Twitter Expected to Begin Layoffs and Stop Headquarters Expansion

Re:Twitter Expected to Begin Layoffs and Stop Headquarters E... by petercooper on Saturday October 10, 2015 @06:52AM (#10365123)

I don't think the final question is realistic. I have 20K followers (not huge, but far beyond who I could realistically ever "know") and get huge value from it as an individual, not as a business. It would be so boring (to me) to only be able to talk to people one knows closely.

There are numerous non-company non-celebs-in-the-Hollywood-sense-of-the-word people who have huge followings on Twitter who get a lot of value from that and who their followers also appreciate: people like DHH, John Carmack, Marco, Sam Altman, Scoble..

There is a definite space between "people you know personally" and "blast ads to 2 million customers" in social and Twitter fills it really well.

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Re:Twitter Expected to Begin Layoffs and Stop Headquarters E... by jalfresi on Saturday October 10, 2015 @08:56AM (#10365354)

Soooo... RSS? Isn't that what you've just described? You could run that on a pretty small web server....

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Re:Twitter Expected to Begin Layoffs and Stop Headquarters E... by petercooper on Saturday October 10, 2015 @03:35PM (#10366679)

Well, we did. I was a blogger for about 7 years before Twitter came along. Twitter pretty much killed it for me as the masses went there.

So you're not wrong, but the people went to Twitter. Even Google killed Reader. I go where my audience is.

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Re:Twitter Expected to Begin Layoffs and Stop Headquarters E... by cookiecaper on Saturday October 10, 2015 @10:56AM (#10365661)

All "social media" services are fundamentally "RSS feeds for humans". It's the same concept, with an easier interfaces and discovery mechanisms, and within a walled garden.

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Re:Twitter Expected to Begin Layoffs and Stop Headquarters E... by mnutt on Saturday October 10, 2015 @12:09PM (#10365928)

Scale RSS up to Twitter's size, interleave a user's subscribed feeds together, centralize it, and you have Twitter's scaling challenges.

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Re:Twitter Expected to Begin Layoffs and Stop Headquarters E... by dllthomas on Saturday October 10, 2015 @01:42PM (#10366233)

"centralize it"

So... don't?

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Re:Twitter Expected to Begin Layoffs and Stop Headquarters E... by mapgrep on Tuesday October 13, 2015 @12:30PM (#10381552)

RSS lacks one-click follow, recommendations, favorites, push of new updates, native replies, and uniformity of message size, and if you could sweep those things under the rug, Twitter wouldn't be as large as it is.

RSS is fine for plumbing and pros but has not evolved into anything resembling a user-friendly system.

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Re:Twitter Expected to Begin Layoffs and Stop Headquarters E... by ljk on Tuesday October 13, 2015 @01:41PM (#10382074)

> * RSS lacks one-click follow, recommendations, favorites, push of new updates, native replies, and uniformity of message size, and if you could sweep those things under the rug, Twitter wouldn't be as large as it is.*

Twitter has way more features than RSS, but do people really use "favorites" that often? The tweets I "fav'd" I don't really go back and check later, or maybe I'm not the targeted demographic

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Re:Twitter Expected to Begin Layoffs and Stop Headquarters E... by sbarre on Saturday October 10, 2015 @09:31AM (#10365442)

That's ignoring the network effect and centralized environment that Twitter provides, without which GP might not have those 20k followers.

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Re:Twitter Expected to Begin Layoffs and Stop Headquarters E... by mtw on Saturday October 10, 2015 @05:10PM (#10367022)

For "friends", there is Facebook. You don't do " friends" on twitter, except if the friends are hackers or marketing types.

Twitter is more for information

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