Twitter limits bulk following to thwart spammers

SAN FRANCISCO--Twitter on Monday trimmed the number of accounts that a user can follow in a single day in an effort to fight spam at the micro-blogging platform.

The total number of accounts that can be added to a user's list was cut to 400 from 1,000, the San Francisco-based internet firm said.

"Follow, unfollow, follow, unfollow. Who does that? Spammers," the Twitter safety team said in a tweet.

"So we're changing the number of accounts you can follow each day from 1,000 to 400. Don't worry, you'll be just fine."

Software programs referred to as "bots" sometimes run Twitter accounts, automatically following massive numbers of real people, a portion of whom tend to reciprocate by following back.

High follower counts can then serve to raise the status of bot accounts, which can fire off website links or marketing content in tweets or messages to followers.

Twitter policy bars use of the service for spreading spam, which it defines as "bulk or aggressive activity that attempts to manipulate or disrupt Twitter or the experience of users on Twitter to drive traffic or attention to unrelated accounts, products, services, or initiatives."

Factors taken into account by Twitter when determining if accounts are being used for spam is following and or unfollowing large numbers of accounts in short time periods.

source: news.abs-cbn.com

China's Weibo backtracks on gay content ban

BEIJING - China's popular Weibo microblogging platform on Monday reversed a decision to block "homosexual" content, in an unusual concession to a storm of online protest at the weekend.

Sina Weibo said in a statement Friday it had begun a three-month-long "clean-up campaign" to remove "illegal" content, including "manga and videos with pornographic implications, promoting violence or (related to) homosexuality".

But the Twitter-like platform backtracked on Monday, stating on its administrators' official account: "This clean-up of games and manga is no longer directed at homosexual content, but is primarily to clean up pornographic and bloody, violent content."


It also thanked the public for "discussions and suggestions".

Weibo's decision on gay content had prompted a tide of protest from outraged users who rallied behind the hashtag "#IamGay", viewed some 240 million times before it was banned by the platform on Saturday.

Even the Communist Party mouthpiece the People's Daily jumped into the discussion, posting an essay promoting LGBT acceptance to its official Weibo account on Saturday. The posting was viewed nearly 6.5 million times.

"Everyone is unique and sexuality is just one side of us that differs, just like skin colour, height and weight," the essay said.

But it added that "even homosexual people are regular citizens" whose affiliated content was not above being subjected to censorship laws against porn and violence.

Monday's reversal was met with an outpouring of support.

"I support Sina in clearing out pornographic content, but it definitely must not do so as before and target homosexuality -- that kind of discrimination is wrong," wrote one user.

"Through everyone's unrelenting efforts, we finally got a basic right -- how rare!" wrote another.

A third said: "Although I still don't like you, I thank you."

Gay Voices, which has since 2009 been one of Weibo's major LGBT accounts with some 230,000 followers, had on Friday declared it would be forced to indefinitely suspend its postings.

On Monday it was back online and thanking supporters, saying: "Only by speaking up can we affect change."

Weibo's purge was the latest move in a crackdown by the ruling Communist Party to clear the Chinese internet of any content deviating from its "core values ​​of socialism", while stifling criticism of social norms and established policies.

The platform -- which has some 400 million active monthly users -- said in its original Friday statement that it was merely implementing China's new cybersecurity law and had already removed some 56,240 items.

'A STEP FURTHER'

Much of the homosexual content on Weibo is fueled not by LGBT activists, who are quite low-profile, but by the large online community of "funu" ("rotten girls") -- heterosexual women who are avid fans of male gay romances and share comics or stories, frequently erotic.

The affair has highlighted the cultural gap between younger Chinese more open to LGBT issues and "China's older generation -- mostly very conservative 40-year-old men -- who are now the main force of our society because they control the resources," Xiao Tie, director of the Beijing LGBT Center, told AFP, using a nickname.

Xiao Tie said the homosexuality ban was a result of over-cautiousness in the absence of specific information from authorities on what kind of content should be censored.

"Sina Weibo doesn't want to make trouble, so they went a step further with their censorship before the government even asked for it," she said.

China has a mixed track record with gay themes in cultural products.

Last year it banned gay content from all online streaming platforms

Last month it pulled the Oscar-winning film "Call Me by Your Name" from the ongoing Beijing International Film Festival.

