<story><title>Twitter Expected to Begin Layoffs and Stop Headquarters Expansion</title><url>http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/10/technology/twitter-expected-to-begin-layoffs-and-stop-headquarters-expansion.html?hp&amp;action=click&amp;pgtype=Homepage&amp;module=second-column-region&amp;region=top-news&amp;WT.nav=top-news</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>petercooper</author><text>I mostly agree, but the scale of what Twitter is doing technically is &lt;i&gt;very&lt;/i&gt; different.&lt;p&gt;Network size is not as important as how messages are distributed within it. Whereas most WhatsApp messages are one to one, on Twitter they&amp;#x27;re almost always one-to-very-many.&lt;p&gt;If 10000 Twitter users with 1000 followers each send a tweet, that&amp;#x27;s 10000000 messages hitting queues. 10000 WhatsApp users sending a single message each are likely to result in 10000-20000 messages (sometimes people have group conversations).</text></item><item><author>amix</author><text>I think the general market could learn a thing or two from WhatsApp: 55 people powering a platform used by 800 million _active_ users across many different platforms. And WhatsApp has innovated, e.g. the new video and calling system works very well.&lt;p&gt;I have often wondered what thousands of Twitter employees are doing all day long? Their platform and apps have been stale for a long time.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>paulsutter</author><text>Number of employees doesn&amp;#x27;t scale up with the number of messages hitting queues.&lt;p&gt;No those acres of employees at Twitter are showing each other powerpoint presentations, ordering lunch for each other, and subdividing again and again tiny slivers of functionality into more and more product management teams, none of whom have sufficient authority to make any material improvement to the product.</text></comment>
<story><title>Twitter Expected to Begin Layoffs and Stop Headquarters Expansion</title><url>http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/10/technology/twitter-expected-to-begin-layoffs-and-stop-headquarters-expansion.html?hp&amp;action=click&amp;pgtype=Homepage&amp;module=second-column-region&amp;region=top-news&amp;WT.nav=top-news</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>petercooper</author><text>I mostly agree, but the scale of what Twitter is doing technically is &lt;i&gt;very&lt;/i&gt; different.&lt;p&gt;Network size is not as important as how messages are distributed within it. Whereas most WhatsApp messages are one to one, on Twitter they&amp;#x27;re almost always one-to-very-many.&lt;p&gt;If 10000 Twitter users with 1000 followers each send a tweet, that&amp;#x27;s 10000000 messages hitting queues. 10000 WhatsApp users sending a single message each are likely to result in 10000-20000 messages (sometimes people have group conversations).</text></item><item><author>amix</author><text>I think the general market could learn a thing or two from WhatsApp: 55 people powering a platform used by 800 million _active_ users across many different platforms. And WhatsApp has innovated, e.g. the new video and calling system works very well.&lt;p&gt;I have often wondered what thousands of Twitter employees are doing all day long? Their platform and apps have been stale for a long time.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>inthewoods</author><text>WhatsApp also appears, at the moment, to have a much simpler business model - you buy it. No advertising technology, no audience&amp;#x2F;data teams and, probably most significantly, no sales team to go out and get people to use the platform. And no big agency handholding people, no data scientists, no customer success account managers. I&amp;#x27;d be curious to see what the breakdown is between tech and sales at Twitter.</text></comment>