CNN BUSINESS - Apr 9 - Trump is reportedly planning to launch a social media platform. Last year TikTok hit the 100m user mark in the U.S. Clubhouse, Gab and Parler emerged. Early social networks like Facebook and Twitter enjoyed a distinct advantage: They were early movers. Today, advances in tech have made it trivial to establish a website and build social functionality: (Heroku on Amazon, or Microsoft Azure with code from Github). A barebones copycat of Facebook might cost $25k, but bandwidth and storage costs could quickly spiral out of control. If you ended up with tens of millions of engaged users, costs could be a $1m/mo. An even bigger challenge is figuring out what product to offer and USPs. A lot of the first invites to Clubhouse, similar to LinkedIn, went to VCs and founders. Everyone wants to join the network where the investors are. Then there's still the question of profitability.
464 posts categorized "Twitter"
It's Never Been Easier to Start a Social Network. Succeeding Is Another Story
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Twitter Have Held Acquisition Talks With Clubhouse on Potential $4B Deal
TECH CRUNCH - Apr 9 - Twitter held talks with Clubhouse around a potential acquisition of the live drop-in audio networking platform, with a deal value somewhere ~$4B. The timing of this revelation seems likely to prime the pump for Clubhouse's conversation with potential investors at its target valuation for the round it's looking to raise.
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Jack Dorsey's First Tweet Sells for $2.9M
BBC - Mar 24 - Twitter founder Jack Dorsey's first tweet has been sold for the equivalent of $2.9m (£2.1m) to a Malaysia-based businessman. The tweet, which said "just setting up my twttr," was first published on March 21, 2006, and was auctioned off by Dorsey for charity. The Malaysia-based buyer Sina Estavi compared the purchase to buying a Mona Lisa painting. The tweet was bought using the ether cryptocurrency, a rival to bitcoin. It was sold as a nonfungible token (NFT) to Estavi, the chief executive of technology firm Bridge Oracle.
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Twitter Begins Testing Its Clubhouse Alternative on Android
CNET - Mar 4 - Twitter is expanding beta testing of its new audio chat room feature Spaces to include devices running Android. Twitter's competitor to Clubhouse has been in beta testing since late last year, but only with a small number of users on iPhones. The Android beta test for Twitter Spaces started Tuesday. Twitter users who are invited to join a room, also known as a Space, will see a purple aura in their fleetline to join. They won't be able to create their own rooms as of yet but the company says that option will come soon. Twitter has yet to provide a date on when the feature will be available to all users.
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Twitter Explored Buying ShareChat and Turning Moj Into a Global TikTok Rival
TECH CRUNCH - Feb 23 - Twitter recently held talks to acquire Indian social media startup ShareChat as the company explored ways to expand its presence in the world's second-largest internet market and build a global rival to TikTok. Twitter offered to but ShareChat for $1.1B and had committed an additional investment of $900M. Twitter had expressed intention to take Moj, a short-form video app that ShareChat owns with 80M users, to international markets and position it as a rival to Chinese app TikTok.
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Twitter Is Considering Paid Subscriptions Again
PCMAG - Feb 10 - Twitter is reportedly eyeing a subscription service to curb its reliance on advertising. Various ideas are being floated, including one that would let users pay the people they follow for exclusive content. Other revenue-generating proposals include charging for programs like Tweetdeck or advanced features like "undo send" or profile-customization options, the news agency said, citing people familiar with the effort. Twitter has been mulling the idea of subscriptions since at least 2017 when reports suggested a paid version of Tweetdeck aimed at marketers, journalists, and professionals. In return for a monthly fee, users would get access to elite alerts, trends, advanced analytics, and posting tools.
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Twitter Acquires Newsletter Platform Revue
TECH CRUNCH - Jan 27 - Twitter is getting into the newsletter business by acquiring Revue, a Dutch startup that allows users to publish and monetize email newsletters. Product Lead Kayvon Beykpour and VP of Publisher Products Mike Park suggested that that Newsletter is a new way for Twitter to serve writers and publishers who have built a following with their tweets. Twitter will continue to operate Revue as a standalone product, with its team remaining "focused on improving the ways writers create their newsletters, build their audience and get paid for their work." The company is also making the platform's pro features free for all users and lowering the fee charged on paid newsletters to 5%.
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Twitter's Decentralized Social Network Project 'Bluesky' Is Hiring
INPUT - Jan 25 - Bluesky, Twitter's project to build a decentralized social networking protocol, is still alive and kicking, and it's picking up steam. First announced in 2019, the company just released a review evaluating the state of existing decentralized social media projects, like Mastodon and Diaspora. It also says it's looking to hire Bluesky's first project manager. CEO Jack Dorsey envisions Bluesky as an open-source protocol that would power Twitter - and other social networks.
