Football is officially coming to Twitter—and, for company executives, this is a big deal.
Starting this fall, you’ll be able to watch Thursday Night Football live on Twitter alongside tweets from friends and fans. As my colleague Brian Barrett noted earlier this month, Twitter reportedly beat the likes of Amazon, Verizon, and Facebook to secure the digital rights to the games. That’s surprising, given that Twitter doesn’t have a built-in video streaming infrastructure.
But the company has something crucial: a vast audience that uses its platform while watching the game. “We know that on Thursday night during the three-hour telecast of Thursday Night Football, we have millions of users looking at tweets about that game,” Twitter chief financial officer Antony Noto said during the company’s quarterly earnings call.
“Being able to bring the live stream game into the product with those live conversations is a complete solution,” he said. In other words, the live game alongside the live commentary should be all football fans need. He added that both those signed into Twitter and those who aren’t would be able to see the game and its ads.
While it remains unclear how exactly Twitter will display the games (and whether sports fans will even want to watch it on Twitter), company execs seem hopeful that this will be one of many live streaming events the platform can use to demonstrate its value to the billions of people worldwide who seem to have no use for it. Twitter also plans to incorporate Periscope live streams before and after the game.
If this works, it may be a significant selling point. Plus it couldn’t hurt to get other sports leagues involved. “As soon as we announced that deal, almost every league in the world contacted us, because they want to provide an even better experience for their fans,” Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey added during the call.
The message seems clear: football may be king in the US, but this is only the beginning for Twitter. Or so Twitter’s execs can only hope.
If you tweet, you inevitably get mad. Sometimes you get really mad. And sometimes you get so mad that you tweet about it. Twitter, after all, is something of a public square where outrage reigns—and there are few things tweeters love getting angry about more than Twitter itself.
Remember when Twitter killed the fav(e)? Mayhem ensued. How about when Tweetdeck has had issues? Drama everywhere (except not really). But most of all, tweeters couldn’t bear the thought of their beloved, free-wheeling streams going algorithmic. (#RIPTwitter)
Turns out, most of you don’t actually care.
In the quarterly earnings report it released today, Twitter said just 2 percent of tweeters choose to opt-out of the new “enhanced” (i.e. algorithmic) timeline. While anyone can easily opt-out by changing their settings, it seems most people don’t think it’s worth the effort. In other words, the twitterverse hasn’t seen its feeds reordered as it feared, and everyone’s survived seeing a few out-of-order tweets at the top of their feeds.
For Twitter, the fact most people haven’t opted out works out well. “We’re really proud of the refined timeline,” Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey said in the earnings call, adding Twitter has seen more people tweet, retweet, like tweets, and reply to tweets thanks to the changes. The company will continue to refine how the timeline works, he said.
This, of course, doesn’t mean everyone loves Twitter’s tweaks. People may be too lazy to tweak the settings. Or maybe no one really cares. Perhaps “While You Were Away,” and other features designed to show you the best stuff first aren’t so bad after all. Regardless, Twitter’s executives know the company can make small changes, and, righteous indignation aside, everyone will move on eventually.
If there’s anything Twitter wants, it’s for you to see more tweets—whether you use Twitter or not.
To get tweets in front of people anywhere on the Internet, the company has long relied on the “embedded tweet,” a snippet of code that displays an individual tweet on a web page. Starting next week, Twitter is giving embedded tweets an upgrade: instead of a single tweet, you’ll be able to include the whole stream.
Twitter
These updated embeddable timelines, similar to what Storify has long offered, will include tweets themselves as well as any media associated with those tweets, including photos, videos, and polls. Twitter says profiles and lists will also be embeddable.
“This update is more than a facelift,” writes Mollie Vandor, a senior product manager at Twitter, in a blog post today. Twitter first announced a kind of embeddable tweet grid in the fall. This is a more streamlined version of that grid developed based on feedback from publishers—that is, the makers of sites that draw the big audiences Twitter hopes to reach.
“More than one billion visitors to our developers’ sites and apps already see these embedded Tweets every month,” Twitter said in a recent shareholder’s letter. “We believe that these sites and apps are incredibly important amplifiers that show the huge reach and importance of tweets.”
