The problem here is the assumption that the algorithm will do a half decent job at showing you important tweets.
Judging by the facebook algorithm, which is utterly terrible at showing important stuff, it seems unlikely. Just another step in the facebookification of twitter to appease short term oriented shareholders who rated the growth too highly.
It is already a mess, can't see how adding this will improve the situation. Opposite of the minimal, fast, realtime platform that so many flocked to in the first place. I'm close to deleting accounts for both.
I left facebook for this exact reason. the platform has diminished so greatly that it's now virtually unusable to me.I'm really not sure what to equate the experience to, it feels like trying to read a newspaper that is all ads. It's all vapid useless sales instead of meaningful interpersonal connections over long distances... the way it started. I fear twitter is not far behind.
First of all, market capitalisation is only the measure of the number of outstanding shares multiplied by the current price. You are absolutely kidding yourself if you think that all the FB shares in existence could be sold at the current NASDAQ closing price.
Secondly, to achieve the current $296Bn market capitalisation, investors are rating the company at sixty-six times 2015 earnings. That means that FB better be growing at an obscene rate for the very long term, because as we say in the market, FB is "priced for perfection". Any hiccups in earnings or signs of faltering growth and investors will be just as quick to de-rate the FB price as they have been for TWTR. So it can be "worth" $296Bn one day and significantly less than that the next.
Suppose your claim is true. Suppose in other words that it would be impossible to sell all the FB shares at the current closing price. How would that be an argument against the usefulness of comparing Twitter's market cap to FB's?
No one has ever bought a company whose market cap is as big as FB's currently is -- let alone bought one for cash. But publicly-traded companies with caps in the billions have been bought in all-cash transactions, and the experience there is that the buyer usually ends up paying more than the market cap right before the investing public starts to become aware of the attempt to buy the company. But even if that were not true, what relevance would it have for whether or not it is a good idea to use market-cap data to compare publicly-traded companies and their products and strategies?
Does market cap not remain a good estimate of the future expected earnings of the company?
I would first point out that it is not really a claim but a simply observable fact for anyone with a brokerage account, check the available market depth at any given price to see how many shares can be sold into the available bid before having to sell at the next lowest available bid in the auction.
The parent did not make a claim that comparing the market cap of TWTR to that of FB is useful, nor am I attempting to make an "argument" in the opposite direction. The goal was to point out that measuring success by an extremely volatile marginal price which rates the stock at sixty-six times earnings is neither accurate nor useful. A little surprised that my attempt to provide useful information earned a handful of downvotes compared to the parents throwaway sentence.
If one honestly believes that market cap data is useful for comparing publicly traded companies in anything but the broadest sense, then one must believe that yesterday TWTR was "worth" 2.5% more of FB than today (judging by daily fluctuations in the TWTR:FB ratio). That is observably not the case, the only difference between that day and the previous is that the company made some information public, no facts at the coalface actually changed. Value of equity is decided over the very long term life of that equity.
As for your final question, one need only look back in history to see that the aggregate marginal daily price and hence market capitalisation is often (and especially in tech) not a good estimate of future expected earnings of a company. The market almost always overshoots, both to the upside and downside, largely depending on available liquidity.
For me, the "while you were away" feature shows me things I don't care about. I do indicate so by clicking the "X" to train their engine - but it hasn't shown me anything worth caring about.
For example, I really care about funny cats. My timeline is 85% cats, and I retweet funny cat pictures 65% of the time. However, the while you were away feature shows me things like opinions about voting, or holidays, or what co-workers are doing and saying, etc - Yah - it's in my feed, but I literally don't care. I spend 8 hours a day with my co-workers and hear all their tweets first hand. All I want are fun cat pictures from places that I haven't seen before to make the day easier to pass and to ward off depression... and it'd be great if twitter can make me a cat picture search engine. But for now they haven't done that for me yet.
Maybe they can allow a user to curate the "while you are away" algorithm so I can have a core set of twitter accounts that I really want to keep track of while I'm away ( https://twitter.com/cuteemergency and https://twitter.com/EmrgencyKittens ) and/or weigh explicitly which accounts I want to train my personal preference algorithms ... It would be pretty easy too since the lists feature already exists - just make it so the algorithm only pulls from an indicated list.
Until such a function exists I think i'll keep it off and just enjoy the cats.
Anecdotal, but I can see how this feature might or might not hit the target. All I can say is I hope they keep it an option that can be disabled or enabled and they don't take away the option box for this.
> However, the while you were away feature shows me things like opinions about voting, or holidays, or what co-workers are doing and saying, etc - Yah - it's in my feed, but I literally don't care. I spend 8 hours a day with my co-workers and hear all their tweets first hand.
Mute them on Twitter if the unfollowing isn't socially acceptable?
I don't want to mute them because I follow their tweets and timelines! I wouldn't hesitate to block/ban if I didn't find them interesting.
I just don't need to be reminded about what they did "while I'm away" - by definition when I'm away from Twitter I'm most likely working and talking to them directly! And often I helped them write/make/instigate the tweet that is getting so much traffic that twitter emerges it as "something hot" from their account.
I get that I want to follow them and don't want to mute them - just that the feature is extraneous for some types of tweets (and some classes of twitter accounts) - for example, if I follow a stock tweet - one that tweets pricing alerts for example, I don't need to know 10+ hours later "what important things they are up to" because by definition, that stock tweet is no longer valid (trading day is only the length of the working day).
And even if I wanted historical updates, I can just go back to their timeline and/or do a search on the stock exchange symbol.
Like I said, if they allowed users to filter out or filter in - or use the List feature - which a large % of twitter users know about and use, it'd be more useful.
But how do you know with any certainty that it is showing you all the things you drfinitely care about? I find it only highlights one in every ten tweets I care about, so I still need to scroll through and read everything because it has missed so much.
I just logged in to fb (Android app) for the first time today and was shown a post shared by a friend. I left a commmment and was shown a weird message "will be shown once online". Never seen it before, but no problem I just need to check my comment went through. Too bad! That shared post is no longer in my feed, even after dragging to refresh 3 or 4 times, each time showing completely different content, mostly stuff from previous days that I had already seen (but I still have to scroll for ages to check because what was on top might be down lower now). In the end I had to go to his fb page and check manually, because the algorithm that decided that post was important immediately changed its mind on my behalf.
PS: the comment now appears on some refreshes and not others.
Judging by the facebook algorithm, which is utterly terrible at showing important stuff, it seems unlikely. Just another step in the facebookification of twitter to appease short term oriented shareholders who rated the growth too highly.
It is already a mess, can't see how adding this will improve the situation. Opposite of the minimal, fast, realtime platform that so many flocked to in the first place. I'm close to deleting accounts for both.