But after a two-year delay, Chinese theatres on Friday finally released "Seek McCartney", a film about a secret homosexual romance between Chinese and French lovers that has been hailed as the country's first gay movie.

rld/lth/sm

source: news.abs-cbn.com

What Twitter must do to counter fears of plateau

SAN FRANCISCO - Twitter, whose shares had soared more than 150 percent since their November debut on Wall Street, stunned investors this week with a one-two punch of bad news: near-flat user growth and a drop in engagement among its 241 million members.

To assuage fears that the company's growth is plateauing, and to justify its rich valuation - still at $28 billion even after a 24 percent drop on Thursday - Chief Executive Dick Costolo must now convince investors that he can quickly make the right moves to broaden Twitter's appeal.

"The fact that we've seen timeline views per user go down two quarters in a row suggests that it's more than just a design problem, that they may be hitting a ceiling for their current iteration," said Nate Elliot, an analyst at Forrester Research. "Clearly we've seen that other social sites, even ones that are much bigger, have kept growing by adding new features and new functionality."

So far, Costolo has asked for time to implement a series of changes that, while not directly lifting Twitter's user growth, will help the service gain traction over several quarters.

Costolo told analysts on a conference call Wednesday that tweaks such as directly displaying pictures and videos in the timeline, or stringing conversations into a thread, have raised user engagement metrics by 35 percent and that the company must continue its course.

"We don't think we need to change anything about the characteristics of our platform, we simply need to make Twitter a better Twitter," the CEO said.

But Wall Street's lingering concerns point to a central dilemma about Twitter's evolution. In the past six years, the service has spread precisely because of its spare, lightweight format, which has fueled everything from mass protests in the Arab world to Hollywood celebrity spitting matches.

Yet critics say Twitter has failed to innovate quickly, especially compared to Facebook Inc, which famously lives by Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg's mantra: "Move fast and break things." Twitter's overseas rivals, such as Sina Weibo , also often copy each others' features and overhaul their own offerings with ruthless efficiency.

Brian Blau, an analyst at Gartner, said Twitter's relatively slow evolution was part of the company's cautious culture, which has been highly methodical in testing how to deploy advertisements or how to venture into a new line of business.

For instance, speculation has mounted for years that Twitter would introduce real-time commerce to its platform, but executives have only begun to openly address the subject in recent months and staff up its e-commerce team.

In comparison, Facebook in 2006 introduced the "news feed," which completely changed the feel of the service but has since become its most central element. By 2010, its sixth year, the world's largest social media site was still gaining users at a rate of more than 10 percent quarter over quarter, and had topped 600 million members by the end of that year.

In the most recent quarter, Facebook delivered its strongest revenue growth in two years, beating Wall Street targets, and said it now has 1.23 billion monthly users.

Twitter reported higher-than-expected fourth-quarter revenue, but investors focused on user growth of just 3.8 percent, the lowest rate of quarter-on-quarter growth since Twitter began disclosing user figures.

"The challenges around user metrics in the fourth quarter are likely to raise more questions around whether Twitter can become a truly mainstream product," JP Morgan analyst Doug Anmuth said in a research note.

BIGGER CHANGES IN STORE?

Some of the tweaks Costolo spoke of were cosmetic, such as helping new users find their friends more easily so they won't abandon Twitter within the first hours or days. But the CEO also hinted that Twitter might make more drastic changes, including introducing an alternative to the chronological timeline, which until now has underpinned the user experience.

"We want to do a better job organizing content for our users along topical lines rather than just chronological," Costolo said on the conference call. "Topic-based discovery on our platform will make Twitter easier to understand and use for everyone."

Under Costolo's stewardship, Twitter has been credited with conceiving the advertising model of injecting ads directly into the timeline, now the de facto business model for social media in the mobile era. But it also came under pressure for not moving quickly enough in 2010 and 2011, when it was quietly perfecting that advertising product with experiments.

Costolo on Wednesday repeatedly stressed that the company conducts extensive research into user behavior before making moves to juice up user growth. An uptick in traction may only take effect slowly through 2014, he warned.

Blau said he agreed with Costolo's belief that Twitter possessed a basic appeal to people around the world, but he said the management needs to move faster.

"It's basic human behavior that people want to have open public discourse," Blau said. "It may be a matter of changing Twitter's interface to make that smoother. They need time to figure it out, but time right now is a luxury."

source: www.abs-cbnnews.com

Strong demand for Twitter IPO

NEW YORK/SAN FRANCISCO - Twitter Inc raised the top end of its IPO price range by 25 percent and will close its books a day early, signaling strong demand for the most closely watched Silicon Valley debut since Facebook Inc last year.

