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KoastPhire t1_iy6q9fh wrote

Why did it fail?

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TheRealEvanG t1_iy6rgg0 wrote

I assume a marketing failure was the first prong of the failure. I graduated high school in 2009, so I should have been in their target demographic, and this is the first I'm hearing of it.

The second reason I assume it failed is because it's a stupid idea. I had a Samsung Impression in 2009 that I could use to get on Twitter just fine, and I was pretty late in my age group getting an internet-enabled cell phone.

I have to guess that the 2009 edition of the venn diagram of "people who want mobile access to Twitter" and "people who already have an internet-enabled phone in their pocket," had a pretty large overlap.

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revfds t1_iy6wyvd wrote

That was still in the era where people didn't mind having multiple "one use" devices. Mostly older people then young people, so I'm guessing this was more of a product to try and drive 35+ yr old people to Twitter. Though even in 2009 I knew teenagers that had both an iPhone and ipod, or other equivalents, so it's not totally dumb for them to think it could have succeeded.

The plot for the first fast and the furious movie was to steal a semi full of DVD players because that was a believable way to get a lot of money.

It was a different time.

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TheRealEvanG t1_iy6zd6y wrote

The first Fast & Furious came out in 2001. In 2001, only 56% of American households had a computer, and well over 90% of all internet access was on dial-up modems. That was a massively different time, technologically speaking, than 2009.

By 2009, over 74% of households had computers, many of those households had multiple comouters, and 63% of internet access was broadband. In 2008, Netflix and Hulu were already competing for streaming customers, and in 2009 Netflix had more streaming customers than DVD rental customers.

I remember people having iPhones and iPods. The issue was because of the first iPhone's super garbage battery life. If you listened to music on your iPhone all day, it'd be dead before you got home. Having a dedicated device to listen to music for hours at a time is way more functional than having a dedicated device to check Twitter once in a while, especially when the Twitter app did the exact same thing the dedicated device would do.

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mournthewolf t1_iy75apf wrote

I worked at Blockbuster in 2001 and we just started going to about 50% DVD and started selling DVD players. In 2001 they were definitely a luxury worth stealing for a heist movie. They were a huge deal at that time.

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[deleted] t1_iy8a9a2 wrote

LOL remember when LaserDisk was a huge deal...those things were so laughably huge oh man!

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TheRealEvanG t1_iy7xs10 wrote

I agree with that. 2001 was about the time we got our first DVD player. My point was that the person I replied to implied that The Fast and the Furious (a 2001 film) is an accurate representation of the technological landscape in 2009, which it's not.

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mournthewolf t1_iy8s55b wrote

Oh yeah, I was in agreement with you. I was just adding my experience from 2001.

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vomitpunk t1_iy8to0s wrote

I seem to remember around that time there were also tiers of DVD players, with the barometer of quality being if it could play The Matrix DVD. People needing firmware updates for a DVD player to work in 1999/2000? Good luck with most consumers getting that done! Head cannon is those were fully updated players they stole :p

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c010rb1indusa t1_iy7wupx wrote

> I remember people having iPhones and iPods. The issue was because of the first iPhone's super garbage battery life. If you listened to music on your iPhone all day, it'd be dead before you got home. Having a dedicated device to listen to music for hours at a time is way more functional than having a dedicated device to check Twitter once in a while, especially when the Twitter app did the exact same thing the dedicated device would do.

This isn't the reason people hung on to dedicated devices. The iPod Classic had a 160GB HDD at the time vs the 8GB of flash storage on the iPhone. It was litteraly 20x the space. Streaming wasn't a thing yet, people were still syncing their music with their computers and they had built up dozens of GBs worth of music & videos.

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TheRealEvanG t1_iy7zeau wrote

I don't want to be "that guy," but the iPod classic had been discontinued by 2009. Gen 6 was released in 2007. I remember my junior year of high school (2008) when one of the guys came in bragging and showing off his customized/engraved 160 GB Gen 1 iPod, and we were all like "Bro...iPod nano." Almost everyone I remember having an iPod in my school had either an iPod nano or an iPod Shuffle. For an 8GB device, you're talking about 1500-2000 mp3s, which is a lot of songs.

Most people I knew who had an iPod Classic and an iPhone had both because they had their iPod Classic before the iPhone came out, so they kept using it.

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TemporalSidus t1_iy8jzqx wrote

2009 sounds a bit too early; I remember they still had them at least a few years beyond that. I was still into the MP3 player market at that time (mainly into competitors to the iPod), and the iPod Classic was still an option.

Quick Google search says 2014 discontinuation.

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c010rb1indusa t1_iy8vru3 wrote

> and we were all like "Bro...iPod nano.

Lol I would have been like "Bro....that Nano won't even fit 1/5 of my library" on there. You're also forgetting video. Remember iPods played movies and tv shows sold through the iTunes store. Those took up lots of space and were very popular. And in 2008, the iPod Touch was the new hotness for iPods, not the iPod Nano. You're off by about 3 years. 2005/6 is when the Nano had it's moment in the sun. Also the Classic wasn't discontinued until 2014.

