Folks who were hoping for a win from Twitter at its latest earnings call were disappointed. Not only did the company miss Wall Street estimates by a fair margin in the wrong direction, it also failed to show any substantial promise of future growth. Predictably, investors took poorly to the report card and drove Twitter stock down by almost 12 percent. Yesterday, CEO Jack Dorsey appealed to investors for more time, stating that the company’s efforts in Machine learning would soon yield dividends.
Speaking at an earnings call with analysts, Dorsey said:
As I look into 2017 and we look at what we can do, I just think the superpower we really provide the world is we can break news and get information to people faster than any other service in the world. And in order to do that, people have to do just a ton of work right now to dig through everything that may not matter to them to find something that really does. And that’s why I am excited about really making sure that we apply artificial intelligence and machine learning in the right ways and that we really meet that superpower of being that little bird that told you something that you couldn’t find anywhere else.
The company has certainly been putting machine learning frony and center in its development efforts of late. To date, the company has made three significant acquisitions in the space with Magic Pony, Madbits and Whetlab. Each of these companies have increased Twitter’s ML capabilities however, it has failed to deploy them in any earth shaking ways until now.
Trolls for example, continue to be a huge issue on the platform. It was only after several influencers and celebrities decided to quit the platform due to excessive harassment that the company kicked into motion and started coming up with measures to curb the troublemakers. As things stand at present, several new measures have been announced but have yet to take any particular effect.
Meanwhile, the Twitter CEO pointed out that the company’s efforts in deploying machine learning to surface tweets that could interest users because they were actually of interest of them — and not because they were breaking news! — appeared to be paying off. For example, he said that user engagement across current users was increasing and folks were spending more time on the platform.
he other thing that we’re investing a lot in is making sure that we apply machine learning more broadly around our entire experience. We can get a lot smarter and provide more magical experiences for people around showing them what’s breaking in real time and giving them a sense of what’s going on without having to do as much work as they currently have to do on the platform.
The company hopes to apply Machine learning more broadly across the spectrum of its service to create more engaging experiences. And that could serve to improve ad-revenue in the long term.
While Twitter could well produce long term gains by deploying machine learning to ensure that its platform is home to more engaging content, what it needs desperately at present are some tangible, short term gains. If the company’s quarterly earnings reports continue to be as dismal as the last one, Wall Street may just come in and force a restructuring — or a sell out. If Twitter stock keeps on tanking, suitors could start lining up again to buy the company off.
