's badge includes both contact requests and updates.
It's a case where disaggregation helps the user experience.
I imagine it's because Facebook has a huge amount of existing penetration and active usage with Facebook Messenger which allows them to have a separate app. They already have the stickiness with the platform.
I imagine, once live streaming gets a sufficient enough user base, it'll have its own application experience.
> Why does Facebook insist on Messages being a separate app then?
Well for one, you can use it now without having a Facebook account at all, and it can also be used as your SMS app (at least the latest version on Android).
I don't understand the reasoning behind your conjecture but I don't see that happening because of the different modes of interaction. Messenger is more of a 1-1 channel that focuses on the immediate. Facebook is more of a broadcast channel focusing on passive, asynchronous, entertaining items.
WeChat has been successful with the model that you talk though .... Never say never ...
I don't see where Messenger could replace the Facebook native app at all...Messenger is growing every day and with bot support and SMS handling it's also becoming way more useful but from there to "Replacement of Facebook" there's quite the jump...
Most people use Facebook to communicate with their friends and family. With the regular Facebook platform everyone can see everything and your comment on a friends obnoxious photo might be posted on your moms news feed. Not so with Messenger. It's easy to have groups for friends, groups for family, groups for your Sunday football group etc. I bet most young people already are using Messenger a lot more than regular Facebook already.
I am not a young person but I am a graduate student with a lot of young friends. At my university, Facebook is primarily used as a carefully curated photo album and an event planner. The genuine social interactions on Facebook have moved into Messenger. Photos and videos that are not profession/parent friendly are only shared in group chats. Most people are in 3 to 10 active group chats.
A few years ago Facebook Groups were popular at my school but now only a few of the largest ones are active. When I transferred in to finish my undergrad, the groups were essential to meeting people. Now I think it would be much harder to meet like-minded students online because all of the genuine conversation is in semi-private group chats.
According to something I read, young people (<22yo) use twitter & snapchat for on-going daily updates and reserve facebook for bigger events like a family get-together.
One argument I've heard that makes sense, specifically about uber eats, if the new app is a shit experience and gets one star reviews, it doesn't affect the primary product
That might be valid for most apps or services, but I don't think Facebook needs to worry about their app rating too much. It's almost a required app for most people. Not to mention the rating on the main app took a pretty heavy dive when they separated Messenger out anyway.
One reason, I imagine, Facebook made this choice as a company is to increase the amount of real estate their apps have on the app store and 'top 10 most popular apps' lists, similar to how companies strive for top listings and more real estate on search engine results pages.
Between Facebook, Instagram, and Messenger, I wouldn't be surprised if Facebook's apps occupy 30% of most top-10 lists.
One reason they did it was to make Facebook messages feel more important. Before Facebook messages were like eMail, you felt like you could reply whenever at a later time. Now you feel like you have to respond immediately, like SMS.
Live video in Facebook isn't separate: it is a different form of news item that is integrated into everything else. Messages is totally unrelated to everything else... it was a tab at the bottom that had no integration into the rest of the app, but because of that left limited ways to expand the experience of messaging itself (as the tab bar was already being used). It made absolutely no sense to have those things be crammed into the same UI.
"But there's Twitter. All these years, it has stayed remarkably close to the original concept of microblogging."
right, they only added photos, video, FB style profile pages, link shortening, location metadata, algorithmic timeline, moments, messaging, and extensively developed mobile apps but otherwise yes exactly the same as when they were an 140 char SMS broadcast service.
I knew this was going to be challenged, and you're not wrong. But Twitter still feels closest to the original incarnation of 'here be a (roughly) reverse-chronological list of text-message length posts'. They had the timeline, the "friend feed" first, and most enhancements affected only the payload of their messages. Moments was a big innovation, and it's presented as a separate offering on their website.
Whereas Facebook's primary function went from a carefully-curated yearbook-style personal and interest page to an... algorithmic timeline of friend's status updates and tumble-blog reposts.
Snapchat went from an app that sends disappearing photos to a general-purpose multimedia messaging app that happens to still put a timer on photos.
Instagram went from a photo and selfie-sharing app to a general-purpose social network with an algorithmic timeline, sponsored posts, and private messaging.
Twitter switching away from a chronological see-everything timeline was a massive departure from its original idea, on the same scale as many of your other examples. To me that was a core feature and not having it just makes Twitter much less interesting to open.
> It's such a shame, really; arguably Twitter, much more so
> than their competitors, tries to stick as close to the
> original form of their product as they can. I admire that.
