Twitter, every mention
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tap a year for its mentions
every year anyone Benedict Evans 166Toni Cowan-Brown 12
Verbatim, from the transcripts: the passages where Twitter comes up
Google Gemini and AI bias
- ▶ 15:33 Benedict Evans But there was a moment when Twitter and Facebook were deleting anyone who said that.
LLMs, links, and the death of links
- ▶ 23:15 Benedict Evans It would make Twitter better if you don't control the user experience. 2 times in the scene
The magic customer
- ▶ 35:18 Benedict Evans Um, and crypto writ large sort of has that, has gone in through a moment of that at the moment, but, you know, every, every, every time I say on, on sort of threads, now that I've left Twitter because it's run by an anti-seamite, now that…
Threads
- ▶ 0:13 Benedict Evans So, um, for anybody who is not deeply involved in the Silicon Valley bubble, um, Meta slash Instagram launched a sort of Twitter competitor, sort of not Twitter competitor called Threads two weeks ago. 6 times in the scene
- ▶ 2:32 Benedict Evans It's more, um, I think it's much kind of more useful to compare, um, Twitter to Craigslist. 16 times in the scene
- ▶ 9:34 Benedict Evans Well, first of all, they launch an app that's nicer than the Twitter app, which frankly is not very nice, not very difficult. 5 times in the scene
- ▶ 12:54 Toni Cowan-Brown And look, rightly so from, from learning from Twitter's 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 14:38 Benedict Evans And so the core challenge that, that, that they have to solve is, and this was always, we probably should have said this sort of 10 minutes ago, but like the core challenge, I think that the Facebook, that Twitter always had was you open… 8 times in the scene
- ▶ 21:03 Benedict Evans Um, I get stupid replies from people who bought Twitter blue and had 10 followers. 3 times in the scene
- ▶ 24:35 Benedict Evans So they need to seed it, Meta need to seed this with Twitter power users. 10 times in the scene
- ▶ 34:23 Benedict Evans So now I'm going to get paid if I bought Twitter Blue and a bunch of 4 times in the scene
- ▶ 39:00 Benedict Evans Now the reason I mentioned this is, you know, think about where all the people who left Twitter went and the people who haven't. 4 times in the scene
Working out AI questions
- ▶ 16:34 Benedict Evans What you then have, I think, is the error rate issue, which to me is sort of fascinating because, you know, I just saw, saw, you know, a week earlier today from, you know, sort of highly followed person, um, on Twitter and saying, well,…
Buzzfeed News, Reddit and OpenAI
- ▶ 3:12 Toni Cowan-Brown Um, so they've got a pretty good argument there, whether it's Reddit, Twitter, or Stack Overflow.
- ▶ 14:31 Toni Cowan-Brown I find it interesting with the piece around, you know, whether it's overflow, whomever is the, you know, Twitter, you name it, BuzzFeed coming, not BuzzFeed, but coming back and saying, hey, we need to be paid for this.
Metaverse and crypto - beyond the BS
- ▶ 16:04 Benedict Evans And so this gets you, you can have these kind of completely unproductive conversations on Twitter where you say nobody really knows what metaverse means, and people say, well, Neil Stevenson wrote it.
The right questions to ask about TikTok
- ▶ 36:07 Benedict Evans If you've got Twitter blue, you can write as much as you like.
Generative search
- ▶ 13:04 Benedict Evans And Twitter is whatever it is, two hundred and fifty million DAOs. 2 times in the scene
ChatGPT and the Imagenet Moment
- ▶ 0:45 Toni Cowan-Brown And I think that I speak for myself, but I think it's probably true for you that all of our Twitter timelines was just people having an absolute blast with this.
All the other things happening in tech part 1.
- ▶ 0:03 Toni Cowan-Brown And today we wanted to talk about maybe all of the things that we're potentially not paying attention to that are happening in the tech space, because there's a lot of noise coming out of Elon Musk, Twitter, FTX.
The FTX face-palm
- ▶ 0:07 Benedict Evans Yeah, there's like, I wrote this week in my newsletter, I wrote, I kind of split my column into two, and I wrote about, I called it the Twitter's hell, which is like, 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 25:06 Toni Cowan-Brown You and I talk about this every time you talk about crypto on Twitter, two seconds later, you get flooded with bots and God knows what trying to scam you.
How many metaverses?
- ▶ 11:49 Benedict Evans And all of Twitter was like, this is,
Wondering about generative AI
- ▶ 5:16 Benedict Evans I would sort of follow, um, Sam Altman, who, who runs Ape and AI on, on, on, on Twitter.
Remember AI?
- ▶ 0:20 Toni Cowan-Brown And Elon Musk and Twitter.
- ▶ 15:17 Benedict Evans And, you know, I was talking about this on Twitter with somebody today, and I posted the kind of classic
Shein, TikTok and Netflix - thinking about limits
- ▶ 6:18 Benedict Evans Vine, which Twitter bought, Twitter bought and, and, and shut down. 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 11:36 Benedict Evans Um, I'll actually look up this up on my Twitter, search my Twitter, and see when I, when that was.
- ▶ 28:37 Benedict Evans So the, so the other, the other social media thing to think about, of course, is our, is our vast moral panic around Facebook, and Twitter, and YouTube, and so on, and that it's all making us stupid, and obviously the, and that social…
Stories in the noise
- ▶ 0:10 Benedict Evans Well there is, there's the, there's the, Elon, Elon is having a wonderful time on Twitter whining everybody up.
Netflix isn't a tech company
- ▶ 20:51 Benedict Evans It's one of the interesting bits, and we're not really going to talk about Twitter, but there's this sort of, this whole part of the tech industry that thinks advertising is somehow terrible and dirty.
