Twitter reported earnings yesterday and the stock jumped something like 30 percent overnight, which is the kind of number that makes financial news people say "surged" a lot. I was half paying attention to it because I still open Twitter more than I probably should, but the part that actually stopped me wasn't the revenue (312 million dollars, up 124 percent from a year ago, since you're asking) or even the user count (271 million monthly actives now, up from 255 million last quarter). It was this new metric they trotted out called "timeline views." 173 billion of them, apparently, in three months.
I don't know what a timeline view even is in a way I could defend to you if you pushed back. Is it every time the app refreshes? Every scroll? Every time I open the app at a red light to see if anything happened in the four minutes since I last checked (it hasn't)? Twitter didn't say, not anywhere I could find, and that's sort of the point of a metric like this. It sounds enormous and specific and it's neither, really. It's just a number that goes up because more people are staring at their phones more often, which, sure, congratulations to everyone involved in that.
I run a stats page for this blog too, obviously at a scale so small it's almost embarrassing to mention in the same paragraph as billions. But I have the same problem in miniature. Pageviews go up when I post more, they go up when something gets linked from somewhere bigger than me, and they tell me almost nothing about whether anyone actually read the thing or just had a tab open on a bus somewhere. I stopped checking my stats daily a while back because it was turning into a weird little ritual that had nothing to do with writing better posts, just with watching a number and feeling things about it. Twitter announcing a new number to investors every quarter is the same instinct, just with nine more zeros and a stock price attached to the feeling.
What I do think is real: the user growth. Sixteen million net new monthly users in a single quarter isn't nothing, and it lines up with what I've noticed anecdotally, which is that people who swore off Twitter a couple years back as "just for nerds and journalists" are quietly back on it, mostly to watch things happen live. The World Cup did some of that work this summer. So did the news coming out of Ukraine and Gaza, which is a grim thing to credit for a growth quarter, but it's true, and Twitter more or less said as much on the call.
The stock move is the part I find funniest. A one-day jump that size for a company Twitter's size isn't a calm, rational repricing of the business overnight. It's a crowd of traders who bet the wrong way getting run over all at once. Wall Street had this priced for disappointment going in, because the last couple of quarters were rough on user growth specifically, so when the number came in merely fine (not great, fine) everybody who was short scrambled for the exit at the same time. That's not Twitter suddenly being worth 30 percent more. That's a squeeze, and squeezes say more about the traders than the product.
None of which changes how I actually use the thing day to day, which is: too much, mostly for links, occasionally to yell about something dumb a politician said before closing the tab and feeling vaguely embarrassed about it. I'd still take an edit button over any earnings metric they could put on a slide, and the mute feature they only half-shipped a few months back has done more for my actual daily life than 173 billion of anything ever will. Products and earnings calls live in different buildings most of the time, even when it's the same company signing both checks.
Anyway, the AT&T store down the road from me had a line out the door this week for the new Fire Phone, which is its own story and one I don't have the patience to get into today. Maybe next time.