Except for that time they blocked third party access to their API. That was kinda big. [0]. I guess you could also say that this move supports your point of view, but those third parties were partly responsible for the popularity of the platform.
Twitter just doesn't have an idea about where to evolve. They've tried small changes, and nothing helped their bottom line. Rumors are that part of the reason is that they are not sure what their "secret sauce" is, so they are reluctant to change anything in fear of harming it.
Also, they are dying. They have never turned a profit. Facebook or Google or Microsoft will eventually buy them, because of the users - but they have so far given no indication they can survive independently. And they have had a few billion dollars in funding and ten years to give that indication.
Twitter (the service, not the company's) secret sauce is:
You can have a public platform, using an identity you choose for yourself, to broadcast snippets of information.
Where do you evolve this? Blogger, Blogspot, Livejournal, Tumblr, Medium, they're all in this same space, except they focus on traditional, long-form content. I don't see Twitter as a social network (although many do, that's okay). I see it as a broadcast medium, a soapbox, a blogging platform.
But if you see Twitter as a social network, you're subject to a different set of pressures than a blogging platform.
Also, Twitter holds no value to FB, Google, MS, or Yahoo. They all have subsumed parts of its core functionality into their offerings. If they ever get acquired, it's by some 'outsider' that wants to enter this space, like Verizon or Yandex.
>> I don't see Twitter as a social network (although many do, that's okay). I see it as a broadcast medium, a soapbox, a blogging platform.
A few years back Peter Kafka wrote an article [1] about how joe/joan-shmoe twitter user will probably never have their tweets read by anybody at all. It was astonishingly small number of folks who broke 500 followers (writing 3/4 years ago)
ex. “The median Twitter account has a single follower. Among the much smaller subset of accounts that have posted in the last 30 days, the median account has just 61 followers.”
It is from a few years ago, maybe things have changed but if that's the experience of the average person why invest time in it?
This is such an important point, lost in the punditry.
Twitter gets a lot of love from journalists and people with a profile, who write the articles about twitter and control public perception. They have an interest in maintaining a personal brand and have enough visibility that Twitter works for them.
If you listened to those people, Twitter's biggest problem would be trolls writing mean (and often abusive) tweets about them.
Most twitterers would be lucky to be threatened with the rape and murder of their families, frankly.
Which is why Twitter is dying-- there are so, so, so many news curation and aggregation sources. Twitter isn't even all that good, frankly. Reddit does the job way better. (Still a lot of folks that want to fuck my mom though.)
As a social network, it's crap, has been crap and likely will remain crap. The time-based feed tends towards livelock from professional content producers. Their curation mostly suggests people I can follow who would generally prefer I do not engage with them beyond promotion of their brands and gentle applause.
Twitter is better than Reddit because it is decentralizes the information from single, topic-related feeds people can post to, to one feed per person that you can subscribe to. This makes it much faster and more convenient than Reddit for getting status posts on things you like, i.e. an independent game developer's latest WIP.
Some people have split accounts that you can choose to follow to receive different kind of status updates from them, so an example of this is a person with a 'oh look this interesting thing happened in my life' account, and a separate account for 'oh jeez I'm really angry and need to vent about this to a subset of people I know in relative privacy'. Because of the nature of twitter it feels easier to throw away or make lots of accounts than, say, facebok.
The real connection comes not when you follow celebrities, but when you're a creator (Or a budding creator), and you interact with other people who are creating things for support or advice; or you have an interest in what your friends are posting and doing, and like viewing their traveling posts and their reactions to things. If you have those sorts of relationships twitter helps facilitate them extremely well, and if you don't, or the people you interact with in that way don't use twitter, then it won't have that value for you.
I suppose all I can say to that is, I do not believe this level of gamesmanship to extract Twitter's value proposition is going to work out. I think they're asking too much of their users, and if they can't figure it out, they're gonna fail.
Reddit only appeals to a specific demographic though. Twitter seems to have broader appeal somehow. I think because Twitter conversation is less controlled by a majority.
Would love to see stats on how often average reddit account owners comment and contribute vs average Twitter users.
I think warcher has a very good point about vocal people from other platforms (e.g journalists) giving a massive misconception over Twitters actual appeal and reach.
There is a huge difference between a platform where you shout in to the void and people have to choose to listen and a platform where you shout into the void and people can overhear you. One of those systems favours the popular, the other favours the average person.
