Twitter: Years After the Alphabet Acquisition

https://medium.com/@karan/twitter-years-after-the-alphabet-acquisition-3f5b5b168fb5#.60mrti2fe

by kaws • 10 years ago

62 44 10 years ago

medium.com

ghshephard• 10 years ago

Someone should append a (2019) to the title.

codingdave• 10 years ago

Or a (fanfiction).

archlight• 10 years ago

I really hope google will buy twitter so it can put back real time search in twitter stream a few years ago as an experiment.

Spivak2• 10 years ago

They could also just pay Google to develop that feature for them. Cooperation doesn't have to happen only by acquisition.

melted5• 10 years ago

I hope they buy it for a different reason: so they could drain this useless sea of vapidity and narcissism, and drive the company into the ground within 3 years tops. Or maybe Dorsey will do it on his own, who knows. Twitter's chance of death goes up dramatically if it's not a standalone entity.

mschuster914• 10 years ago

Twitter's chance of death goes up dramatically if it's not a standalone entity.

Currently the whole TWTR management is looking to please short-term "investor" and "speculator" scum.

Companies don't exist for 3-month intervals and maximum gains, they exist for creating LONG TIME wealth (and that's the mistake Capitalism does).

Existence inside a huge, rock-solid company frees management from the cognitive and financial round to be hyper-effective for capitalists instead for their users (who actually create the work that makes Twitter exist).

Spivak2• 10 years ago

You have a typo, in the section about Twitter's business tools you said they have '"millions of" of users'.

karangoeluw5• 10 years ago

Good catch. Thank you

acslater00• 10 years ago

$29b in cash and stock?? Man, I'm really looking forward to the 150% run up in TWTR before Alphabet makes that $43 tender offer. brb calling my broker

0x0dea• 10 years ago

PhilWest• 10 years ago

Why is there an earnings call if it's wholly owned by Alphabet?

taylorhou• 10 years ago

OP states that Google keeps Twitter as its own entity that reports, runs, and operates independently.

wslh3• 10 years ago

This is an unreal post: "When Alphabet bought Twitter back in June 2016 for almost $29 billion", you can easily check Twitter valuation at $10 billion here: https://www.google.com/finance?q=NYSE%3ATWTR&ei=gHO_VpH9GsnB... so... spending 3X the public market valuation will be crazy.

And speaking about science fiction, what will Alphabet/Google do to turn around Twitter?

Also the posts saying: "I quit Facebook" are nonsense, how many people around you removed themselves from FB? Most probably, very few.

orf• 10 years ago

how many people around you removed themselves from FB?

Almost everyone, it's becoming a ghost town on Facebook proper. Whatsapp/messenger/instagram not at all, but few of my 300+ friends really use it that much any more.

wslh3• 10 years ago

Almost everyone,

And what do they do? I mean, are they distributed into many different occupations?

nostrademons• 10 years ago

I think he's assuming the market will turn around, or at least Twitter will turn around enough that it's an attractive acquisition target.

karangoeluw5• 10 years ago

spending 3X the public market valuation

Just last year, Twitter’s market cap was more than double what it is today. Since then, they have managed to grow revenue by 48% while reducing the losses by 9%. So, with all that, I think $29B is a steal for the acquisition.

EDIT: my last response here was uninformed.

And speaking about science fiction, what will Alphabet/Google do to turn around Twitter?

Clearly you have not read the post, and are jumping to conclusions.

Riod4• 10 years ago

If it is an early stage company that has the ability to not just increase revenue/customer but also total number of customers.

Also the competition in the bidding process matters. There are a limited number of players who can/will swallow an acquisition this size. Public companies never get bought for these numbers. Why would Google bid that when a 30-40% premium would be enough for most shareholders to vote yes?

On twitter itself, I feel the quote, "clown car that fell into a goldmine" attributed to mark zuckerberg is pretty appropriate.

wslh3• 10 years ago

3x is not a crazy multiple for a company that has grown revenue by 48% and decreased losses by 10% (yoy)

Tell me please of other public companies which also were acquired by public companies for that multiplier.

Clearly you have not read the post, and are jumping to conclusions.

I read the post and it offers a childish reason why Twitter should be acquired by Google.

pavlov• 10 years ago

Twitter's market cap was twice as large as recently as October 2015. The current market makes it very hard to guess where tech companies are in 6 months.

fchollet• 10 years ago

So Periscope and Moments would be the saving grace of Twitter? On what planet does the author live?

sigmar2• 10 years ago

Moments is pretty amazing. Have you used it? Seems to me like it is miles ahead of snapchat's stories

Riod4• 10 years ago

I have. Gives me a bunch of bs I have no interest in. How about ask me/infer from who I follow, what I'm interested in? Google now does that and blends it in with more general stories; simple and useful. Not intrusive and useless like moments.

azinman22• 10 years ago

Apples and oranges. Snapchat is personal, moments is more like news.

karangoeluw5• 10 years ago

How much have you used the two products?

qj4714• 10 years ago

Ha ha...April Fools came early this year

jasonkostempski• 10 years ago

I think you mean it came early next year.

riffic• 10 years ago

Way overpriced. All the cool kids are using GnuSocial/OStatus anyways (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OStatus).

Animats• 10 years ago

From the article: "Twitter is live".

Now that's a useful concept to focus the business. That tells Twitter what not to do. Twitter should do only things that are happening right now. All retrospective uses of Twitter data would be via Google and Google accounts.

Monetization of Twitter might not involve ads on Twitter. Google could data-mine Twitter for ad-targeting data. That might be more useful than "paid tweets".

Google's AI capabilities could be used to digest the Twitter flood and create news alerts. A Google Maps overlay of where things are happening on Twitter right now, for example. Enough activity, and a Google satellite (yes, Google has their own spy satellites [1]) would focus on the target area as soon as possible.

This could work out.

[1] http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-06-10/google-buy...

Twitter: Years After the Alphabet Acquisition

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