Here Are The Latest Very Bad Things To Happen To Twitter

Here Are The Latest Very Bad Things To Happen To Twitter

The Death of Twitter has be proclaimed over and over in some form since 2009. Eulogies ramped up over the last year, when its monthly active user count stalled, its executives left en masse and the prospect of changes led users to revolt with the hashtag #RIPTwitter.

Image: Shutterstock

It’s been a few months since those stories broke, but that doesn’t mean Twitter is out of the woods — in fact, it still appears to be squarely stuck there, blindly flailing around as it tries to find some moss to direct it back to civilisation. This week, for example, the following nuggets of news popped up:

1. Jeff Seibert, the company’s head of consumer product, has peaced out of the role

Re/Code reports that Ed Ho, a senior engineering director, will take over the product team in the meantime. Seibert, on the other hand, will return to Fabric, the mobile development platform he was running before his promotion. His departure is more of the same for a position that has been described as “cursed” and “jinxed“. Amusingly, it’s also been compared to the Defence Against the Dark Arts position from the Harry Potter universe.

2. Advertisers are flocking to Instagram, not Twitter

A Reuters report details a new survey which claims more advertising agencies said they’d choose Instagram over Twitter for social media ad campaigns. This seems to square with the the company’s first quarter earnings report, which posted disappointing revenue because of “weaker than expected spending by big advertisers“. (Twitter said the report was, in essence, bullshit.)

3. MTV is using Twitter… to see if it’s doing well on Snapchat

Sick burn, MTV. According to Sarah Epler, MTV’s senior director of social media, the media company uses Twitter to see how people are reacting to its Snapchat content.

From Adweek:

Epler added that she specifically homes in on sentiments like how happy someone is, and her team analyses screenshots that people attach to their tweets to determine which Snapchat pieces are most popular.

Well, at least someone is using Twitter. Still not as many as Snapchat, though!

4. Some 32 million Twitter accounts may have been compromised

Twitter found itself dragged into the rash of security issues that recently popped up on various social platforms, including LinkedIn and Myspace. While the company has been adamant that compromised account information “was not obtained from a hack of Twitter’s servers” — it instead pointed to the other breaches as a possible source — its accounts were still affected, and it locked out some affected users and required them to reset their passwords.

None of this is to say that Twitter is going to fall off the face of the planet anytime soon. (Where else will we see politicians shutting down the haters?) Given the media’s propensity to eulogise the struggling platform, however, you can expect to hear the death knells continue.


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