After all, imagine how many people have read Kanye’s (numerous) Twitter meltdowns on a news site instead of Twitter itself. Or how many people smirked about jokes about Burger King’s new hot dogs, or winced at critiques about #OscarsSoWhite—all via tweets embedded in other places on the web. Twitter wants to make sure that that pattern continues, and offering prettier, more streamlined ways to embed lots of tweets (whole streams of them!) helps make that prospect easier and more palatable to publishers.
One problem with this plan is that few publishers embedding tweets are going to want to embed ads. So Twitter won’t make money directly by reaching those extra eyeballs. But as the company’s stock flails below its IPO price due to slow user growth, Twitter is looking to make its appeal as broad as possible. See enough tweets in other places, and maybe you’ll end up going to Twitter to see for yourself.
Fabric
For the just the second time in its history, Twitter has built a new smartphone app.
Sure, Twitter offers apps like Vine and Periscope. But it bought those. The company’s new app is the first Twitter has built from scratch since, well, the Twitter app itself. That’s a big deal—but, as it turns out, only if you speak code.
Reaching software developers these days is as important for Twitter as getting more millennials to trade micro-messages and six-second videos and real-time video streams. As the company has struggled to expand its reach under pressure from Wall Street investors, offering more tools for coders gives Twitter a way to pull outside apps into Twitter’s orbit.
Twitter, you see, offers a wide range of tools for developers collectively known as Fabric. The new Fabric mobile app lets coders to keep a close eye on the health of their own smartphone apps or Internet services. It’s basically an extension of an existing tool called Crashlytics, a way of identifying the cause of app crashes and otherwise monitoring app performance that’s used by tens of thousands of coders.
“We built this for the obsessive startup CEO who obsessively checks up on how his app is doing,” says Twitter product manager Meekal Bajaj.
Why does Twitter offer a wide range of tools for developers building all sorts of apps outside the Twitter universe? Well, Twitter wants those apps inside the Twitter universe. These tools help coders identify what makes an app crash, but they also help coders embed tweets in their apps and place advertisements via Twitter in-house MoPub system. All this is a vital way of, yes, expanding Twitter’s reach.
According to Twitter, these tools play into apps running across 1.5 billion mobile devices. That’s a sizable number. But a good number of those apps were probably using Crashlytics before Twitter acquired the service in 2013. The trick will lie in continuing to expand its developer community and, indeed, encouraging this community to feed the growth of Twitter proper.
But as important as cultivating a developer community can be it’s also a hard thing to pull off. Twitter at least has a firm strategy for building such a community, but this can’t always be fostered top-down. Facebook has cycled through many (failed) developer efforts over the years. Just last month, it shut down its latest effort, a high-profile acquisition called Parse.
But Twitter says that Fabric is built for the long haul. And its new app is a way to try to show that commitment.
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7
Twitter is trying to rescue itself with longer tweets, algorithmic timelines and… animated GIFs.
Today the company is rolling out a new feature that lets you find and share animated GIFs without ever leaving Twitter. If you want to reply to a friend’s tweet with a funny picture of someone banging his head against a desk, you can just push the “GIF” button, search for “head desk” and find several to choose from. Or you can select one from a bunch of pre-defined categories, such as “Happy Dance,” “Mic Drop,” or “YOLO.”
It works a lot like the GIF button in Facebook Messenger. And like Facebook Messenger, Twitter’s GIF button is powered by the GIF hosting sites Giphy and Riffsy. But unlike Facebook, Twitter is making the GIF feature available on public posts, not just direct messages.
This is the latest change designed to make Twitter more appealing to the general public. It might not seem like Twitter needs much saving. The company has 320 million active monthly users, and it boosted its revenue by 58 percent last quarter. But the company is still losing money. Worse, it’s slowly bleeding users, possibly due to rampant harassment and a confusing interface. Earlier this year its stock sunk to an all-time low. Meanwhile, other social apps, such as Instagram and Snapchat, have either caught up with Twitter or surpassed it entirely.
The new feature won’t do anything to comfort Twitter’s harassment victims, nor will it make the site easier to use. It could even add to the confusion. Animated GIFs alone won’t save Twitter’s dwindling stock price. But they’re a heck of a lot of fun, and that might be just what Twitter needs right now.
Jack Dorsey believes in Twitter’s future. “Twitter’s here to stay!” he tweeted just before yesterday’s Superbowl. “By becoming more Twitter-y!”
