by admin | May 25, 2021 | Corporate, Corporate Buzz
New York, (IANS) Celebrating Twitter’s 10th birthday at its annual meeting on Wednesday, stockholders of the micro-blogging site have approved CEO Jack Dorsey’s pledge to give away one-third of his shares to employees.
Last October, Dorsey had pledged to donate shares to a pool to be “granted over time to Twitter’s employees and other service providers,” Forbes reported on Thursday.
The 6.8 million shares that the Twitter CEO plans to donate were worth about $200 million when he promised to give them to employees in October.
Since then, Twitter stocks have slid more than 50 percent owing to stalled users growth and falling revenues, lowering the value of the promised shares to $98 million, the report added.
Twitter shares fell sharply about 12 percent after the micro-blogging website – which managed to add 5 million people to take its monthly active user base to 310 million – missed the first quarter revenue estimates last month.
The company posted $595 million revenue in the first quarter ending March 31. It was up 36 percent from $435.9 million in the same quarter last year but missed the $607.9 million expected on average among analysts, Forbes reported.
Twitter posted a net loss of $79.7 million compared with a year-earlier loss of $162.4 million.
Twitter has predicted revenue for the second quarter between $590 million and $610 million — much lower than the $678 million analysts expected.
“Revenue came in at the low end of our guidance range, as brand marketers did not increase spend as quickly as expected in Q1,” the company tweeted.
According to Dorsey, the engagement on Twitter is growing. Direct messages are up about 50 percent year-over-year and tweets shared via direct message are up more than 75 percent quarter-over-quarter.
Twitter said more than 800 million people visit the site and there are more than 1 billion monthly unique visitors to pages that syndicate Twitter content.
The company also said that new follows on the service are up about 48 percent.
Dorsey hinted that Twitter’s deal with the National Football League (NFL) to stream 10 games this fall will help the company earn better traffic.
by admin | May 25, 2021 | Corporate, Corporate Buzz
New Delhi, (IANS) The micro-blogging site Twitter is reportedly planning to stop counting photos and links against the 140-character limit.
This comes as a welcome news for Twitter fans as the change will allow them to compose longer tweets.
“Twitter is planning to incorporate changes in the coming two weeks,” The Verge reported on Monday.
Attaching links and photos currently strikes out 23 and 24 characters respectively off a tweet’s character count which often requires thinking in unconventional ways to convey what you mean in your tweet.
The change looks more tuned in comparison to earlier reports by Twitter to increase the 140-character limit to 10,000.
Twitter is hoping that it will make the service more approachable to users.
According to Twitter, there is still time for you to tweet in 10,000 characters and its original 140-character limit is here to stay.
Appearing on a TV show recently, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey said that the 140-character limit is “a beautiful constraint” and that Twitter “will never lose that feeling”.
“It’s (140-characters) staying. It’s a good constraint for us, and it allows for of-the-moment brevity… We’re changing a lot. We’re always going to make Twitter better,” he was quoted as saying.
Earlier in January, media reports said that Twitter is building a new feature that will allow users to tweet longer than its traditional 140-character limit.
The 140-character limit has been around as long as Twitter has been and has become part of the product’s personality.
by admin | May 25, 2021 | Economy, News
New York : (IANS) If you thought you will be able to convey more to your friends and policymakers on Twitter soon, hold on. According to the micro-blogging site, there is still time for you to tweet in 10,000 characters and its original 140-character limit is here to stay.
Appearing on a TV show, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey said that the 140-character limit is “a beautiful constraint” and that Twitter “will never lose that feeling”.
“It’s (140-characters) staying. It’s a good constraint for us, and it allows for of-the-moment brevity… We’re changing a lot. We’re always going to make Twitter better,” he was quoted as saying in a Tech Crunch report on Saturday.
Earlier in January, media reports said that Twitter is building a new feature that will allow users to tweet longer than its traditional 140-character limit.
The company is currently considering a 10,000-character limit, recode.net reported, adding that Twitter may launch this feature toward the end of the first quarter.
This is the character limit the company uses for its Direct Messages product.
According to the report, it is also possible that the 10,000-character feature may change before it is finally rolled out.