The future of Twitter
- ▶ 0:13 Benedict Evans Elon wants to buy Twitter. 14 times in the scene
- ▶ 12:36 Benedict Evans Now for Twitter, it's not so much that there's a next product, but there is a sort of, um, there's a whole bunch of stuff that's not working very well that needs to get sorted out. 7 times in the scene
- ▶ 15:31 Benedict Evans I saw, I saw a, um, unfucking of Twitter. 20 times in the scene
- ▶ 34:25 Benedict Evans And then you leave the meeting, and you open Twitter, and you discover that 10 different politicians are calling you, saying that you don't care about this, and you're a terrible person, and you're a terrible human being, and destroying… 3 times in the scene
The Evolution of networks
- ▶ 5:52 Benedict Evans Um, and, but, but the, the, you know, Clubhouse, while you were driving people to Clubhouse from your Twitter account. 4 times in the scene
- ▶ 17:27 Benedict Evans But for the sake of argument, you know, you remember there was a moment when, when Twitter clients were like a UI playground. 3 times in the scene
- ▶ 28:46 Benedict Evans So you can add stories to Instagram as another type of content you can create, and that works fine, and you can add them to, you know, all sorts of other sort of, I think, um, obviously Twitter tried to do it, but because Twitter is a… 3 times in the scene
- ▶ 35:27 Benedict Evans I mean, you know, to go back to, you know, my story, you know, Twitter launched a newsletter product whenever it was, 18 months ago, and I'm afraid to be brutally cynical, I looked at this and said, I know Twitter have recently said that… 4 times in the scene
Ukraine
- ▶ 4:06 Benedict Evans Twitter is blocked. 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 22:02 Benedict Evans Is the answer that you go and pass rules on what should be in the, in the Twitter algorithm. 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 28:13 Benedict Evans And meanwhile, then you open Twitter, and you see a beautiful, high definition, high frame rate video of a surface-driven missile blowing up a helicopter.
- ▶ 30:05 Benedict Evans No, it wasn't Instagram, it was Twitter. 2 times in the scene
What we know about web 3 so far
- ▶ 20:40 Benedict Evans This is a joke I made the other day on, on Twitter that, you know, where three people say we need direct democracy and all the users need to vote according to their own incentives.
How to think about tech
- ▶ 5:02 Benedict Evans Um, I immediately understand, you know, Chinese popular culture, because I read something about it once, and I'm on Twitter, like, and so you have to kind of go against that.
Creativity and Optimism
- ▶ 49:28 Benedict Evans Yeah, I'll just say Mark, we can just all tweet it, we can all tweet it independently now, like Mark Andreessen, you can make your second fortune, sell an NFT of the Netscape throbber. 2 times in the scene
Tech in china, from inside and outside
- ▶ 8:09 Toni Cowan-Brown You said something at some point, Lillian, that I found was fascinating, and I think it was actually in that Twitter thread,
Trying to understand Ad Tech
- ▶ 27:43 Benedict Evans It's sort of classic, you know, Jack Dorsey at Twitter, like saying the thing that sounds simple until you ask, well, what do you mean?
Who's in the office? Notes on a year of remote work.
- ▶ 12:49 Benedict Evans I think the other interesting thing is the panel point, because, you know, it's a meta observation about Clubhouse is, one of the reasons it reminds me of Twitter 2 times in the scene
Shopify and digital transformation
- ▶ 1:05 Benedict Evans So my Twitter feed is like, 90% people in tech looking at this and going, this is insane.
- ▶ 34:34 Benedict Evans You know, this is sort of, you know, again, I mean, you know, there's a sort of the small crew of idiots on Twitter who are venture capitalists all trying to flip things quickly.
Clubhouse and the endless cycle of social apps
- ▶ 13:29 Toni Cowan-Brown And it was the thing in the early days of, of Twitter that I loved is you are faced with people you wouldn't normally be able to have a conversation with. 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 19:25 Benedict Evans That probably has translated into a Twitter audience. 4 times in the scene
- ▶ 26:31 Toni Cowan-Brown And I was thinking about this the other day, of just like, where does Clubhouse sit when you look at the social media platforms and networks, you've got, you know, you've got your chat, um, you've got your chat ones, the likes of WhatsApp,…
Telling stories with charts
- ▶ 8:18 Benedict Evans It's the same with, I mean, I saw in my Twitter flow this morning, um, Twitch did, I think the number was two trillion hours of video last year.
Why do we care about games?
- ▶ 25:17 Benedict Evans I think Clubhouse is interesting because it sort of blends podcasts and early Twitter and accessibility and spontaneity.
The history of doom-scrolling
- ▶ 4:17 Benedict Evans Is I feel like Instagram, Tumblr, Facebook, Twitter between them sort of killed mainstream blogging.
- ▶ 7:39 Benedict Evans As opposed to Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, where you have a, both a tool and a network.
- ▶ 37:35 Benedict Evans Um, Fred Wilson writes something every day at the other end of the spectrum and isn't that active on Twitter, but he's always been said something interesting or intriguing on, on, on his website. 5 times in the scene
The FTC and Facebook
- ▶ 27:02 Benedict Evans Doesn't touch Twitter at all.
Is content moderation a dead end?
- ▶ 0:17 Benedict Evans At least that's what my Twitter feed tells me.
Amazon and eCommerce
- ▶ 35:58 Benedict Evans Yeah, or somebody made a camera app that did, did a bit mapping, so it looked like a camera from 1990, or, yeah, but there's value in, obviously this is what Twitter was, but there's, there's, there's, there's, the thing you're actually,…