I can't tell if you're being ironic or facile, but Twitter has become quite a bit more than "140 status messages"(sic). It's a medium where politicians, dissidents, celebrities, the hoi palloi, brands, and anarchists all interact. Its a place of record quoted in headline news briefs and long-form journalism. It is used to organize rebellion and restricting access to it is viewed by many as a human rights violation.
Twitter as a business has problems, but being a fad isn't one of them.
I'd heavily disagree with that. The fad's not over, but it is a fad. The reason it sticks around is that people have an easy way to communicate with celebrities/popular people, and that was certainly not twitter's goal. The moment something better for this comes along, the fad will quickly fade.
Their entire userbase could do a MySpace overnight.
Restricting access to any website (except in some extreme cases) is viewed by many as a human rights violation. I don't see how Twitter is unique in this respect.
Twitter should never have been a publicly listed company. They don't have a business plan, there was never any prof that they would be profitable. But Silicon Vally types, news media and bankers liked using the platform so: hey presto Twitter is a billion dollar company.
Twitter could be profitable if each user paid just $10 per year, but sadly I don't think people like it enough to pay up.
It seems to me that stock price is correlated with more money: if I have X stock options worth Y dollars each, I effectively have X*Y dollars worth of stock. If stock price increase by 1 dollars, I have X dollars more than I did before. No?
Sure, but the "market" price of stock isn't really the value of every* share, its roughly the marginal price of the last/next share purchased or sold, but the more you want to trade, the farther from the market price the value will be.
And changes to the market clearing price don't tell you about changes to the supply and demand curves, just where they intersect. So, for any but a small quantity of stock, you can't tell what the real change in the realizable value of your holdings is just from the change in the market price, since there's no guarantee that a change of $1 in market price equates to a change of $1/share in the price you'll get if you try to sell a particular quantity of a stock.
We tend to ignore that when placing a valuation on a portfolio because if you don't ignore it, you can't get a valuation. But those valuations are approximations, at best.
No. Only if you sell it right now. A lot of problems come from people thinking stocks are more liquid than they are.
Exceeding expectations with a price drop afterwards is inexplicable.
It probably is. But probably not as much as everything believed it would be.
Coolness is about making money in case, but indirectly. If investors see others not being interested in Twitter and not regarding it as cool, they will pull out. I understand Twitter's primary revenue tool is advertisement. That requires users to advertise to.
But is it? Maybe the public is realizing that tweets were just a cool fad for a while. For twitter to be profitable, I am guessing, there has to be people that want to use it, and (very important) people believing that people want to use it (so they'd pay Twitter for advertising).
Compare with Google. Google provides something momre back (gmail, search, calendar, docs, photo storage, directions + many other things I forgot about).
Twitter provides 140 status messages. There is nothing wrong it, that is very cool. But I think there is a realization that it just isn't as cool as it was in 4 years ago. And it just became 3% less cool.