Yeah but those companies, Coca Cola etc, can only pay as long as Twitter have the user-base. And if the adverts cause users to go visit the site less, then their revenue stream from advertising would shrink.
Would they put averts in the Developer-API responses too? One one hand it's free to use, on the other hand it's being paid for by advertising. What company wants to be a slave to advertising companies? That sounds like a difficult situation to be in.
A 30-minute long TV show is actually only about 21.5 minutes long. The rest is advertising. People will tolerate it if the rest of the content is relevant and engaging.
If the ads are well targeted then they make people even more accepting of them.
I pay Netflix $9 a month and I have no commercials to speak of. What is the marginal ad revenue of every user on Twitter? If it's <$1/mo then there should be a premium, ad-less Twitter available for purchase at $1.99/mo.
You're not accounting to the effect a premium service has on marginal ad revenue per user. It goes down as the people with disposable income (the most desirable demographic) opt out of ads.
I bet th effect of even of the most engaged users isn't worth $10/month in ad revenue. Although I think there would be an irrational element in the pitch of reach the whole Twitter userbase vs reach the users that haven't paid.
You also don't (yet, at least) pay for "new" content. People sitting through commercials (or paying for cable) get content before it is even available to you.
Such is the nature of disruptive technologies. The "yet" in your comment speaks volumes on the impending doom of traditional, multi-channel television. The core value of Twitter, however, is the fresh and organic nature of the information flowing through it. Netflix relies much more on quality than newness. The major difference here is that advertisers are paying to have information artificially inserted into the Twitter-verse where the core value is the organic nature of the content. A subscription greater than marginal ad revenue would greatly increase the amount of organic info on Twitter (both to subscribers and free users) which would lead to more users which would lead to more overall ad revenue.
I don't think this argument really applies to TV, where viewers really haven't had any voting power about ads. Until very recently, they either watched TV or didn't, and I doubt people ever stopped watching TV and stopped digesting TV media because of ads.
It's amazing to have watched Twitter grow in the last four years. Now people even tweet from space. I think with regards to the architecture, it's not an old problem, and there are existing solutions from much larger entities. If they had the money, they could invest in an architecture worthy of a communications system that is so ubiquitous that it is being used to ignite social revolutions, manage humanitarian crises and talk to people buzzing around the themosphere in a tin can.
It's time for some real upgrades. And they do have a user base to support that. I would most definitely pay for better Twitter services if they were available. I think the question is, how do you not neglect the people are unable to pay for these services? How do you make it a fair service?
Agreed. Mozilla are also doing their part with FireFox, they have something called "35 Days" coming up to co-inside with the public release of 3.5, which is packed with juicy HTML5 goodness.
I think Microsoft are badly hurting from the their lack of web-focus (or at least web-productivity) over past years (around v6), but I don't think they are maimed. When you actually meet some of these guys at conferences etc: they seem to be very intelligent individuals, who have their finger on the pulse, yet remain very guarded.
Their guardedness is understandable from a corporate perspective, but it also carries personal weight when you hear a room full of people bad-mouthing IE with some of their developers standing at the back of the room. I have to say I am sympathetic to their position and believe in their ability, even though I am very much NOT an IE developer or enthusiast.
Yeah they do a lot of stuff. I think the reason people feel they don't is that their coming and goings are largely enveloped behind the green paper curtain. They do put things out there more than people give them credit for, but we are often not aware of them because of a natural schism between the consensus of a world-view and the forays of a dominant corporate machine. Regardless... the two organisms are really different faces of the same entity and should be treated as such if we are to experience the maximum reward from it's cumulative knowledge, which after-all is the primary purpose of the Internet in the first place.
I Disagree. I just got back from the Microsoft offices at Boston, and my personal hunch is that Silverlight is being primed for slick one-web device integration. While that may be possible to achieve with numerous languages, the people who seem to be really leading the way are in fact Microsoft:which makes me wonder: was the idea of having "a computer in every home" more a vision of the computer on the Star Ship Enterprise than the idea that everyone would have their own terminal? Judging by Bill Gate's abode, I would think the latter.
I'm not ruling out the possibility of Flash and Silverlight dying to HTML5, I'm just saying that it is unlikely to happen in the near future (even in HTML5) a) because of the people behind them and modern projects they are rolling out and b) because it takes a long time to change from one standard to another unless there is some kind of unforeseen tear in the fabric of hyper-space.
When all is said and done, it always seems come to down to the preference of the developer, which will always remain a diversity.
Hey, the OP probably has the actual code as well. If you really want to be sneaky, you could install a little back-door just in case things get serious.
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/the-old-github-fon...
https://github.com/rreusser/the-old-github-font