The public markets, however, do not share his enthusiasm. The company, which will report fourth-quarter earnings on Wednesday, was valued at just more than $10 billion when it closed today—down from a 2013 high of $40 billion. That’s less than Pinterest ($11 billion) and Snapchat ($16 billion) are valued in the private markets.
The pessimism follows a questionable Super Bowl social turnout. In 2015, Twitter reported 28.4 million tweets that contained terms related to the Super Bowl or halftime show (Katy Perry!). In 2016, the company’s measures of its own success were long on creativity—but didn’t report a comparable number.
Meanwhile, four top executives left Twitter last month, including the head of engineering, the head of product, the head of human resources, and the head of global media. Though Twitter also hired a new chief marketing officer, former Amex exec Leslie Berland, none of the vacancies have been filled permanently.
Most concerning, user growth remains nearly flat. Twitter reported 307 million monthly active users last quarter, a growth of only three percent over the past quarter. (This number excludes “fast followers,” who follow Twitter on SMS.)
Rumors abound that Twitter will introduce changes to its feed that will alter the chronological order in which we see Tweets. Dorsey took to Twitter to deny it. But rumors—of executive departures, potential product changes, and employee unrest—seem to be part of the culture of the company. Maybe Dorsey’s wrong: the problem is that Twitter needs to be less, well, Twitter-y.
Josh Valcarcel/WIRED
Just a year and a half from IPO, action cam maker GoPro finds itself a company in decline. Just ten months after launch, live-streaming app Periscope finds itself looking for ways to continue its explosive growth. Little wonder in either case, then, that they’ve decided to team up.
Starting now, Periscope users with a GoPro Hero4 camera can stream their adventures (or their soup, don’t let expectations define you!) live to the world. In fact, you can toggle between your iPhone camera and your GoPro with a single tap, giving you a small semblance of directorial control over the events unfolding around you.
The most obvious use case here is extreme sports, both because that’s where GoPro still shines, and because it already has an X Games collaboration lined up to coincide with its Periscope partnership. In fact, the tie-in also follows Twitter’s recent decision to put Periscope livestreams directly in the main Twitter timeline. That means you’ll be able to ogle sick 720s (is that good? it sounds like a lot) from a first-person point of view without leaving Twitter.
Another exciting use for both users and viewers, especially those who can neither complete nor spell even a simple “ollie,” is that GoPro cameras are popular picks for drone videography. Eyes in the sky can livestream remote vistas or protest crowds or anything, really, within federal regulatory standards (whenever we actually get those locked down).
The point being: GoPro gives Twitter (through Periscope) more than just words and pictures to tell every story. It gives it a live, unfiltered video feed from every possible angle. That’s powerful, especially for a social service that’s been struggling to attract new users, and keep the ones it has engaged. It also lets Periscope break out from its smartphone confines.
As for GoPro, it’s dabbled with livestreaming apps before; it announced a similar partnership with Meerkat last summer. But Periscope, which is owned by Twitter, gives it indirect access to Twitter’s 320 million monthly active users. And the more people see that its cameras can be used for more than just barrel rolls, the better chance GoPro has to reverse its sales decline.
The GoPro integration is iOS-only for now, and it should take some time for people to learn that GoPro livestreaming is an option and then to actually do it. At the very least, though, it should give your Twitter timeline a little lift.
Things are changing at Twitter. (And when are they not?) Now, just three months after cofounder Jack Dorsey became Twitter’s permanent CEO, four of the company’s ten senior managers announced they are leaving.
The shakeup comes as Dorsey attempts to revive growth at the stalled social media company. Twitter’s struggles are numerous and well known, but the gist is: Though plenty of media personalities use Twitter daily, from presidential candidates to rock stars to journalists—so many journalists!–new people aren’t signing on. Twitter reported 307 million monthly active users last quarter, a growth of only three percent over the past quarter. (This number excludes “fast followers,” who follow Twitter on SMS.) Its stock has lost 55 percent of its value in the past 12 months, prompting constant speculation that company will be acquired.
Since Dorsey returned to Twitter and joined his first earnings call in July, he has criticized the company’s failure to make Twitter more popular. It’s not a surprise, then, that two of the departing execs are Alex Roetter, who was in charge of engineering, and product head Kevin Weil. After all, engineering and product are the teams responsible for developing features that should entice new users to try the service, help them get more value out of it, and stick around longer.