Carefully note he's talking about accounts, and accounts are probably over 90% bots for "pay $50 for 10000 followers" marketing scams. In comparison you're talking about "average person"
If most accounts aren't people, then what most people do on the service is likely to have nothing in common with what most accounts do on the service.
There is also the orphan account situation. My twitter and facebook and linkedin accounts are unused but not deleted. I would theorize that's yet another problem, once you cross off the list of bots, if the majority of remaining accounts are unused, that means what the majority of accounts do has little to no relationship to what actual active users do. For marketing and PR purposes I'm sure my unused accounts are being monetized and proudly being counted as a "user", which is a whole nother problem.
There is an even deeper reason the analysis is wrong. Inspired by writing this post I logged into facebook for the first time in months. My kids stopped using it years ago and now posting is very power law distribution where virtually all my timeline posts are now from exactly two people who post or repost something roughly every waking hour and nobody else can keep up with their meme-stream which floods everything else out. When a sample is power law skewed like facebook, words like average and median are irrelevant and meaningless. Power law distributions have other ways to analyze them like half life / doubling intervals and talking about the actual exponent of the distribution and stuff like that. The average post "on facebook" comes from precisely two meme-crazy shitposters I feel familial / workplace obligation or peer pressure to friend, but the average user's post is an entirely different phenomena and is a perhaps annual event at most. Oh look its been a year since my last summer vacation, here's my annual summer vacation post.
There is a similar problem with email, yes 99.9% of email sent is spam no one reads. No that does not mean no one uses email or there are no important emails.
> For marketing and PR purposes I'm sure my unused accounts are being monetized and proudly being counted as a "user", which is a whole nother problem.
They usually apply basic criteria such as monthly active users (MAUs) here when promoting such stats. Your account likely wouldn't meet the criteria. In the case of bots, being "active" can be programmatically achieved, however.
> Blogger, Blogspot, Livejournal, Tumblr, Medium, they're all in this same space
So why does Twitter need 3,800 employees? Why does it need 1,500 technical employees?
Sure, it gets more traffic than any of those other sites, but growth has slowed and the traffic is more or less stable. The core product hasn't changed significantly. Their most ambitious innovation in recent years (Periscope) was an acquisition. What do the bulk of these engineers work on, day to day? It seems like Twitter is optimally set up to burn money.
Twitter puts out a LOT of software, and open-sources a good portion. I don't know if this is smart in the sense of being overstaffed relative to their revenue, but they do it regardless. Some examples:
Thanks, I wasn't familiar with many of these projects. I'm still not sure whether all this output justifies the staff, or whether they're over-engineering the hell out of a microblogging service.
>Twitter (the service, not the company's) secret sauce is:
You can have a public platform, using an identity you choose for yourself, to broadcast snippets of information.
Parent means their secret, money-making sauce. Not just what makes it appealing to some people.
>Where do you evolve this? Blogger, Blogspot, Livejournal, Tumblr, Medium, they're all in this same space
They have value to anyone who has an interest in selling interest / location / cross-device based advertising, so that's exactly Facebook, Google, Microsoft. Yahoo would buy it for exactly the same reason they bought Tumblr - trying to stumble on a new business model via acquisition.
On Device Research said the overlap was only 24% in the USA. 45% only used Facebook and 31% only used WhatsApp.
Also, WhatsApp was strong in some parts of the globe where Facebook was weaker. In particular, WhatsApp was used in mainland China where Facebook was banned.
>> It's such a shame, really; arguably Twitter, much more so than their competitors, tries to stick as close to the original form of their product as they can.
> Twitter just doesn't have an idea about where to evolve.
My feeling is the secret sauce was "being cool and disruptive". /s
To secure that position they have, IMO, spent the last few years painting themselves into a corner.
The big problem was that they're profitable at the hundreds-of-millions-per-quarter level but have been trying to spend into the billion+ range.
They uses to have tons of ideas and innovation until they locked the API in preparation for the IPO, but the ways they expected that to generate revenue obviously haven't happened at the scale they hoped for.
Their quarterly reports consistently show that the losses are caused by stock-based compensation and simply having staffed for a much larger business.
What I think is interesting is their direction towards streaming. For instance, they struck a deal to stream NFL games and they will being streaming the RNC and DNC conventions.
That may be a good direction for them to pair with their platform.
I don't think that's true. Twitter has stuck to the original 140 character format...true. Honestly I think they should stick to that. The reason why Twitter has took a turn over the years is because of their treatment of developers and their murdering of top apps instead of letting them flourish. Look at TweetDeck, it hasn't improved in years, and you could argue it has gotten much worse. They dropped the Windows client support for one.
