zlacker

>>antina+(OP)
So to recap, Twitter exploded onto the scene in 2007, the "fail whale" appeared a lot, developers made all sorts of wonderful programs hooked into Twitter, the fail whale disappeared, Twitter started to destroy the app ecosystem, App.net launched to great fanfare in response to Twitter's knuckleheaded anti-developer stance, Britney Spears and Justin Bieber arrived and knocked all the nerds out of the top spots on Twitterholic, Donald Trump came and bludgeoned everyone with his bombastic prose, and now App.net is shutting down.

And after all this, Twitter still does not have a viable business model.

>>milesf+q9
> And after all this, Twitter still does not have a viable business model.

...more pertinently, App.net didn't have one either - and they had an open API, charged real money and did all the things HNers' idealized version of Twitter would.

>>sangno+El
Maybe because the reason people use twitter isn't because it is useful but rather because

Either:

It is cool. So we must use it.

Or:

Everyone else is using it so we must use it too.

Seriously:

140 characters? Feature?

Everyone can read everything? Feature?

The two biggest technical "features" of twitter can be arrived at by dumbing down either google+ or facebook 98%.

>>reitan+jn
I have no idea why anyone even likes Twitter. Beyond broadcasting, there is nothing of value on it. Every tweet has absolutely inane replies. You can at least find some half-decent commentary in Facebook post comments, but Twitter is just insane babble

>>puranj+Sn
How a social platform looks like to any given person depends on the people that person associates with. If twitter is inane babble to you that says more about what you did with twitter than about twitter itself.

>>Mithal+Lp
In my field (marketing), it's overrun by spam.

And anytime I've looked at anything remotely political, I had to take a bath afterwards

>>puranj+NZ
Marketing and politics are probably the two worst areas to try to find any humanity in.

I use it for things like gaming, talking to locals (almost everyone I know in my current city I met through Twitter, or through someone I met through Twitter), getting local news, and keeping up with friends.