In addition, Katie Jacobs Stanton, who leads media partnerships, announced on Medium that she plans to leave to spend time with her family. During her five-and-a-half year tenure at the company, Stanton helped open offices around the world, beginning in the UK, Japan and Ireland.
Dorsey confirmed the departures in a late Sunday tweet, and said vice president of human resources Skip Schipper will also leave. Schipper came to Twitter in 2014 from Groupon, where he was head of public relations. Dorsey said all four executives were leaving by choice, contrary to earlier reports indicating some were fired.
While Dorsey looks for their replacements, chief operating officer Adam Bain will take over duties for revenue-related products, human resources and media. Meanwhile chief technology officer Adam Messinger will handle engineering and consumer products, as well as design and research, user services and the company’s mobile development platform, Fabric. “I will be partnering with him day and night to make sure we’re building the right experiences,” Dorsey wrote, who will presumably do this while also remaining CEO of Square.
Dorsey is expected to make numerous other personnel changes in the coming weeks. Twitter is close to naming a new chief marketing officer, according to Recode. And it will also add two people to its eight-member board of directors in an announcement that may come as early as next quarter, according to media reports. In October, Dorsey named former Googler Omid Kordestani executive chairman. Twitter did not immediately return requests for comment.
Twitter’s constant senior turnover has become a mainstay of its corporate culture, a characteristic as defining to the company as its 140-character Tweets. (Consider that Weil is Twitter’s fifth head of product in six years.) Dorsey hopes to lose both. To confirm the changes, he tweeted a three-paragraph screenshot—a reminder that, if Dorsey has his way, both executive turnover and the 140-character limit will soon be history.
Twitter’s stock hit an all-time low today, dipping below $20 a share for the first time.
As the new year kicks off, investors apparently remain worried about Twitter’s ability to broaden its appeal. The company’s stock has fallen steadily over the past few months as concern persists over its stagnating user growth, which could affect its ability to grow ad revenue long term.
should I buy powerball tickets or twitter stock?
— bill lee (@westcoastbill) January 8, 2016
For its part, the social networking giant seems to be trying, well, pretty much anything that sticks to attract new users. Last year, Twitter cofounder Jack Dorsey returned as CEO in the hope of giving the company the confidence to take risks and experiment with new features.
In the fall, Twitter launched Moments, which showcases popular and newsworthy tweets in a separate tab, to make the service easier to use. Dorsey also hinted this week that the company may expand the character limit for tweets well beyond 140 characters. So far, however, Twitter hasn’t persuaded the market that it has regained its footing.
If #Twitter‘s stock price goes to $0.00, can I still tweet?
— Dennis O’Mara (@dennisromara) January 8, 2016
Despite investors’ pessimism, Twitter (market cap $13.8 billion) remains a significant presence around the world with 320 million monthly users. But for Wall Street, it’s hard not to compare that figure to the more than 1.5 billion users on Facebook (market cap $275.3 billion).
Twitter’s latest new features appear, in fact, to reflect some of the more popular aspects of Facebook. Late last year, Twitter replaced the popular star icon, which was used to “favorite” tweets, with a heart to signify the more Facebook-like “like.” Twitter has also explored new features to make its reverse chronological timeline more Facebook-like by showing tweets that a user may have missed. And expanding beyond 140 characters would also be in keeping with Facebook’s far more liberal limits.
Monetize your shit, $TWTR. I don’t want u to go away & I *definitely* don’t want you to become FB.
— Em (@meyerems) January 8, 2016
For Twitter, finding a way to consistently grow its user base will likely take more than just a few small changes—it will take time. But nervous investors don’t seem willing to wait too long.
More than 70,000 people are watching a puddle in England on Periscope right now. I am one of those people. I cannot take my eyes off it. It’s being streamed by folks in a nearby building (shockingly, savvy social media folks who run a marketing agency, according to their Periscope handle.)
The puddle is rather large, and appears to be at a major thoroughfare in Newcastle upon Tyne. Every few seconds a new British person approaches and has to figure out how to get around it. The puddle is not deep. It is wide.
Some sad folks just walk straight through it, wet feet sloshing off stage right. Others get a running start, gain leverage off a nearby wall and bound over it. There are the long-pausers. And the quick skippers. The climbers. And the bouncers. I heard tell in the Periscope chat of a “pram woman” who apparently took the puddle like a champ earlier today.