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Report Finds Many Americans Rely on Social Media for News
MEDIAPOST - Jan 13 - 53% of Americans get their news from social media at least some of the time, but an increasing percentage of them feel it is making them more confused about current events. That's the finding of a new report from the Pew Research Center, which has been tracking Americans' use of social media for news for several years. The report suggests that social media is becoming a less reliable source of news for many Americans. Not surprisingly, Facebook is the primary social media source of news, with 36% of Americans citing it the social network as a "regular source" for news, followed by YouTube (23%), Twitter (15%), Instagram (11%), Reddit (6%), Snapchat (4%), LinkedIn (4%), TikTok (3%), WhatsApp (3%), Twitch (1%) and Tumblr (1%).
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Twitter Acquires Social Podcasting App Breaker
TECH CRUNCH - Jan 6 - Twitter has acquired the social broadcasting app Breaker (founded in 2016). The deal will see Breaker's team joining Twitter to help "improve the health of the public conversation" on the service, as well as work on Twitter's new audio-based networking project, Twitter Spaces. The Breaker app, however, will shut down on January 15, 2021. According to Leah Culver's tweet as the CEO of Breaker, she'll be joining Twitter with a focus on Twitter Spaces, Twitter’s audio-based social networking product, and Clubhouse rival. Spaces lets Twitter users chat in real-time using voice instead of text.
by Sarah Perez & Alex Wilhelm
See full article at Tech Crunch
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Google and Snap in Talks To Invest in India's ShareChat
TECH CRUNCH - Jan 5 - ShareChat, a Bangalore-based social network that added Twitter as an investor in 2019, is in advanced stages of talks to raise money from Google and Snap, as well as several existing investors, including Twitter, three sources familiar with the matter. ShareChat has raised about $264 million to date and was valued at nearly $700 million last year. Ankush Sachdeva, co-founder, and chief executive of ShareChat, said the app was growing "exponentially" and that users were spending, on average, ~30 mins on the app each day. If the deal goes through, it would be the first investment from Snapchat's parent company into an Indian startup.
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Twitter Confirms Periscope Is to Close
APPLE MAGAZINE - Dec 17 - Twitter has confirmed that its live-streaming platform Periscope, which it acquired back in 2015, will be shuttered in March 2021, with its core features being baked into Twitter itself. Twitter took ownership of Periscope at the same time as the app was named App of the Year by Apple, and though the company has enjoyed some success with the platform, it's now an "unsustainable" business model, and the company plans to close it and transition any remaining Periscope-exclusive features over to the main Twitter app.
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Twitter Acquires and Then Shuts Down Screen-Sharing Social App Squad
THE TECH PORTAL - Dec 14 - Twitter acquired Squad, a screen sharing social app. This acquisition doesn't include the Squad app, but just the co-founders of Squad being CEO Esther Crawford and CTO Ethan Sutin, and the rest of the team. Instead, the company has announced that with the acquisition, the app shut down on Dec 12. "Squad's talented team, led by Esther Crawford and Ethan Sutin, bring a deep understanding of how people engage in interactive audio and video conversations - an important pillar in the spectrum of conversations we seek to serve on Twitter," said Twitter's vice president of product Ilya Brown in a couple of tweets.
by Nikhil Makwana
See full article at The Tech Portal
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All the Social Media Giants Are Becoming the Same
WIRED - Dec 1 - Social media companies have taken unoriginality to new levels. Twitter now has Fleets, a rip-off of Instagram Stories, originally copied from Snapchat. Snapchat now has Spotlight, similar to Instagram Reels, brazenly stolen from TikTok. TikTok grew from the ashes of Vine, which was acquired by Twitter, which is now pursuing a concept called Audio Spaces, a carbon copy of Clubhouse. Companies are always eyeing their competitors to see what works; that's just market research. But copycatting on social media has led to platforms that look suspiciously similar, with fewer things that set them apart. The biggest differentiator is that they all call their Xeroxed features by different names, leading to the maddening vocabulary of social media. For the companies, reproducing the same features and formats is often an attempt to juice engagement.
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Indonesia Adds Twitter, Zoom to Tech Companies That Must Pay 10% VAT
REUTERS - Sep 8 - Indonesia has added 12 more companies, including Twitter and video-conferencing site Zoom, to a list of internet-based businesses that must pay a 10% VAT on sales. The companies must start charging VAT to advertisers and other customers from Oct. 1.
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