[freehunter]

When I think of twitter I think nothing but mainstream. There are two platforms that anyone who is anyone (celebrity or business or politician) needs to have: either Facebook or Twitter. Niche is Instragram. Niche is Snapchat. But when Kardashian is on CNN once an hour because of a tweet, it's not niche. App.Net is niche. Twitter is the epitome of mainstream.

[eterm]

CNN is precisely the journalism niche they are talking about.

It isn't about niche celebrities, but celebrities as a whole is their niche. And journalists, of course. Newspaper websites publish vast quantities of tweets because it costs them nothing, it means you indirectly consume a lot of tweets.

But the celebrity content consumed by journalists is as a whole still a niche, even if all celebrities are on there.

FWIW I think it would be a mistake to abandon that, but it does raise questions about how they grow.

[mmahemoff]

Part of Twitter's challenge is that it's mainstream, but in a "write-only" way. Every celebrity, politician, religious leader, and journalist may be tweeting 24-7, but their followers aren't engaging in the same way they do on Facebook. A lot of users don't login, tweet, or spend much time on the site/app according to various reports.

Chris Sacca said a lot about this recently. http://lowercasecapital.com/2015/06/03/what-twitter-can-be-2...

[Zigurd]

Google will buy it because Google+ is Twitter minus the people.

[dredmorbius]

G+ is a staggering number of peoole. 2.6 billion last I checked. Its simply that mist of them don't want to be there and say nothing. Engagement is by a fraction of a percent of the whole.

[icpmacdo]

I think thats the main problem with Twitter, saturation. Its mainstream enough the regular people are not likely to jump on Twitter now if they already haven't.

[somebodyother]

This. Nobody who could conceivably make an account is just waiting to hear about this hot new thing called microblogging.

[bluepostitnote]

And yet Facebook is still signing up users

[incongruity]

I'd argue they're better about extracting value from network effects – Facebook allows you to broadcast, but it really encourages interactions... the value grows a lot more with your network... whereas, following more people on twitter just makes it harder to follow.

[dredmorbius]

My understanding was that FB growth stalled in the US./EU in 2012, slipping since. No?

[nuclear_eclipse]

> "Niche is Instagram"

Except Instagram has more active users than Twitter...

[freehunter]

When was the last time you saw a business with nothing but an Instagram profile, or saw Instagram referenced on the news, or cited in a paper, or used for a press release?

It's not about active users, it's about how it's used.

[mkr-hn]

Everyone had an AOL keyword. AOL isn't dead, but it fell hard. Ubiquity isn't enough.

[freehunter]

Are you saying AOL wasn't mainstream? The Internet might have been niche as a whole, but out of that, AOL was as mainstream as it got. AOL was synonymous with Internet, like Facebook and Twitter are synonymous with social media.

[mkr-hn]

I said:

> Everyone had an AOL keyword. AOL isn't dead, but it fell hard. Ubiquity isn't enough.

Every business having a Twitter account won't save Twitter any better than everyone having an AOL keyword saved AOL.

[Altay-]

I don't think that's a fair comparison. AOL didn't initially position itself as a portal. It positioned itself as an ISP with a portal.

Had AOL built itself as a web portal like Yahoo from the start it may very well have stayed relevant. I still have business partners (in non tech fields) that use their AOL email and news/portal services.