Their services didn't change much, but their philosophy changed drastically.
Then you have them temp banning people for political speech (and I'm not talking about harassment here, which is different.)
As for Vine, that is one that they should have evolved. Vine could have easily been more like SnapChat is now, but instead Jack and company sat on their thumbs.
Twitter is a remarkable case of mismanagement. I think in about 5 years hopefully someone write a book about how Twitter has constantly shot itself in the foot.
> The reason why Twitter has took a turn over the years is because of their treatment of developers and their murdering of top apps instead of letting them flourish.
Oh how I wish this was true but sadly this is usually never the case. If it was Facebook would be long dead by now.
Oh absolutely it validates their business model (or so it seems), but I can't help but feel that value is paradoxically lost (for the user) once everyone iterates themselves into equivalence. Network effect advantages become almost irrelevant when everyone maintains an equally split presence. And if value is lost for the user, their platform loyalty will plummet.
Facebook and Snapchat will begin to be perceived as a 'utility' (something that has already happened to Twitter), meaning, we as a society all expect these functions of social networking and messaging to be fulfilled by a provider, but the exact provider is no longer relevant. Pressures to maintain a positive balance sheet will lead to a proliferation of ads.
This will leave room for new upstarts to target a niche they can serve better than the incumbents, and lure engagement away. They will use VC money to fund their effort and offer ad-free, carefully-focused refuges away from the big networks. But the incumbents have so much money, they will all get bought out in the end. (Snapchat refused to be bought out by Facebook for $3,000,000,000, at a time when it was still known as a sexting app)
I see analogues to the churn of free image hosts -- new one starts up because all the old ones are full of ads; introduces ads a few years later because they can't pay the bills. The cycle continues.
I remember way back when a lot of stuff was forums.
I think the communities are the most important part of these networks, and even if they all have feature parity, it's 100% fine for them to still exist independently.
I think Facebook and LinkedIn are a good example. You could basically do everything you do on LinkedIn on FB, but the communities are different so they stay different. Of course, LinkedIn accentuates different features, but both are mainly "Walls" with some messaging features and community building.
Though, I think you're very right in that Twitter is its own beast. Namely for the semi-public nature of it all.
I think this is a fundamental truth that is rarely acknowledged by the creators of "free" services. Delivering value to your users and increasing profit for the company are almost always in direct conflict. Large groups of users are drawn in by a free product which will ultimately be unsustainable. The companies which succeed after this initial period are the ones who are willing to degrade their original product, and manage to do so gradually enough that it doesn't draw too much backlash from their existing users.
One major social network that rarely gets mentioned is NextDoor. Unfortunately, they've just begun doing ads, too, and I already hate it.
It's disappointing because they have such a natural starting base for generating revenue: collecting neighborhood dues. It provides a useful service, would likely increase dues participation, fits within the value-proposition of the product. Lots of opportunities for premium features paid for by neighborhood associations, too.
That's why it's sad to see NextDoor chasing the same ad revenue of every other social network.
> Twitter, much more so than their competitors, tries to stick as close to the original form of their product
And I hope they stay that way. Despite reports on twitter's dropping valuation, I find it as an immensely valuable tool for staying up to date. I'd pay to use twitter.
Twitter isn't a product. It's, at best, a product-construction command line; every product they've had (photo-sharing before murderized by Instagram, for instance) has been accidental.
You state that these social networks haven't improved experience for user. But user count has steadily gone up and so has engagement. I'm sure the evolution is also inline with their internal metrics. Why is not evolving based on data a good thing?
As a casual observer and non-user I'm actually quite happy to see them all reach feature parity. I'm hopeful that layman users will start to rue having the community so fragmented and we may start seeing faster progress towards common protocols and interoperability.
Part of me is seeing shades of the browser wars in these social network wars, and even though there were years of pain in the middle, we're all better off nowadays.
The founders departed very early after the acquisition, like Rus and Dom. None of the 'top executives' were ever the original visionaries that created the product to begin with.
It's sort of shocking that after Jack left but hailed back to save Twitter, that the board didn't have more wherewithal to retain the founding team of Vine. Textbook post-acquisition problem.
I agree with other commenters that they should integrate Vine into Twitter. Like Instagram and video (or Facebook and Facebook Live), there's really no reason for it to be separate. Twitter needs better content generation tools at it's core. It's really starting to feel like a washed up RSS aggregator and nothing more.