Amid a red-hot market for initial public offerings and soaring equity markets, Twitter raised its price range to $23 to $25 per share on Monday, but kept the offering size at 70 million shares. That means it will raise up to $2 billion if an overallotment option of 10.5 million shares is exercised.

Sources close to the situation said demand among institutional investors was so strong that the final pricing is likely to go even higher than the new range announced on Monday. The sources declined to be identified because the sales process is not public.

The microblogging network, which has yet to turn a profit, has amassed 230 million users in seven years, including heads of state, celebrities and activists. About half of all U.S. adult Twitter users said they get news through the social media platform, according to a Pew Research survey.

Twitter is the best known Silicon Valley company to go public since Facebook, though it is seeking a far smaller valuation of up to $13.6 billion compared to Facebook's $100 billion.

One of the sources said Twitter's IPO is now "massively" oversubscribed and underwriters are looking to select investors who plan to hold the stock for a longer duration rather than traders wanting to do a quick flip.

Some funds that ordinarily do not buy IPO shares were seeking allocations of up to 10 percent, but were unlikely to get them, according to the source who requested anonymity.

Twitter plans to close the books on the IPO on Tuesday at 12 p.m. EST (1700 GMT), a day earlier than scheduled, because of strong demand, according to two sources with knowledge of the process.

The IPO is set to price on Wednesday, with shares to begin trading on the New York Stock Exchange on Thursday. The previous price range was $17 to $20 a share.

The new pricing would value the company at up to $13.6 billion, or about 12.5 to 13.6 times forecast 2014 revenue of $1 billion, according to eMarketer. Both Facebook and LinkedIn Corp trade at about 12 times forecast 2014 revenue.

Several equity research analysts said they expect Twitter shares to rise after they begin trading, with some setting their one-year price target as high as $52.

"We would participate within the $23-$25 range, albeit, simple math would dictate that management should price at the bottom end of the new range," BTIG's Richard Greenfield said in a note Monday after the price was raised.

RED-HOT MARKET

Year to date, 2013 has been the strongest for IPOs since 2007 in the United States, with more than 178 companies going public, according to Thomson Reuters data. Equity markets are climbing and investor uncertainty has subsided, at least for now, over the U.S. debt ceiling crisis and political gridlock.

Shares of Container Store Group Inc doubled on their first day of trade on Nov. 1, joining strong debuts from more than half a dozen companies, including restaurant chains Noodles & Co and Potbelly Corp and software company Benefitfocus Inc.

Twitter management has been traveling the United States over the past week, speaking with potential investors.

On Monday, they pitched about 120 investors over lunch at the San Francisco Ritz Carlton but did not encounter any questions about the newly proposed IPO price range.

Instead, investors focused on Twitter's fundamental business and asked about its plans to make money outside the United States and its headcount projections, which have contributed to the company's ballooning costs, according to several people who were present.

Twitter executives were scheduled to hold one-on-one meetings with investors Monday afternoon before traveling to Los Angeles for meetings on Tuesday.

Some investors and analysts have raised concerns about Twitter being overly reliant on advertising sales, with few other significant revenue sources in the near term. Twitter said last month that its third-quarter revenue more than doubled to $168.6 million, but net losses widened to $64.6 million from $21.6 million a year earlier.

Twitter also disclosed in its new IPO filing on Monday that it had received a letter from International Business Machines Corp accusing the social media company of infringing on at least three U.S. patents.

Although many tech companies wrangle over intellectual property claims, IBM is a more serious and deep-pocketed threat than any accuser Twitter has faced before. Twitter's thin patent portfolio has been long been a vulnerability, and the company will likely have to spend money to acquire patents, experts say.

"Twitter has very little IP of their own," said Maulin Shah of Envision IP, an advisory firm. "They seem to have been more focused on talent and product acquisitions, but I would not be surprised if they now go out and try to actively acquire companies that have larger IP portfolios."

Twitter said it had legitimate defense against IBM's accusations but warned that "there can be no assurance that we will be successful in defending against these allegations or reaching a business resolution that is satisfactory to us."

FACEBOOK'S EXPERIENCE

Adam Grossman, an analyst at Boston investment firm Middleton & Co, with about $500 million under management, said his firm has yet to decide whether to buy into the IPO. The higher valuation "does make me more skeptical" he said.

