This is why Twitter is soon to be bankrupt. They don't understand how to stop insulting the people that actually provide the content and value. The value isn't the technology, but the people developing and using it.
I don't understand why people think it's fair to criticize a move like this without offering a plausible alternative that will sustain the business. Sure, letting other people build on it got them to where they are today, but where exactly is that? With massive infrastructure and engineering costs, but little income.
Twitter doesn't owe anybody anything. We owe them. If they don't find a way to monetize, then everyone loses.
I'm often rather hard on Twitter, but it's not the company as such that I hate. I hate that they are perceived as a valuable and successful Internet company, when they are clearly neither of those things. At this point Twitter should be the shinning example of the fact that users don't always translate into profit.
At this point Twitter is, as the original comment states, a mature company, but they aren't behaving like one. There is very little reason that Twitter hasn't gone bankrupt. A 2 billion dollar revenue, no profit and no plan for the future.
My best guess is that the people who invest in Twitter are all using it so heavily that they have become blind to the fact that it is a failing company/product.
To me it seems like the larger problem is that Twitter doesn't just have to be profitable. They also have to justify their $9 billion valuation. Which I suspect will be impossible.
Twitter has wracked up 2.5B in losses over like 11 years. Only now have they turned a profit. That is a failure in the time frame of its existence. http://time.com/4241716/twitter-losses-twtr/
Am I missing something? Why would they build an app to consume a twitter feed? I guess that's what someone who actually knew what the heck they were doing said when they asked why they were spending a bunch of money on the app. It's amazing how much money can be wasted at a corporation because it's other people's money.
What a ridiculous take. Twitter was run so competently that it has managed to grow to a company with hundreds of millions of daily active users and can’t figure out how to make a profit.
I wonder why people still have to explain that Twitter has value. After all this company is worth at least 1 billion $. Unless we're all have been abducted by aliens and brainwashed to use it there must be some value otherwise the billion wouldn't be there to back it up.
People who want to convince us that Twitter has no value wanted to tell us the same thing about Facebook a year ago. Now they earn money already, one year earlier than planned.
To me this sounds like envy. Everybody believing that s/he has the best startup idea out there but instead something "value-less" like Twitter is worth a billion. Get over it and try to copy the Twitter business model instead and make some money.
There were people who didn't believe that airplanes would ever fly. They're too heavy! The same kind of mentality abounds when it comes to Twitter critics.
Company allows others to build cool things on top of it. Sounds good. Then others start making money from the stuff they build but Company isn't really making money and the others are selling because they are filling in Company's deficiencies around their product.
So how do you fix it so Company makes more money? Kill the others. That's why the first wave of stuff died on Twitter's platform.
So what's different now? Has Twitter figured out how to make money and fill in the gaps in Twitter? If they have then this could end up working out. If not, how could things be different this time around?
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