I’d like to think if I were a bloke walking in that dreary lane in England today, I’d briefly stop, take in the water and then leap over it with gusto. But I’m a bad jumper, guys. I get no air. I fear I would be one of the ones who puts my head down and trudges on through, thinking of the horrors of the news cycle or my own hungry belly, never knowing people in a window above me—and thousands of strangers—were giggling as water filled my socks.
pic.twitter.com/bc5RwqPcAX
— Jack (@jack) January 5, 2016
Earlier today Recode reported that Twitter is considering expanding the length of tweets from 140 characters to 10,000. We’ve heard rumors like that before, but this one just got a lot more plausible thanks to a cryptic tweet from Twitter co-founder and CEO Jack Dorsey.
“We’ve spent a lot of time observing what people are doing on Twitter,” Dorsey wrote in an image attached to a tweet published this afternoon. “And we see them taking screenshots of text and tweeting it. Instead, what if that text … was actually text? Text could be searched. Text that could be highlighted.”
That’s not quite a confirmation, but it fits with the Recode report that Twitter is testing a version of the product in which tweets appear the same way they do now but add a “call to action” that take you to more text: “Clicking on the tweets would then expand them to reveal more content. The point of this is to keep the same look and feel for your timeline, although this design is not necessarily final.”
Looks like the screenshort really is changing the world.
Politwoops, a digital archive of public tweets deleted by politicians, is coming back online after reaching an agreement with Twitter. It’s a big deal for transparency. It’s also a big deal for Twitter as a signal of where it’s headed under co-founder and new CEO Jack Dorsey.
Last summer, Twitter effectively shut down the project by cutting off its access to Twitter’s API. The company noted at the time that preserving deleted tweets violated user privacy and its developer agreement. The Sunlight Foundation, which runs the US-based version of Politwoops, objected that what elected officials say in public is a matter of public record, and that transparency of that record leads to more accountability.
Twitter now appears to agree with that argument. After returning to the company as CEO, Dorsey publicly apologized to developers for how it has treated them in the past. In a keynote address at its developer’s conference last year, Dorsey said Twitter has a responsibility to organizations like Politwoops if it wants to serve as a social networking tool that empowers free and transparent dialogue around the world. But, to do so, Twitter needs to be open and transparent itself.
Dorsey is now delivering on that promise. On Thursday, the Sunlight Foundation, along with digital transparency organization the Open State Foundation, reached an agreement with Twitter to allow API access to Politwoops. “The understanding reached last week has been welcomed by all those who believe the world needs more political transparency,” said Arjan El Fassed, the director of the Open State Foundation, which developed Politwoops and operates several of its accounts globally. “Our next step is to continue and expand our work to enable the public to hold public officials accountable for their public statements.”
First launched in 2012, Politwoops grew to include dozens of countries before it was shut down. It’s now back online for 25 countries, including the Netherlands, Chile, and Germany, as well as the European Union. The Sunlight Foundation is currently working to get the US version up and running again; it hopes to be back online in the coming weeks.
For Twitter, the return of Politwoops marks a first step. Under Dorsey’s guidance, Twitter is demonstrating its commitment to open dialogue, allowing powerful voices to be held accountable in public. But Dorsey will have to do more than fix old mistakes to prove Twitter’s openness. Granting API access to Politwoops serves, after all, as another reminder that Twitter isn’t so much a public sphere as a space that’s privately controlled.
Twitter’s new heart icon will replace the star effective immediately. Twitter
Twitter users today hoping to hand out stars to “favorite” the posts of their friends and online acquaintances were greeted instead by an unusual sight: hearts. Little red heart animations, signifying love and adoration, where previously there had been delightfully neutral gold stars. The reaction was… robust.
Here’s the new heart animation, frame by frame pic.twitter.com/CigVBVguUw
— Christopher Ingraham (@_cingraham) November 3, 2015
*opens Twitter*
“My god, it’s full of hearts!” pic.twitter.com/lNCOpzqv5G
— Mary Hamilton (@newsmary) November 3, 2015
“You know what’s cool? Hearts.”
“You can shoot for the stars!”
“You can STEAL someone’s heart.”
“Daddy?”
