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back to article Twitter co-founder: 'I don’t give a SHIT if Instagram has more people looking at pretty pics'

Twitter co-founder Evan Williams has attacked Facebook for getting money men too hung up on monthly user metrics. When quizzed by Fortune magazine about the recent claim that the Facebook-owned photo-sharing site Instagram was now used by 300 million netizens, Williams hit back at how the numbers were presented. He also – …

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  1. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Williams wants to be important and influential

    That's the problem with Twitter right there - back in the distant days when The Times was an important newspaper, the advertisements were carefully separated from the content (on the outside,in fact). With Twitter, Facebook and the rest, you can't tell advertisement from content. In fact, usually the advertising is the content. And people comment on it.

    The pendulum is going to swing the other way at some point, and when it does, these profitless companies and their overpriced shares will be history.

    10 0 Reply
  2. Mark 85

    Yawn....

    Twatter, Instantgram, & FB. Whoppdeedo. At some point, they'll end up in the dustbin of history. Probably sooner than later, IMO.

    8 1 Reply
  3. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    I for the life of me can't figure out what is so good about these sites. Twatter is basically dumbed down IRC, instacracker is basically sending a picture, FaceB0rk is basically a webpage that uses frames...I mean WTF is so cutting edge about all this?

    Clearly now more than ever there is a remarkable highlight on those who know, and those who are suckers. I would love to know just how much of what user info makes marketing companies money...I mean REAL money.

    Social networking seems like the latest get rich scheme, but obviously no one has a network to keep track of the money it really makes.

    7 6 Reply
    1. P. Lee
      Reply Icon

      re: can't figure out what is so good about these sites

      +1

      Probably why twitter is doing better than FB. Storage of a little text is so much cheaper than graphics. It's also cheaper to push out. Whether FB will borg the function effectively and kill them off that way is a different matter.

      What is very depressing is TV reporting on twitter trending celebrity's gossip. Now that is meta-data I'm happy for the government to collect.

      I can't wait for FB to fold under the weight of its storage requirements. Perhaps then people will rethink the whole cloud thing and all the other far more important issues than ease of use.

      Oi, ISP! I want you to give me a presence directory I can extend as I see fit. XML, LDAP, even just an IRC channel people can query and my software can auto-reply to. I reckon some FLOSS guys can deal with unsolicitated messages safely via IRC.

      0 0 Reply
    2. Anonymous Coward
      Reply Icon
      Anonymous Coward

      I for the life of me can't figure out what is so good about these sites. Twatter is basically dumbed down IRC, instacracker is basically sending a picture, FaceB0rk is basically a webpage that uses frames...I mean WTF is so cutting edge about all this?

      You realise you are ridiculing what you admit to not understanding?

      Surely it would be better to say "I really don't understand the appeal of Facebook / Twitter / Instagram / etc, but hundreds of millions of other people seemingly do". Or "I don't know what's so good about these sites, but people with far more financial savvy than me seem to think otherwise and have backed them".

      4 4 Reply
      1. Anonymous Coward
        Reply Icon
        Anonymous Coward

        Geocities versus FarceBook

        "I for the life of me can't figure out what is so good about these sites. Twatter is basically dumbed down IRC, instacracker is basically sending a picture, FaceB0rk is basically a webpage that uses frames...I mean WTF is so cutting edge about all this?"

        Those of us who've been around long enough will recall the abomination that was Geocities.

        FaceB0rk relieves us of the visual abomination of Geocities, adds lots of useful functionality (and lots of it is useful, especially in closed group environments), and provides a generic and reasonably satisfactory standard delivery vehicle for everyone's content - all at the cost of being bombarded with "targetted" advertising and being tracked whether we like it or not.

        Now, whether everyone's content is "worth" delivering at all, is a different question, but what is really not in dispute, is that FB has developed a pretty good system of uniformly delivering user content on a massive scale - and it is popular, whether we like it or not (and the bogus FB metric aside, lots of people are active).

        There are no free lunches, and at some point, advertisers might begin to value FB impressions differently, with interesting outcomes to follow.

        2 1 Reply
        1. Anonymous Coward
          Reply Icon
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: Geocities versus FarceBook

          Sociologically, Facebook is really interesting. Its appeal is (obviously) to narcissists and people with a generally inflated sense of self importance. But what seems to have happened is that it has legitimated narcissism, so more people feel able to go that way. Celebrity culture has become ever more fixated on image versus content. It may have been kickstarted by the way that just about all US kids are trained to sell themselves from kindergarten on, but it seems to keep finding new demographics of self-publicists. Like all the best marketing, it has found a need and then expanded its offering to widen the range of people experiencing that need.

