Twitter's best feature is 140 characters of content. Also, Twitter has always amazed me by being the first place that I discover breaking and often historic news - an experience that has never been replicated on Facebook or elsewhere. The signs though seem to indicate that it struggles with product vision and leadership. Seriously, "to build the world’s largest audience" is not product or user centric thinking and is a step toward failure in my opinion. I think core users can still find value and a unique experience on Twitter, but Twitter needs to better understand and articulate what makes it so great. Yes, it is still great in my eyes.
Personally, I think Twitter is struggling because they're married to the greatest short coming of the product: the 120 character statically allocated array. Sure they've tried to shoehorn other things into it (photos, replies, tags), but always at the expense of these precious characters -- a product decision that came from aping SMS. The updates are often frustratingly limiting. As long as you artificially limit yourself, you're stuck and can't innovate.<p>I use Twitter, but I don't know what I exactly get out of it. I guess I use it out of habit more than anything.
I've dropped Twitter. Their iOS client regularly pushed so many ads down my throat (in stream) that (a) I noticed and (b) I noticed it every day.<p>When I got to the point of blocking every advertiser (confirmed views +1!) but they popped back up under different special handles I resigned myself to defeat.<p>I will miss the serendipitous discovery of tidbits of information that it enabled, but the signal/noise (or rather, content/ads) ratio was overpowering. It needs to make money, but I think it's killing itself or at least transforming itself into the equivalent of TV -- content producers broadcasting to a largely passive audience.
this sounds rough:<p><pre><code> Last week, he named Twitter’s fifth head of product in as many years. Its
most recent vice president of product, Daniel Graf, who came from Google
Maps and was handpicked by Mr. Costolo, lasted less than six months in the
post.
</code></pre>
What was Daniel supposed to accomplish in 6 months? That's barely 1-2 months of strategizing then a 3 month dev cycle worth of work...
Twitter has already built the most important audience on the internet - the news media and news makers. The only missing link is a strategy that caters to this audience with active sourcing of news worthy content and additional mediums for short burst one-to-many real-time broadcasting. Tools that let media and news makers exploit the stream are monetizable. Ad carry-through is entirely unexplored ad revenue awaiting Twitter. Mesh networking solutions are monetizable as are private and encrypted sub-networks. Twitter's chief problem is a lack of identity. It will never be Reddit, Facebook or Instagram - mercifully.
Remember when Gmail used to have that ticker for how much space you get that would update live? You'd watch for a few seconds, and instead of 3.104649 GB of free email storage you'd have 3.104672 GB!<p>I think what Twitter needs is a similar ticker indicating the maximum number of characters in a tweet. I can scarcely imagine the excitement of watching it slowly creep upwards. Think of the celebratory triumph we can all share when, after months of build-up, it finally crosses over to 141 and everyone gets another character to use!<p>No more worries about vision after that.
I was on a Twitter Singapore office visit once, and asked the panel "what's next after hash tags?", the hall fell silent.their panel stunned. Granted this isn't where their product strategy discussions take place but somebody should know.<p>The panel avoided answering. This question should be keeping Dick up at night.
Twitter's a $25B company with $4B cash in the bank and is at revenue run rate of more than $1B/year. There are some existential questions about whether or not they could be doing more with their reach and influence, but it seems decently managed from my perspective.
It's so obvious what Costolo should do that I feel shame of Twitter: sell the firehose data to small and medium size companies! There are a lot of companies who want to analyze data from the firehose but can't afford the entry price.<p>Google revolutionized the advertisement world in this way. Before Google the entry level for putting ads in Yahoo was very high and involved human assistance.
Twitter is already the premier platform for cyberstalking and harassment. The question they're struggling with is, how do they monetize that?<p>Maybe if they charged for rape threats. Perhaps use something like the Facebook model, and charge a fee that scales based on the number of the target's followers to make a "Featured Rape Threat" that appears more prominently on the feed.<p>Or they could actually make a real effort to do something to stop the harassment, but obviously there's no money or "Big Vision" in that.