Twitter (2018), by Aaron Sorkin
— Mark Harris (@MarkHarrisNYC) November 3, 2015
Funny to me that Facebook understood why the fav was so powerful and tried to copy it
Twitter goes FACEBOOK HAVE PEOPLE and steals Likes
— David Pierce (@pierce) November 3, 2015
The heart doesn’t quite say “yes, I saw your tweet, but I have no intention of replying now go away”
— Elon Green (@elongreen) November 3, 2015
Twitter going through all the Lucky Charms eventually
— Stephen Totilo (@stephentotilo) November 3, 2015
How changing stars to hearts will fix Twitter’s harassment problem…
I’m kidding. They have no idea how to fix that. But hey — hearts!
— Mike Monteiro (@monteiro) November 3, 2015
ANGRY KEYBOARD MAN ONLY GET HEARTS FOR GOOD SAYINGS, NOT THE SHOUTING TIMES
— Lauren Laverne (@laurenlaverne) November 3, 2015
[Twitter headquarters]
“We’re losing the social media war! What do we do! I need ideas!”
“What if we change stars to hearts?”
“BRILLIANT!”
— Mike Drucker (@MikeDrucker) November 3, 2015
Ugh Twitter turning fave stars into hearts just upgraded every “good tweet, champ” to a “YES YES THIS TWEET HAS WON MY ETERNAL DEVOTION!”
— mah ree nah (@marinarachael) November 3, 2015
If Twitter really wants to mess with people they’ll change Retweets to Endorsements
— Mike Brown (@mikearildbrown) November 3, 2015
Next, Twitter will add hearts to all of your lower-case i’s.
— Ryan Teague Beckwith (@ryanbeckwith) November 3, 2015
Still have the fav on Tweetdeck. Going to cherish these last few moments before I have to refresh.
— Mary Catherine (@mcwellons) November 3, 2015
Can’t wait for favs to be replaced with hearts in Tweetdeck in two years or so
— Owen Williams (@ow) November 3, 2015
Finally we can end the age-old debate of whether it’s spelled “fav” or “fave”
— Silvia Killingsworth (@silviakillings) November 3, 2015
Wow, I’ve never seen so many people get grumpy about having to use a universal symbol of love and affection
— Chris Taylor (@FutureBoy) November 3, 2015
took only a quick mention of Twitter killing favs to one of my friends who doesn’t work on the internet to remember I’m the absolute worst
— Charlie Warzel (@cwarzel) November 3, 2015
Then again, it doesn’t really matter what current Twitter users think; the move, like Twitter Moments and its redesigned homepage, is engineered to attract new tweeters into the fold. Whether that plan will actually work remains to be seen.
In the meantime, fav while you can, TweetDeck users. Fav while there’s no tomorrow.
Twitter wants to be the fastest way to get anything—news, a movement, your opinion, jokes—out to the world. But, to fully become that place, it needs more users. And to get users, Twitter is turning to TV.
The company said during its third quarter earnings call today that it will be launching an “integrated marketing campaign” in the United States, starting with TV ads running during the first game of the World Series tonight. According to The Verge, the ad was created by the same agency, TBWAChiatDay, that was responsible for Apple’s iconic 1984 spot for the Macintosh.
The ad itself includes tweets from the MLB’s playoff games as seen in Twitter’s new Moments feature, the company’s latest initiative to make Twitter more accessible to new users. When asked today about spending money on TV ads during a major sporting event, Twitter Chief Financial Officer Anthony Noto said that the company is keen on investing in its future.
The company has seen lackluster user growth in the past year, especially within the US, and is likely hoping that an ad campaign will help get the word out about Twitter. That, of course, depends on whether the ad itself drives users to its platform. Let’s just say we’re not sure if it clears anything up.
Christie Hemm Klok/WIRED
For Twitter, things aren’t looking up quite yet. The tech giant announced its third quarter earnings today, and in the first full quarter since cofounder Jack Dorsey took the reins as interim CEO (and now official CEO) the company only managed to get 3 million more users, up 8 percent year-over-year. (If you count users who use Twitter over SMS, as the company does, the number is a little higher at 4 million, up 11 percent year-over-year.)
Twitter says it now has 320 million users total, but most of those new users seem to be coming to Twitter from outside the US.
Twitter
For investors, the number of users and the growth of that number represent how the company is not only faring today, but also its prospects going forward. Dorsey will have to convince investors, as the company’s chief financial officer Anthony Noto said on the last earnings call, that user growth will come, even if it they don’t seem to be flocking to Twitter just yet.