But Grossman noted that Twitter's bankers were conservative in not raising the size of the offering, which had caused problems for Facebook's IPO.

Facebook raised its price range as well as the total number of shares in its IPO just before it debuted in May 2012. The move maximized the amount that Facebook's backers raised but contributed to declines in the stock in the early days of trade.

Twitter in contrast has won plaudits for running a more modest IPO pitch process, including roadshow presentations that focused on business fundamentals.

Goldman Sachs is leading Twitter's IPO, alongside Morgan Stanley and JPMorgan Chase & Co.

source: www.abs-cbnnews.com

Meet the elusive Hollywood financier who invested in Twitter

LOS ANGELES/ SAN FRANCISCO - When Twitter goes public in coming weeks, one of the biggest winners will be a 47-year-old financier who guards his secrecy so zealously that he employs a person to take down his Wikipedia entry and scrub his picture from the Internet.

Over the past two years, Suhail Rizvi, founder of New York private equity firm Rizvi Traverse Management, has quietly amassed a stake of more than 15 percent in the microblogging phenomenon for himself and his investors at a cost of more than $1 billion, according to three people with knowledge of his investments.

The previously unknown extent of Rizvi's involvement in Twitter comes as the eight-year-old company prepares for Silicon Valley's biggest coming-out-party since Facebook Inc in 2012.

Twitter will soon file its IPO registration document with U.S. securities regulators, revealing the identities of top shareholders. Because the shares Rizvi purchased are distributed among investors via multiple vehicles, it is unclear whether the filing will list Rizvi or his individual investors. The size of his personal stake has not been disclosed.

People with direct knowledge of his investment activities say that Rizvi, backed by Chris Sacca, a former Google executive and Twitter investor, were instrumental in attracting large private investors to the microblogging site, serving as matchmaker between the company's founders and global financiers from Wall Street to Riyadh.

Rizvi declined to comment for this article. Sacca, a longtime friend, gave him an entree into tech investing in 2011 - when Twitter was still struggling to make money - and from there, Rizvi scored stakes in some of the most sought-after Internet startups, from Facebook Inc FB.O before it went public to Square and Flipboard.

Rizvi's string of tech deals came amid intense competition among hedge funds and private equity investors to secure shares in startups, highlighted by Russian billionaire Yuri Milner's 2009 investment in Facebook.

With tech companies waiting later than ever to go public, some investors believed they may miss out on the biggest gains if they wait to buy shares in public markets, when a company's value may no longer rise exponentially.

DEEP-POCKETED INVESTORS

The son of an Iowa psychology professor, Rizvi has networked with rich and powerful people including Queen Noor of Jordan and Google Inc's Larry Page and Eric Schmidt, devising financing schemes that leveraged his access to deep-pocketed investors, according to people who know Rizvi.

Those who invest with Rizvi include British billionaire Richard Branson and Jeffrey Skoll, the former eBay EBAY.O executive and film producer, according to people with knowledge of the matter. It is not clear whether they are among the investors he brought into Twitter.

Before turning his attention to the Internet, Rizvi's deal-making focused on Hollywood. He helped Hugh Hefner take Playboy Enterprises private; bought and then sold the Hollywood film studio behind the "Twilight" series; and led the buyout of a leading talent agency, International Creative Management (ICM).

Rizvi is not alone among entertainment investors who have turned their focus to Silicon Valley. Former News Corp executive Peter Chernin's Chernin Group has invested in Tumblr, Pandora P.N and Flipboard, while Michael Ovitz, the talent agent and former Disney DIS.N CEO, has invested in Ron Conway's SV Angel funds, the tech incubator Y Combinator and venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz.

But few have operated on the scale of Rizvi. Twitter has a policy of restricting outside investors to only a handful, but Rizvi has had more freedom to bring in additional investors since he bought a large slice of the company.

"He's not to be underestimated. His approach to traditional media as well as technology has put him in a great position," said Jeremy Zimmer, chief executive of United Talent Agency, a competitor of ICM. "His ICM investment was viable and gave him a seat at the table and a chance to make a sound investment in Twitter."

TAG-TEAMING TWITTER

In late 2010, Sacca approached Rizvi with an offer: Sacca's friend, Evan Williams, had stepped down as CEO of Twitter and was seeking to sell 10 percent of the company. Rizvi soon snapped up the shares for $340 million, according to people familiar with the matter.