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Flamekebab t1_iy8n1si wrote

>The issue was because of the first iPhone's super garbage battery life.

Literally the first time I've ever heard that as a complaint and I owned the original iPhone.

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Whifflepoof t1_iy8x7ls wrote

It was garbage. I was constantly pissed off about apps killing the battery. I'd try to ride my bike with GPS to map my route and music playing and it would be dead in an hour.

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puttinonthefoil t1_iy6xpke wrote

The first iPhone had pretty limited storage didn’t it? iPods at the time were way more storage capacity, so if you had a lot of music you probably couldn’t use the phone.

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revfds t1_iy6zb48 wrote

Yes, storage was much less, 4-16gb if I recall, but Pandora, Spotify, etc were things, and the ipods were basically iPhones that couldn't make calls.

I suppose beepers would be more analogous, as older people still had those despite having cell phones, but I think my point still stands, that people were willing to have multiple devices on them.

Also consider bandwidth. American telecommunications have always been stingy with bandwidth.

I'm not saying I wouldn't have thought it was dumb at the time, but this came at the end of a time where these things had some moderate success. It was considered that we would all have multiple devices, not one that did everything.

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puttinonthefoil t1_iy6zla7 wrote

I was agreeing with you! You needed both an iPod and an iPhone if you liked music (I kept my iPod when I got an iPhone 3GS years later).

Spotify was not a thing in 2007; it opened in the UK in 2010 and in the states in July 2011.

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revfds t1_iy6zvu2 wrote

Oh for sure, I wasn't saying you weren't, or disagreeing with you, just discussing. It must have been some other so then Spotify, I personally used a phone with an SD card, I've never done streaming music, so I'm only recalling what I saw others do.

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TheRealEvanG t1_iy801mn wrote

iPods in 2009 were not "basically iPhones that couldn't make calls."

Yes, the first iPod touch did exist in 2009, but it was ludicrously expensive compared to a shuffle or a nano, and adoption was slow. Nanos and Shuffles were much more popular in 2009, along with people hanging onto their Classics.

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Sweetwill62 t1_iy9iopg wrote

I've corrected this a number of times but they were not stealing DVD players in the first Fast and Furious movie. They were stealing VCRs, VCR/TV combos along with camcorders. Picture of the back of the truck

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BlinkReanimated t1_iy7arc6 wrote

The idea probably predates smartphones entirely. Given that twitter was originally sms-based not web-based, they probably came up with this idea as a means for those without active cell phones to access Twitter in some way, but couldn't get it into production until it was already obsolete.

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TheRealEvanG t1_iy7xh87 wrote

This is an interesting take. I did not know that Twitter was originally SMS-based.

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bolanrox t1_iy81r7v wrote

Where the character limit started from

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davidbenett t1_iy9llf6 wrote

Also hash tags, because everything had to be in-band. Previously tags were popular on blogging platforms but were out-of-band from the message/post.

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AppalachianMarxist t1_iybsnrp wrote

The second idea was the notion. The smart phone was becoming a common thing for people so this single function device was trash. I mean before smart phones, you could text a number and it would put it up as a Facebook update. I used to text that number LG flip phone. So it seems like Facebook had wayyyyy more practical sense than Twitter at this time.

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444455550000 t1_iy6vg3y wrote

Probably because people didn’t want to carry another device. At that time people would’ve had on them a phone, laptop, keys, and wallet.

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3210atown t1_iy8f38m wrote

Some people at that time might have still had the flip phone/ipod combo.

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444455550000 t1_iy8qmgo wrote

My old iPod is the only device I miss and want again.

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IAmDisciple t1_iyb0aqa wrote

The G1, the first Android phone, was out in 2008, as was the iOS App Store. The people who wanted to buy a Tweeting device (and didn’t want to text 40404) would just buy a smartphone

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444455550000 t1_iyb3m3l wrote

Yep. The average person would have just a smartphone. No need to buy another device. My job (like other jobs) required me to have multiple devices. Same deal, no need for another device. I could tweet from my phone.

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iam-X t1_iy6qwhw wrote

Read the title again.

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DaveOJ12 t1_iy6rd6z wrote

I'm pretty sure they were being sarcastic.

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arglarg t1_iy701d1 wrote

Introduced about 2 years after the first iphone, I guess it came a few years too late.

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ProbablyathrowawayAA t1_iy7v2fr wrote

Just a guess. In the US it was $20 a month. Getting a prepaid cell phone with the same capabilities or better at $25 a month.

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zerbey t1_iy80427 wrote

It's 2009, still within what DankPods has termed the "nugget era". Technology companies were throwing all kinds of junk "e-devices" out into the world to see what would stick. Then smart phones came along and it pretty much ended this era overnight, that's why it failed because it was a single purpose device that didn't even do that well and even the cheapest smart phone or tablet on the market already had a Twitter app.

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TheBertinator3000 t1_iy9383c wrote

Wikipedia says service cost $8/month

We all know how that one goes over...

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PopeHonkersVII t1_iy97oex wrote

I think it was expensive and had an expensive data plan that went along with it. No one in 2009 was that obsessed with Twitter

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