Yeah, I'd have to agree. At this point, talking about Vine is almost (not yet, but almost) like talking about a subsidiary of Yahoo; whatever the unique problems of the child company, the parent company's dysfunction remains the primary issue.
What exactly is valuable about it? I keep hearing this but it is just a jumble of collective stream of consciousness. Has anyone that has read Ulysses actually made any sense of it? Twitter is the collective analog of Ulysses.
>it is just a jumble of collective stream of consciousness
Much of it isn't even that. A huge proportion are not even real humans but are instead accounts being operated by one of the myriad of pieces of software that enable automatic posting on behalf of a human.
Perhaps my view is skewed as we have a travel blog and know many other travel bloggers but a vanishingly small percentage are real humans actually typing their own tweets in real time.
However, most of that software can be filtered and controlled via the API. Part of the reason Twitter is so hostile to third party apps (with exceptions) that duplicate its own functionality is so they can get analytics about actual users and not marketing bots.
Trend forecasting, market analysis -- mineable data for purposes other than just display (their own) ads.
Shazam [1], a company that makes an app to identify songs recorded through the microphone, makes money off of figuring out which songs get a lot of interest. Twitter can do something similar, if they don't already.
It is insightful to point out the widely held belief that Google Reader would never be cancelled because its an incredibly tightly curated data set of what real humans actively seek out and hard working devoted humans actively filtered the wheat from the chaff. All for free, for google to monetize.
Everyone knows, that everyone knows, that its a very valuable dataset. But nobody is apparently interested in paying for it or otherwise monetizing it. Shades of "emperor has no clothes". The end result is Google Reader got cancelled.
If twitter was not standalone and was a mere subproject of a real company, it would likewise be long gone. They have no plan B so they'll have to keep doing what they're doing until they run out of money or are purchased, pretty much a Yahoo situation. Its like a decades old portapottie at a concert venue, everyone goes there does not mean its worth anything to anyone.
It would be a nice, cool world to live in where sentiment analysis is a thing. Its such an obvious and tasty idea, that unfortunately is completely wrong.
> 3. Nobody tweets about their hemorrhoids. Or abortion.
There's an informal support group that tweets about perinatal depression, OCD, and psychosis. This includes people who've taken the choice to have abortion (or even sterilisation) rather than go through what they went through before. ((Watch out, this is just an informal group and there's not much in the way of clinical or data governance.))
It can, but at what price? Parent was questioning this data being "extremely valuable" - is sentiment analysis at $.001 per user an attractive proposition to a client? Likely. Is it still a viable product at $.01, $.10, $1 per user?
This question gets asked pretty much every time there is an article about the size of tech companies. If you think about what is required for running something at the scale of Vine, 50 people makes a lot of sense, and if anything that seems somewhat lean.
You still didn't explain why they need that many people.
What exactly _is_ required for “running something at the scale of Vine”? Yes, they have/had a lot of traffic, but traffic in and of itself does not require a large staff to manage.
I'm not going to explain the individual job functions of 50 people, and for folks who work in the industry this should seem like a reasonable number just from their own experience.
However, let's do some rough numbers. It says they had 3 product managers. I would guess this means 8-10 engineers. 3 QA folks would be a decent enough ratio. You've then got a GM, a head of product, head of UX, head of data science, head of BD, editorial lead, and head of engineering who all just left. We're up to 26 people already. Now we've got some HR staff, maybe a recruiter or two, finance team, people underneath the UX, editorial, data science and BD teams (let's generously assume 1-2 hires each), and we're over 40 people easily. We haven't even discussed marketing, help centre and customer support, a DBA, ops, or IT support.
Does that all make sense now? It's a company within Twitter and there are a lot of specialized roles to keep something with 25-30 million active users a month running smoothly.
I'm not then going to go into what each person does each day, but with a product that you're trying to drive growth and new features for, while supporting existing customers, and just generally running a company, that takes a lot of bodies if you want to do it effectively and not cut corners.
> Now we've got some HR staff, maybe a recruiter or two, finance team, people underneath the UX, editorial, data science and BD teams (let's generously assume 1-2 hires each), and we're over 40 people easily. We haven't even discussed marketing, a DBA, ops, or IT support.
All which presumably can be filled by pre-existing Twitter people. In the M&A world these are called "synergies".
Depends on how they're running the company. Post-acquisition at my last startup it was much easier to keep our startup intact within the larger company.
Regardless, the point is whether 50 people is reasonable to run something like Vine.
> I'm not going to explain the individual job functions of 50 people
Good thing I didn't ask you to.
