it is a big conundrum if your core product, through its simplicity, is really great.<p>you hire all these product people, have all these investors, but any direction you can take the product actually makes it worse against its initial, great core use.<p>twitter as a protocol is on a level with smtp - a lucky strike, hitting a need, something for the ages. journalists, media, etc. love it. RSS on a whole new level.<p>but twitter as a product company? smtp is a not a profit model, you need to have real, closed products - hence the API limits, hence all this other bull. they have a narrow scope hit product and will kill it by making it broad. a little bit like google and search, put ads on it, done, the rest is noise driven by boredom and/or panic (we need to justify our existence!).<p>twitters design team is bigger than most startups - and for what? the whole slack team fits into the twitter reception area and covers how many platforms, apps, use cases by now?<p>you threw a lucky punch with a communication channel/protocol, but now you're stuck. aren't we happy that the smtp or unix guys as a whole didn't try the same. "monetize".