“Twitter is currently testing a version of the product in which tweets appear the same way they do now, displaying just 140 characters, with some kind of call to action that there is more content you can’t see,” recode.net said, quoting sources.
Clicking on the tweets will then expand them to reveal more content.
The 140-character limit has been around as long as Twitter has and has become part of the product’s personality.
Twitter is also working on the idea of changing its reverse chronological timeline.
The micro-blogging site is experimenting with a Facebook-type way of sorting your timeline where tweets are sorted by relevance and not in reverse chronological order as it happens now.
According to motherboard.vice.com, Twitter is working with algorithms similar to the ones Facebook uses to order items on your news feed.
“This is an experiment. We’re continuing to explore ways to surface the best content for people using Twitter,” a company spokeswoman was quoted as saying.
Twitter has been hinting towards an algorithmic-driven news feed for more than a year.
The test is part of Dorsey’s promise for bold changes to Twitter to help get it out of its slow growth
by admin | May 25, 2021 | Markets, Technology
New York:(IANS) An Arab Spring activist has accused the Twitter micro-blogging site of suspending his account after administrators mistook him for the leader of the Islamic State (IS) terrorist group.
Iyad El-Baghdadi, who has more than 70,000 Twitter followers and frequently mocks the IS, said his account was suspended for about half-an-hour after he was misidentified as IS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi in Indonesian newspaper Republika and the New York Post, BBC reported on Friday.
“To confuse an Arab man for the IS leader because of his very Arabic common surname is overt racism, @twitter,” he wrote on his account.
“My account gave you nearly 100 million twitter views this year, but you suspend me and keep the trolls running around, @twitter,” he wrote in another tweet.
El-Baghdadi said he received a message from Twitter saying he had “violated” its rules but did not specify the offence.
The activist, who also researches radicalisation, said the company needed to be “more transparent” about why and how people are suspended.
“I don’t think a single Arab country exists that doesn’t have a family with the surname El-Baghdadi,” his another tweet read.
Arab Spring refers to the democratic uprisings that arose independently and spread across the Arab world in 2011.
Meanwhile, Twitter has not commented on the issue yet.
In a fresh bid to combat abusive behaviour, micro-blogging site Twitter is also revising its rules to tackle hateful conduct including spreading of terror messages online.
“We believe that protection from abuse and harassment is a vital part of empowering people to freely express themselves on Twitter,” Megan Cristina, director, trust and safety at Twitter, posted in a blog recently.
“The updated language emphasises that Twitter will not tolerate behaviour intended to harass, intimidate, or use fear to silence another user’s voice. As always, we embrace and encourage diverse opinions and beliefs but we will continue to take action on accounts that cross the line into abuse,” she posted.
Over the past year, Twitter has taken several steps to fight abuse in order to protect freedom of expression.
It has empowered users with tools for blocking, muting and reporting abusive behaviour.
by admin | May 25, 2021 | Markets, Technology
New York:(IANS) The response by a company to a customer’s complaint on the micro-blogging site Twitter is likely to trigger many more such complaints, says a study co-authored by an Indian-origin researcher.
The team found that while addressing complaints on social media does improve customer relationship with the company, but it also increases customers’ expectations to receive help, and makes customers more likely to speak up in the future.
That is, responding to complaints will encourage even more complaints.
“Social media is a double edge sword. Companies need to watch out and weigh the plus side against the down side for marketing and service interventions,” said researcher Sunder Kekre from Carnegie Mellon University.
Along with Liye Ma of University of Maryland and Baohong Sun of Cheung Kong Graduate School of Business, Kekre examined the history of compliments and complaints by several hundred consumers of a major telecommunications services provider made on Twitter and the company’s responses.
“People complain on Twitter not just to vent their frustration. They do that also in the hope of getting the company’s attention. Once they know the company is paying attention, they are more ready to complain the next time around,” explained Ma.
Despite this side effect, addressing complaints is still worthwhile.
The improved customer relationship from such effort outweighs the downside of encouraging more complaints, the researchers observed.
The study was published in the Articles in Advance section of Marketing Science, a journal of the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS).