> It says they had 3 product managers
Seems like a lot of product managers for a company with one product which isn't especially complicated. Smells like a sign of hiring really fast to try to grow.
> I would guess this means 8-10 engineers
The fuck do they even do? You don't need that many people to make something like Vine. Unless I'm missing something and there's more to the service than the video-related social CRUD app?
> You've then got a [bunch of dept heads]
Eh, I can see those I guess.
> Now we've got […snip handwaving about team sizes and numbers…] over 40 people easily.
OK.
> help centre and customer support
Yeah pretty sure Vine doesn't have a custom support team.
> ops [and] IT support
If they're managing their own servers that would add a lot of overhead I suppose. If they're just running off EC2 or Linode or whatever then there's not a whole lot of staff there.
> Does that all make sense now?
No.
> there are a lot of specialized roles to keep something with 25-30 million active users a month running smoothly
I think it takes more people to work out a revenue model for Vine than to sustain 25-30 million active users.
---
Basically, bullshit. In Vine's case, you really don't need a big engineering team, which means you don't need a lot of people to manage your engineering team. I find it much more likely that Vine hired a bunch of people (engineers and otherwise) with VC money when they were growing fast.
> If they're managing their own servers that would add a lot of overhead I suppose. If they're just running off EC2 or Linode or whatever then there's not a whole lot of staff there.
The needed headcount in both cases is nearly identical as well as quite significant at Vine's scale and with their type of product, and your assumption otherwise is a pretty clear indicator that you don't have much experience managing an operations team. That's okay, not everyone does, but you should listen to those around you rather than assume you know best in this case.
In operations it gets pretty tiring having engineers explain our role, strategy, and headcount to us, most particularly when this takes the form of criticism such as "you don't need a lot of [or have too many] people to do that," which comes off extraordinarily condescending and diminutive. The one thing that does not exist in all of computing, ever, from Joe's Web Design through Twitter and beyond, is a perfectly-staffed operations team. There is always more work than operators, and always "there are too many of you" sentiment. Always.
Sizing operations is an inexact science but one which yields "too many operators" approximately 0% of the time. When your operators propose dropping GPUs in the fleet to mine cryptocurrency as an additional revenue stream, you might (might) have too many. But not until then.
I'm trying to give you credit here that you mean well but the rest of your comment is somewhat suggesting that I shouldn't, so take it as you will, I suppose.
If you think you can come run a team more leanly and successfully, I invite you to come do it - clearly, if there is a market inefficiency here you could reap the rewards.
This kind of reply isn't really that constructive, the guy raised some fair points... A lot of smaller companies and startups seem to do incredibly well with not even 10 employees, let alone 50. I understand there's more to running a company than meets the eye, but I really do wonder if all 50 people spend their days at vine being productive.
Please name a company of 10 people that manages a user base in the tens of millions with similar technical requirements as Vine (bandwidth, storage, etc). If such a company exists I believe it would be an outlier.
Are you really so blinded by free-market ideology that you think one company having bloated headcount makes room for a direct competitor in their product space? You believe in a perfectly efficient market and don't believe in the existence of barriers to entry?
But this isn't one bloated company - this is a normal size and ratio of folks for this type of product. There will always be outliers - and in particular extremely small teams that can have outsized success, just as you'll also see behemoths not doing much (e.g. monster.com, 4,000 employees).
My point is that your sarcasm was laughably bad. You came off like you genuinely believe that any perceived weakness makes room for a new company. Which is something people genuinely believe on this website.
If you want to make an effective point with sarcasm, you need to stay a bit more grounded.
Based on what PeCaN said, it seems he/she thinks that Vine is an anomaly, and uses a vast amount of resources compared to what is required.
I believe they are perfectly normal, and if anything are slightly on the leaner side of average.
If PeCaN is right, and I'm wrong, then he/she should be starting a company much more efficient than the average, and benefiting from being that much more effective than his/her competition. There are plenty of opportunities out there - if someone like Vine is bloated, then surely PeCaN could be a consultant and not deal with barriers to entry, and still be wildly successful. There was no sarcasm.
For what it's worth… I /do/ work for a very efficient company, and benefit from it relative to our competition.
I'm not personally interested in Silicon Valley brogramming for social video sharing sites, but thanks for your confidence that I could dominate the market.
So WhatsApp had did have bigger team (you're comparing 50 engineers vs 50 employees total), and now it's even bigger. There are hundreds of people working on WhatsApp.
