[empressplay]

I know this is going to be an unpopular view, but Twitter is a zombie. They've come, they've gone but they don't seem to know it yet.

It's a case of scaling too far, before your revenue model can catch up with your size, I think.

[muzmath]

It's unpopular because it's blatantly false.

> As of the third quarter of 2015, the microblogging service averaged at 307 million monthly active users.

A zombie doesn't have 300 million active users.

[maxlamb]

MySpace did at one point, and it was indeed a walking dead.

[riffic]

Kinda like MySpace, yeah?

[muzmath]

MySpace wasn't a zombie while it was at the height of it's popularity. All zombies were once alive. I'm not arguing that it won't be a zombie, but that it currently isn't.

[gaius]

Like Yahoo?

[muzmath]

In what way is yahoo a zombie? Yahoo offers many products that are very competitive in their respective spaces (as well as having a 33 billion market cap)

[josefresco]

They didn't scale too far, they set expectations too high (for investors) creating the perception of a struggling $20B company, when they are really a thriving $5B company.

[apalmer]

I think this is it I think. Just investors who made a bad investment, more or less they are just going to have to deal with it, and take their loss.

Twitter doesn't have a means to increase its profitability by 500% over the next couple years. It will probably be fine in the sense that it will probably remain 'minor'-ly profitable and probably remain at its current size for quite a while... I think its hard to replace in that, to replace twitter you more or less have to duplicate it exactly. Its really that simple a service...

[developer1]

This is exactly it. Twitter should not have gone public, or at least nowhere near the valuation it received. You don't take in a lot of investor money without having a fully fleshed-out plan on how exactly you intend to put it to good use. Twitter's IPO was not based on logic and proven methods for growth. It was a bunch of people jumping on a bandwagon hoping that Twitter was going to be the next major player in the social media bubble.

Small and medium-sized businesses should be raking in investments to accomplish a single specific and realistically obtainable goal at a time. Large businesses who haven't yet found a way to be profitable aren't going to magically find a solution to all their problems by experimenting with dozens or hundreds of new ideas at high cost, with the desperate hope that one of the ideas will randomly catch and save the business. That approach is pure gambling, and so far the gamble does not appear to be paying off.

I honestly can't imagine what people who invested in Twitter expected to see happen. I figure that with Twitter being the next most recognized name in social media after Facebook, people simply imagined that nothing could go wrong. "Everyone knows about Twitter" does not translate as "everyone uses or will want to use Twitter".