          Zuckerberg is, accidentally or not, a genius. But being a genius doesn't make you good. Stalin too was a genius.

          4 1 Reply
          1. Anonymous Coward
            Reply Icon
            Anonymous Coward

            Re: Geocities versus FarceBook

            Facebook is an invaluable tool for staying in touch with family and friends across the globe (I'm an expat), features like Events are a genuinely useful tool for organising social events (aka herding cats). It appeals because of it's ubiquity, even the most ardent naysayer will climb off their high horse to accept an invitation....you don't have to engage in the news feed.

            Apart from anything else, it's clearly a valuable platform for advertisers, and it makes a healthy profit. More than can be said for Twitter et al. which I honestly just cannot see a way to monetise. The promoted posts are invariably irrelevant, I certainly would never pay money to advertise on it.

            2 0 Reply
    3. Amorous Cowherder
      Reply Icon
      Pint

      If you have a purpose then they can be useful tools. I know photographers who have managed to use "Instagrab" as a way to generate interest from their mobile phone snapshots, to get their main photography businesses off the ground and stay running. However they are not "lifestyles" as some people seem to think, these places are tools used by "tools". You get used by these sites, your data gets crawled over and analyzed to death, but if you're a little smart you can use them for your own advantage and get something useful back.

      0 0 Reply
  4. Camilla Smythe

    No Doubt I Missed This...

    http://i.imgur.com/2Zvqo7h.png

    Muh-Huh.. Click

    http://i.imgur.com/jhFmC8a.png

    Uhm-Kay,....

    Is this bad doo-doos?

    0 0 Reply
    1. Kristian Walsh Silver badge
      Reply Icon

      Re: No Doubt I Missed This...

      Picture 1: Twitter Inc is trying to coax you into giving them access to your Outlook.com email account. (They want to find out which of your Twitter contacts are also known to you via email)

      When you foolishly click "Yes", Twitter's server starts the process of obtaining an authentication token from Microsoft that it can later use to slurp your email info.

      Picture 2: Microsoft is asking you to log in and prove that you are the owner of that outlook.com account. Once you do that, you will be asked to give permission for Twitter to grab your contact list.

      There is no business connection between Microsoft and Twitter. If you had used a GMail account as your Twitter account's email account, then Picture 2 would show you the Google signin process instead.

      1 0 Reply
  5. Amorous Cowherder

    USED or SET UP?

    My Missus has a an Instagram account just to keep an eye on our what our daughter is doing, but my Missus has no interest in posting.

    1 0 Reply
  6. Jedit Silver badge
    Stop

    Swearwords in article titles

    Guys, can you please not put swearwords in the titles of articles? I personally don't mind or care about the odd four-letter word, or indeed many of them, but employers often do. This case was particularly egregious as at time of typing the article is headlining, so the first thing I saw when I loaded up El Reg on my lunch break was "SHIT" in inch-high capital letters. I don't want to lose my workplace Reg-reading privileges...

    2 0 Reply
  7. Cuddles

    "We make more money, m'kay?"

    ...is what he might have said if Twitter had ever actually made any money. In reality, the big news for Twitter last year was that for the first time ever they managed to post a profit. For one quarter. As long as you ignore half their expenses. Total for the year? $35 million loss.

    "It’s this realtime information network where everything in the world that happens on Twitter – important stuff breaks on Twitter and world leaders have conversations on Twitter."

    Or, in the words of Jack Dorsey, co-founder, former CEO and current chairman, as opposed to Williams, co-founder and currently not involved with the company at all other than owning some shares - "a message on Twitter is 'a short burst of inconsequential information'"

    Which is why around 80% of it is classed as pointless, with another 10% being spam and advertising:

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter#Content

    We're very much social monkeys and pointless babble has a useful place as part of that, but let's not pretend that a service which exists specifically to enable that is in some way a deep and meaningful experience. Or a profitable one, in this case.

    0 0 Reply
  8. ItsNotMe
    Mushroom

    Well you know Evan...

    ...there are actually some of us who "don't give a shit" about ANY of these crap social networking sites...especially yours.

    0 0 Reply

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