It seems to me that WhatsApp and Vine have a similar staff to user to ratio.
If there are hundreds of people working on WhatsApp I wonder why it's so difficult for them to continue supporting Blackberry 10. So what if it's not popular, they should aim for complete coverage of modern mobile OSes. Then again this is the same team that could not implement encryption without outside help.
Reddit is kind of a slow-burning tire fire. The site is down or responds with an error page frequently. They have no good revenue model, and they're too old to easily attract new VC funding. They're a small team because they don't have money to hire a bigger team.
I've seen this cycle a few times now. Just give it a merciful death (vine and twitter). Some things are meant to be ephemeral. I think vine and twitter are in that category. Just like a forest needs fires to be a healthy ecosystem. People should be more willing to let go of business ideas that see explosive growth but lack the business fundamentals to be sustainable.
Instead what's gonna happen is that it is going to be a slow and steady march of attrition until only the husk is left and people just feel sad every time either twitter and vine are mentioned.
Most power users who command an engaged audience ('influencers' or 'VIPs' or 'celebrities' or 'streamers' or insert-your-noun-here) already cross-post on every single service. Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Twitter, Youtube, Tumblr, Twitch...
Staying exclusive to a particular platform only pays if the platform literally pays you for your content. Otherwise you want to reach as wide of an audience as possible.
I'm certainly not a power user. I mainly use Twitter to keep up with friends and acquaintances in the tech community. None of the other platforms seem appropriate for that.
Tumblr is another blog/social hybrid, but in your particular case you're subject to network effect (or the lack thereof) in your community of interest. Also, Tumblr is similarly faltering in engagement and owned by a corporate parent that is trying to leverage it as part of a wider strategy to turn its fortunes around.
Well I think you've hit on something there: since certain types of content are cross-posted to every platform, maybe that particular type of content is not why people value Twitter, specifically.
In other words, maybe you don't actually understand why people like Twitter. Which is fine--not everyone needs to like Twitter--but if that's true, you're probably not the best person to point Twitter fans toward good alternatives.
I don't know. I think RSS aggregation with some extra bells and whistles is a perfectly good alternative but then again I don't think I'm the target demographic of twitter.
At some point the numbers of remaining dedicated users simply do not justify keeping the service up, even if there's no alternative. It's a game of numbers (number of users and number of dollars).
I may be out of the loop of some drama, but to be it seems like Twitter has been so successful, and it seems like its here to stay. It's got advertisement in between tweets which will be viewed by tons of people. It's the preferred social network for well known people. My twitter feed is also much less of a toxic junkyard than Facebook is right now.
Vine on the other hand I agree with, the business model is doomed to fail. Instagram already has a huge userbase, and all it has to do is implement a video feature to kill Vine.
I don't know. I think if they had souped up RSS they would have been in a much better position and maybe it would have been more sustainable but a long series of missteps has led them to this point. I think the biggest mistake they made was shutting down the developer ecosystem. They never recovered after that.
I feel like this is the fate of all the social networks whose main purpose is to feed into people's vanity. Surely 20 year companies can't be built off of people's desire to show off how much better their lives are to ours?
Both true and false. Don't forget that even now there are real-life VIP clubs the entrance to which costs the members pretty penny just so they can drink overpriced wine and convince each other they are special snowflakes, all the while crowding together underground in a place I wouldn't go in even if I am paid to. (And this phenomenon has been going on probably since the early medieval ages.)
Maybe a virtual variant of that can be profitable but IMO it's doubtful. Elitism works best with real-life meetings. Same with snobism.
...Then again, I heard there are people sinking thousands of dollars each month into the dying game named e.Republic just so they can be shown in top-50 charts.
TL;DR: Humans love to pay so they can feel special. Go figure.
I loved Vine, it's a really interesting medium/format. But the userbase killed it for me. Young teenagers posting stupid clips with music edits about some boy band, TV show, or anime. I'm not interested in any of that. I liked the artsy clips, sports highlights, and comedy but it became increasingly difficult to find when using the app. I felt like an old man being somewhere he didn't belong. I still enjoy a funny Vine now and then, but I only see it when it pops up on my Twitter feed.
I knew things were getting bad when I got like three push notifications in a week to pretty please open the app to see what my friends were not posting anymore.
Instagram has more everyday users. Think about me, the average dude. I have 100 followers on Instagram, most of whom are from high school/college. I have zero followers on Vine. Unless I dedicate my life to making funny Vines, I probably won't get any followers. Whoa, now Instagram has pushed a video feature, great! Now I can share "vines" with my 100 followers. No need to download Vine after all.
