![]() ![]() When it first appeared, mainstream media used to ridicule Twitter as the place where sad people sent messages to other sad people about what they’d had for breakfast. Twitter’s chief executive, may follow the Facebook template. What happens over coffee and face-to-face, while others are schmoozing and dropping business cards on tables.” And so on, ad infinitum. Twitter is not the main stage it’s the backstage. the most effortless way to meet a celebrity. ![]() the easiest mode of finding breaking news that’s relevant to you. For others, such as blogger Jeff Goins, it’s “the cheapest way to send an instant message to someone interested in you. For some people, it’s a combination of a giant phone book, a personal radio station and what used to be called a “party line” in the old days of telephony. ![]() For journalists, it’s an efficient way of conveying breaking news from anywhere. For geeks, it’s a human-mediated RSS feed – that is to say, a way of plugging into the thought streams of people you choose to “follow”.įor celebrities, it’s a way to broadcast to fans. Technically, it’s a platform-independent micro-blogging service with a limit per post of 140 characters. At the heart of the distinction is the fact that, whereas it is easy to give an answer to the question “What is Facebook?”, the answers for Twitter depend on who you ask. It didn’t do all these things, for various reasons, the most important of which is that it wasn’t (and isn’t) a “social networking” service in the Facebook sense. At its flotation in November 2013 it was valued at $32bn, a figure largely based on hopes (or fantasies) that it would keep modifying its service to attract mainstream users, that its advertising business would continue to grow at a phenomenal rate and that it would eventually be bigger than Facebook. Whereas you or I might think that a company with more than 300 million regular users that pulls in $710m in revenues is doing OK, Wall Street sees it as a potential zombie.Īt the root of the dissonance is the fact that Twitter is a public company. Endless exponential growth is what investors seek. If there’s one thing Wall Street and the tech industry fears, it is the idea that something potentially profitable might peak or reach some kind of equilibrium point. Why? Because it has stopped growing! “So Twitter user growth (excluding SMS) has now declined,” tweeted one excitable commentator. Viewed through the distorting prism of Wall Street and the tech commentariat, this is apparently a catastrophe. Insofar as all this hullabaloo had any rational basis, it lay in the revelation that Twitter’s active user base had declined from 307 million monthly active users to 305 million. And the stock market, ever attentive to hysteria, marked the shares down accordingly. #Ad infinitum twitter fullYet the technology babblesphere is full of fevered speculation about whether Twitter “has a future”. ![]() If you know anything about technology companies, especially those with a global reach, this looks about par for the course: the company is on track to break even and reach eventual profit. It had revenues of $710m (£490m) and a net loss of $90m, which means that – compared with the same quarter last year – revenue was up 90% and losses were down by 27%. It turned out that the company had just released its last quarterly return for 2015. ‘T witter shares drop on faltering user growth,” said the headline last week. ![]()
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