Mastodon’s sudden popularity should serve as Twitter’s wakeup call (Engadget.com)

Editor — Sun, 09 Apr 2017 08:25:00 +0000

There’s a hot new social network these days and it’s called Mastodon. Well, it’s not that new — it’s been around since September 2016 — but it’s gained tens of thousands of users in the last few days.

Nicole Lee, @nicole – 04.07.17 in Internet at https://www.engadget.com

The reason for the growth? According to its founder, Eugen Rochko, it has a lot to do with people getting increasingly fed up with Twitter, especially the recent decision to nix @usernames from Replies. Mastodon — named after an American heavy metal band — is mopping up users seeking an alternative. Sure, Mastodon is still small and relatively unheard of, but the very fact that it spurred this much interest is a sign that the established social networks like Twitter are fundamentally failing at one thing: keeping users happy.

Before we go on, it would help to know what Mastodon is. Some would say it’s a Twitter clone, but there are enough differences that it’s really quite a bit more than that. Yes, the interface looks very much like Tweetdeck: there’s a vertical timeline, you can retweet (known in Mastodon as a “boost”), favorite (stars instead of hearts) and posts have a funny nickname (they’re “toots” instead of “tweets”). But a few features really set it apart.

Toots have a 500-character limit instead of 140, you can set content warnings per post by hiding sensitive content behind a “show more” button (some users have taken to using it as a joke setup mechanism) and you have way more privacy options. Posts can be totally public, private (only your followers can see it) or unlisted — which means it’s still viewable to the anyone who goes to your profile page, but it won’t show up in the public timeline.

But the key differentiator from Twitter is that Mastodon is a free, open-source protocol that’s distributed across multiple “instances,” so there’s no centralized server. It’s not really a traditional social network in that sense. Each instance has its own set of users, but you can still follow and interact with users from others. A “local timeline” only shows posts from your current server, but a “federated timeline” shows posts from yours as well as the instance of the people you follow (There’s a more succinct explanation of it here).

One of the benefits of having these multiple instances is that each can set its own rules. For example, the main instance, mastodon.social, has a strict policy of no Nazis, no racism, no sexism, no xenophobia and no discrimination, which can be seen as a direct result of Twitter’s inability to handle harassment and abuse. The one that I’m on, mastodon.cloud, just has one rule for now, which is to not be a jerk. Other instances could very well set their own rules too; it’s entirely up to the local admins.

“I was a heavy Twitter user since 2008,” says Rochko. But Twitter kept making bad decisions, he says, like changing Tweetdeck, closing down a third party app ecosystem, adding ads and even introducing algorithmic timelines. “Twitter was really trying hard to be not-Twitter,” he says.

Read the rest of this great story at www.engadget.com

Mastodon.com.au is scheduled to launch this week in Australia

The post Mastodon’s sudden popularity should serve as Twitter’s wakeup call (Engadget.com) appeared first on OzMedia.

Can Mastodon Bring Down Twitter? Maybe and Here’s How!

Editor — Thu, 06 Apr 2017 04:20:30 +0000

Twitter Inc. stock is down nearly 10% in the Year-To-Date. However, TWTR stock could be headed even lower. Here is why.

Twitter’s life as a publicly listed company has been short, and bitter for the major part. The San Fransisco, California-based micro-blogging company listed at a market cap of nearly $25B, which was called expensive at the time of the IPO. Twitter Inc. (NYSE:TWTR) immediately proved the naysayers wrong, gaining 60% in just 2 months following the IPO. However, the $39.3B valuation was the peak and the ride thereafter has pretty much been downhill. The Micro-blogging platform is today valued at a market cap of $10.6B, down 58% from its listing valuation and 73% from the post-IPO peak. That’s been Twitter’s story, and it isn’t going to get better anytime soon. The future for TWTR stock looks just as bleak as the past, if not worse. Here is why we would be wary of buying into the micro-blogging platform even at these seemingly ‘cheap’ or ‘beaten-down’ prices.

The company has delivered little to justify valuations.

At the time of its listing, Twitter was valued at a whopping 44.8x its trailing twelve month (TTM) revenue of $534.5M, and the company has achieved little to justify those lofty valuations. Yes, the company has managed to grow its top line at a rate of 56% YoY, but that growth hasn’t dripped down to the bottom line. (Also, growth in recent quarters has dropped to single digits, which is worrisome.) Twitter continues to bleed money, with the company having reported a net loss of $456.9M in FY 2016. Not surprisingly, the TWTR PS ratio has dropped to sub-5 levels, with Twitter stock currently quoting at 4.14x its TTM sales. However, it is hard to justify even these valuations, given Twitter’s bleeding bottom line. The only time Twitter valuations look attractive is when you compare against Snapchat. And well, this isn’t saying much, given that Snapchat enjoys insane valuations which are far from sustainable. All in all, topline growth is the biggest positive Twitter has delivered in the three years since its IPO. Is that good enough? Well, not good enough to justify the lofty valuations.

The emergence of the biggest competitor.

The fundamentals of Twitter are just one-half of the story. And, while the micro-blogging platform has been taking steps to rectify the sorry state of the fundamentals, the story could have gotten just a bit more scary on another front: competition. In fact, the emergence of a new competitor could bring into question Twitter’s status as the number one micro-blogging network. Yes, you read that right. As per various news sources, Mastodon, a relatively new micro-blogging platform founded by 24-year-old Eugen Rochko, is the latest challenger to Twitter’s ‘cult status’ among micro-bloggers. And, people are starting to take notice. According to Jack Morse from Mashable, Mastodon is “an underdog with serious spunk.” Comparing the two networks, Morse writes that the increasingly popular social network delivers a Twitter-equivalent micro-blogging experience, but with better privacy controls.

Read the full story at AmigoBulls.com

The post Can Mastodon Bring Down Twitter? Maybe and Here’s How! appeared first on OzMedia.

social media – OzMedia

Mastodon’s sudden popularity should serve as Twitter’s wakeup call (Engadget.com)

Can Mastodon Bring Down Twitter? Maybe and Here’s How!

Twitter Inc. stock is down nearly 10% in the Year-To-Date. However, TWTR stock could be headed even lower. Here is why.

The company has delivered little to justify valuations.

The emergence of the biggest competitor.