Following that first transaction, the two men formed a highly efficient tag team, the sources said. Sacca would seek shareholders who wanted to cash out, while Rizvi helped raise money to purchase the stock.

The friends successfully pitched JPMorgan Chase on a deal to buy more than $400 million worth of Twitter shares in 2011. Months later, Rizvi recruited Kingdom Holding Co, Saudi Prince Alwaleed's investment company, to buy an additional $300 million in stock in a separate vehicle.

JPMorgan Chase and representatives for Alwaleed did not respond to requests for comment on the deal.

By mid-2013, investment vehicles managed by Rizvi and Sacca had collectively bought more than $1 billion in shares, a stake that at one point amounted to nearly 20 percent of Twitter before it was diluted in recent months, sources said.

Twitter declined to comment.

Rizvi's Twitter connections opened the doors to other investing opportunities. Last year, Rizvi led a $200 million investment in Square, the mobile-payment processing company founded by Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, at a $3.25 billion valuation. On Sept. 24, Rizvi led a $50 million financing round for the news reader app Flipboard, whose founder, Mike McCue, once sat on Twitter's board.

But he has not always gotten his way in Silicon Valley. Although Rizvi owns indirectly some shares of Pinterest, Rizvi failed to purchase a significant stake when the online scrapboard site raised $100 million in 2012 and $200 million this year. It was unclear what stymied his attempts.

"He fought tooth and nail for an allocation" but failed, an angel investor in Pinterest recalled. "He was willing to pay."

It also remains unclear whether Rizvi's Internet investments other than Twitter will pan out. Some industry insiders note that he missed out on the huge gains that were made with very early investments in social media, and companies including Square and Flipboard remain unproven. Rizvi was able to buy only $100 million in Facebook shortly before its IPO, thus limiting his returns, according to people with knowledge of the matter.

FROM IOWA FALLS TO SILICON VALLEY

Rizvi, who owns a sprawling three-home compound in Greenwich, Connecticut, and a 1.65-acre Palm Beach, Florida, estate near Bill Gates and Michael Bloomberg, was born in India but moved to Iowa Falls, a town of 5,200 people, when he was 5.

Along with his older brother Ashraf, a hedge fund manager, Rizvi graduated from the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton business school. Both now serve on the undergraduate school's executive board.

Rizvi worked as a real estate analyst while at Wharton, then he started and sold a telecom company. With the proceeds, he financed his first big buyout in 1995, when he bought the electronic manufacturing business of a Puerto Rico phone company. Refocusing it on making higher-cost equipment, he spent the next four years boosting the company's annual revenue from $10 million to $450 million.

He would not break into the elite circles of media investing until 2004, after he founded Rizvi Traverse with John A. Giampetroni, a New York private equity investor.

In 2005 the ICM talent agency, which represented stars like Mel Gibson and Robert Redford, was looking for financing as it struggled with the defection of key agents and stars.

Rizvi took a controlling stake in ICM for $100 million, including $95 million in debt financing from Merrill Lynch & Co, according to a person with knowledge of the deal. Rizvi Traverse put up just $5 million. Later, he refinanced the agency for $300 million against future revenue from assets like "Friends," the popular show in which ICM holds a stake.

That $300 million loan was enough to repay Merrill Lynch and provide a hefty return for Rizvi and his partners.

ELUSIVE ON THE WEB

Even as Rizvi's circles have broadened, he has continued to keep a low profile, both in his personal style - sometimes flying commercial, one Hollywood executive said - and in his hands-off approach to tech investing. Despite bringing capital, he has not taken a board seat at Twitter, Square or Flipboard.

Rizvi's trusted lieutenant, Ben Kohn, has instead been the face of the firm on the West Coast, several entertainment industry executives said. Known for an aggressive negotiating style that contrasts with Rizvi's more reserved stance, Kohn manages a dozen employees out of a small office in Los Angeles.

Rizvi's growing network includes the likes of Vivi Nevo, the secretive Time Warner Inc shareholder who also famously prided himself on being "UnGoogleable," mutual friends of the two men said.

But while Nevo is now easy to find online, Rizvi maintains an elusive Web presence. The only readily found picture of Rizvi is a snapshot of him sitting with Twitter CEO Dick Costolo and Alwaleed in a New York hotel after the prince bought Twitter shares.

The photo, on a Saudi news outlet, had irked Twitter executives and Rizvi, as they had preferred to keep the transaction quiet.

source: www.abs-cbnnews.com