Twitter. To this day, I find it idiotic. I thought society reached rock bottom when politics started using it to convey their message (is there anything sadder than a political agenda that can be expressed in 140 characters?)
I too thought it was idiotic. Now I realize that because brevity is the soul of wit is the reason it succeeds. Sometimes less is more and the pearls of wisdom of society at large certainly qualify.
As of this writing, Twitter's market capitalization is over $23 billion. That's a success by any sensible definition. If you know something the market doesn't, there's any easy way to put your money where your mouth is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Short_(finance)
That is actually not a bad idea. A business with poor underlying fundamentals must either improve, or lose market cap. I'll have to give some serious thought to shorting twitter.
EDIT: It may be too late. It has already had major drops in the last quarter, and is down almost 50% off its highs from 2014.
Also on my agenda, which is an interesting situation for me because I'm a heavy user.
I think it is a great way to stay up-to date on what happens in startup-land and in open source, the granularity with which you can follow people still fascinates me. Seeing that 95% of what active human accounts post is pretty useless, I don't see justification of a $20bn+ market cap, especially without growth.
PS: They've recently cranked up ads, next earnings report could surprise ...
Do you own TWTR? I think eventually Twitter will be acquired and integrated into a different social network. As for the OP's original point, they've never turned a profit, and I'd estimate that half of their accounts are inactive/fake.
I don't own TWTR, but that's irrelevant. All of Twitter's early investors are very pleased with their investment, while those who missed out or (worse) passed are probably wringing Twitter's hands. Anyone who invested $10K in one of Twitter's early rounds is now set for life. (If I could have gotten in on one of those rounds, I certainly would have invested myself.)
Current profitability is irrelevant. What matters is net future (discounted) profitability. People who malign companies for not currently being profitable apparently don't understand this, but investors do, and the market certainly does.
Many great companies are massively unprofitable while in their early growth stage, then become massively profitable in their later years, and are valued accordingly. If you can exchange $1B in profits this year for (say) $2B in profits next year, you'd be a fool (assuming current discount rates) not to make the trade.
Bizarrely I'm much happier signing in on web sites using my slightly anonymous twitter account than anything else. Maybe this is where twitter can expand?
> is there anything sadder than a political agenda that can be expressed in 140 characters?
Formerly respected news outlets reproducing others' 140 character comments as a substitute for actually asking subject experts specific questions.
I understand the rationale for reproducing Twitter comments when they come from someone directly connected with the story. I can even see how comments from people claiming to be involved or particularly pithy statements might make it into a "breaking news" feed. What I don't understand is why news outlets with loftier ambitions than Buzzfeed think tweets like these:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-33656579
is substantial enough to constitute a commentary piece.
(Or worse still, the obituary complete with "@randomdave said 'RIP U were a legend'")
> (is there anything sadder than a political agenda that can be expressed in 140 characters?)
Sadder? Or anger inducing? I'm convinced the reason twitter succeeded is that it wound up being an echo chamber for the outraged. A perfect platform for trolls. You can't explain anything sufficiently in 140 characters, so dialectic is out. The fallback is usually rhetoric (appeals to emotion), with anger being the most effective.
The end result is you have an internet shouting match where everybody is trying to piss off everyone else and nobody can clarify anything. It's the digital embodiment of CGP Grey's video "This video will make you angry[0]".
I really like the idea of a service designed to deliver concise epigrams. Twitter is great when people are doing that.
Of course, more often they're boiling political agendas down to 140 characters, or worse, splitting a page-length message up into 17 chunks tagged (1/17). C'est la vie.
I don't think it's so much about conveying an important message more than being able to engage the masses at a pretty ridiculous speed. Besides, most politicians only post brief messages linking to bigger and more in-depth articles.