Not to mention a lot of the funny vines get posted onto a youtube compilation anyways, so in the end youtube is profiting from vine's success. Vine's business model was just doomed to fail.
Every time I click a vine video it takes ages to load. I can't remember a similar service with a crappier user experience
The Vine app lasted less than a week on my phone, because it was pretty much unusable. Yes, please, let me play a series of videos with sound while scrolling.
That and the 6 second limit is totally arbitrary. The fact that you can have longer videos on Instagram(but not, say, multiple minutes long) is killer.
The part that has impressed me about Twitter/Vine/etc over the past few years is their content embeds in other sites/services. Their main apps are so riddled with junk that I hardly use them. The real estate in their feeds devotes more to ad space than micro-blogging, and everyone knows that followers (/follow-for-followers) are a marketing cesspool.
Twitter et al. should really become the blockquote service for the internet.
Because it had the potential to create a community around it. If they just wanted the feature they could easily have built it into Twitter for less than $30M. What made Vine work is the same thing that made Instagram work: a killer app. If Viners had to compete with everyone else on Twitter their work would have been too diluted to get traction, and you wouldn't have seen the same creativity and commitment.
Critically, the vine community is a younger demographic. Maybe Twitter wanted to keep them separate because they didn't want an eternal September killing the "bird in the hand" Twitter community.
That Vine's userbase consisted largely of younger people probably should have given Twitter pause, and in retrospect might have made them rethink that $30M valuation. Those are the same users who are most likely to drop your service overnight when it becomes uncool, for reasons that may never be clear or make sense. (See also: Myspace.)
Because people would actually use it. A feature which no one uses is worthless.
I'm not saying I agree with the strategy, but you can't really say it failed. For a $30M acquisition it was quite a value as it exploded in subsequent years, it would have easily been approaching a $1B valuation at its peak, it only petered out in the last couple years. I really can't see how building a looping video feature into Twitter would have achieved that kind of reach (of course it would also have been hard to measure)
Thank god. While vine may have some significance, it's a wasteland of content, full of stupid crap, and unfunny memes that even /b/ would hate. I think that Thomas Sanders is one of the very few people on Vine actually producing interesting content. And most things on vine could be recreated as gifs with subtitles without missing much.
I've seen people moving to different platforms. There seems to be always a platform replacing another platform. I have yet to see this with Facebook. It seems like the new Google Hangouts and their new messaging app (allo?) might be in the radar. But, at this point is it even possible to have a facebook replacement withing the next 3 years?
Such a shame, I love Vine. Integrating it into the twitter feed just means videos will not be seen as they have to compete with all the other stuff that's taking space on your feed.
Instead of launching Vine a 6 seconds micro vlogging service. Twitter should have integrated that as a feature in their own app. That would have made so much sense. Every social media company for e.g SnapChat, Facebook etc. are closely integrating video content within the core of their app and Twitter had a huge opportunity and the managed to below it away.
The content creators are running for the hills. Almost all of the popular folks I followed no longer post content on a regular basis. It's usually posted as an afterthought. I really enjoyed the comedy section and the time constraints on the video length was great to show off creativity.
Why would you need multiple executives to handle a business that is mainly silly 6-second video clips and could never be more than that without changing the name in which case it becomes an unknown brand?
What do top executives do for these types of companies. It seems like a joke.
Does vine load terribly for anyone else? Always amazed that it's considered a "production-ready" level product when ti doesn't even play videos consistently across multiple sites.
I'm not surprised. Using livestream apps (or in Vine's case short videos) I've noticed that broadcasters are incredibly addicted for a month or so, and then they disappear forever.
Facebook (and Instagram) and Snapchat have both transformed from their original incarnations, in ways that have improved the companies' valuation, but have not always improved the experience of users. It seems every single social network is trending towards feature parity with each other -- Facebook now has streaming video, Snapchat now has a decent text chat with messages that need not disappear, Instagram has an algorithmic no-longer-timeline wall and private messaging, they all have ads, even Tumblr now has IM and livestreaming. Some (important) differences remain, but from an observer time-travelling forward from 2012, the social networks of today would appear nearly interchangeable.
But there's Twitter. All these years, it has stayed remarkably close to the original concept of microblogging. Instead, it developed (or acquired) other formats and cultivated them as separate services, separate communities. It's unfortunate that not even wide societal impact can make a service profitable, or at least quell the pressure to feature-creep outside of your original scope.