Back to the Future of Twitter

Twitter could still do that, and pursue other initiatives like its revitalized API, offering developers the opportunity to build entirely new experiences on Twitter’s information flow (including unmoderated ones). The difference from the first go-around is that Twitter won’t have an advertising business to protect, and thus will have its interests ... See more

So let’s review: there is both little evidence that Twitter can monetize via direct response marketing, and reason to believe that the problem is not simply mismanagement. At the same time, Twitter is absolutely essential to a core group of users who are not simply unconcerned with the problems inherent to Twitter’s public broadcast model (includin... See more

Even that, though, suggests that the company can’t entirely escape its roots: having one identity is a core principle for Facebook, which is great for advertising if nothing else, but at odds with the desire of many to be different parts of themselves to different people in different contexts. Twitter, meanwhile, is unlikely to ever recover from it... See more