On Sunday night, following reports by our sister publication Recode, Twitter confirmed that several of its top executives were leaving the company. The list included Kevin Weil, its fifth head of product since 2009; Jason Toff, who ran Vine; and vice presidents in charge of engineering and human resources. It’s an ugly list of departures for a company that has seen its user growth stall and its stock price drop 55 percent over the past year. And it calls into question CEO Jack Dorsey’s efforts to stabilize a company that was in turmoil for much of 2015. The Verge’s Nilay Patel and Casey Newton recently sat down in a Google Doc to tackle a question no one in the media has ever dared to ask: is Twitter doomed?
Nilay Patel: So I think Twitter has a deep existential problem, which is that no one knows what Twitter is for, or how people should use it. That sense of gleeful anarchy propelled the service in the early days, when a small group of power users made and remade norms and etiquette on a near-constant basis, but now it’s just a mess.
It’s pretty normal for companies to have some management turnover after a leadership change, so all these VPs leaving isn’t necessarily a bad thing — but the fact that Jack Dorsey hasn’t articulated a coherent vision for why anyone should touch the Twitter icon on their phone instead of the Facebook icon is the real problem. Why should anyone use Twitter right now?
Casey Newton: Twitter remains the best answer to the question: what’s going on right now? And it’s a pretty good answer to the question: what are people saying about what’s going on right now? That’s one reason that Twitter completely replaced a television showing CNN on most journalists’ desks over the past few years. And at 320 million monthly users, it’s not just for the media that Twitter replaced CNN. Which is one reason it's making more money now than ever: Twitter ranks number two in revenue growth for tech companies with at least $2 billion in sales. And it has $3.5 billion in cash sitting in the bank.
Anyway, it strikes me that first-time Instagram users face most of the same supposed problems that Twitter users do. They have to seek out accounts to follow, master quirks like @ mentions and hashtags, and — by the way! — learn a suite of elaborate photo editing tools. And yet Instagram has more than 400 million active users and could bring in $3 billion this year. So where exactly did Twitter go wrong?
Nilay: So I have this theory about parties: you know you’ve thrown a good one if there’s someone there who doesn’t like you. It means your party is too important to ignore.
That was Twitter at its peak: a cocktail party that everyone was at, and drive-by snark at rivals and strangers just added to the excitement of the place. The problem, sadly, is that "media-insidery cocktail parties" is not a scalable business model. Twitter grew so fast that suddenly the party got overwhelmed with people who don’t seem to like anyone, and it’s never taken the time to build tools to preserve even basic civility.
Add in the fact that the tools power users want — a better Tweetdeck! — have nothing to do with the problems of the masses — a better login experience! — and the misalignment between what Twitter needed to scale and the needs of the people who actually make all the content just got deeper and deeper. Instagram doesn’t have that problem; everyone just uses it the same way.
And while sales and cash are great, they basically just make Twitter a takeover target while user growth continues to flatline and the stock keeps falling. The company needs to make moves fast if it wants to be anything other than the next thing Yahoo somehow destroys.
Casey: Drive-by snark at rivals is actually going to be the theme of my birthday party this year. Hope you will attend!
So Twitter turned out to be many things to many people, and wrangling them all proved incredibly difficult. More difficult than, say, telling the world to capture their brunch in a square frame. That’s fair. So where does Twitter go from here?
We actually know, to some extent. We know they’re going to let us post ultra-long tweets of up to 10,000 characters. And we know that they’re going to offer a Facebook-style, algorithmic timeline that tries to rank tweets by importance. If you were running Twitter, can we agree that those are literally the last things you would do?
Nilay: It’s always felt like simply turning into Facebook has been the biggest idea Twitter has stubbornly refused to engage with, hasn’t it? Twitter is the service we all want to love, but Facebook is the company that got successful by shamelessly building or buying products people actually want. If the biggest vision issue at Twitter is character limit, the battle’s already lost.
Twitter’s biggest value is actually that unfiltered firehose of a timeline. I’d embrace it, and the tension it causes: build one set of apps that let power users put great stuff in the timeline, and another that let regular users find that stuff way more easily. Even that might not work, though.
Or I’d just hire you and tell you to figure it out. What would you do?
Casey: Get fired in under a year, if history is any guide! In the meantime, I’d borrow a different idea from Facebook — its Creative Labs division. In its relatively short life, Creative Labs was a small part of the company that churned out a number of big ideas. Most notable were Paper, a radical rethinking of Facebook for mobile devices, and Moments, which is now its default photo-syncing solution.
There were also a lot of flops along the way, several of which were just bad clones of Snapchat features. What I liked about Creative Labs was that it allowed Facebook to constantly rethink its approach to sharing and social networking. It took a dozen shots to find two that worked. I’d love to see Twitter take a similar approach, not unlike the one you suggest: build a series of apps that deliver Twitter in interesting new ways. See which gain traction. Incorporate big wins back into the flagship app.
Alternatively, Twitter could simply have allowed its once-thriving developer ecosystem to continue experimenting with new designs and features instead of crippling its API in 2012. But the company has only $3.5 billion in cash on hand — not nearly enough to develop a working time machine.
The company’s best path forward may be the one floated by pseudonymous Silicon Valley gadfly Startup L. Jackson: use Twitter’s 300 million or so core users to bootstrap a network of related but different apps, eventually amassing Facebook-like scale in the aggregate. Vine and Periscope have been hits; Twitter ought to pick up (or homebrew) a few more.
We’re coming dangerously close to 10,000 characters here. Any parting thoughts?
Nilay: Jack Dorsey wants to emulate Steve Jobs, so maybe Twitter should just put out an iPod? It’s basically as good as any other idea we’ve had.
Casey: It holds more than 10,000 tweets!
Nilay: Seriously though: if Dorsey wants his Jobs moment, the thing to do is articulate a real vision for Twitter. Who is it for? How should we use it? It hasn’t happened yet, and the clock seems to be ticking.
Casey: Totally unrelated, but follow us on Snapchat. Please RT!!
Comments
app.net
By T.C. Sottek on 01.26.16 1:20pm
arstechnica.com
By Nick, Yeah? on 01.26.16 2:59pm
Isn’t it already effectively bankrupt?
By d0mth0ma5 on 01.26.16 3:10pm
If Twitter is doomed; why is Jack Dorsey depicted as a Twitter-gadget God?
By fakejobs on 01.26.16 1:21pm
… With weird twitter logo-shaped hair.
By Ghost650 on 01.26.16 3:24pm
Twitter’s problem is actually too much text in spite of the 140 char limit. When you look at your Facebook feed it is nicely broken up with images and videos. A lot of the time, my twitter feed seems like a long disjointed essay.
While that allows for a quick view, it’s not something I’m going to spend a lot of time on. It’s great to find out what’s going on with the Oscars, or the latest on a shooting, or the traffic downtown but at other times it is literally like a fire hose — knocking you down if you stand in the stream.
By aditseng on 01.26.16 1:24pm
I think that curation of who you follow is key. I rarely get floods of news as I follow a few key people in most areas. I guess if I were to get above 500 or so people it would be worse.
By d0mth0ma5 on 01.26.16 3:05pm
I’m in the opposite boat as you since I find the "nicely broken up" stream of images and videos frustrating on Facebook precisely because they take up so much visual space. It doesn’t make for a fast scroll through my feed to catch up on what’s going on. Even reshares take up what feels like unnecessary amounts of space. Compare that to a retweet or a quote tweet which are much sleeker in comparison.
By gmacek on 01.26.16 4:46pm
The beauty of Twitter is its simplicity. the 140 character limit is enough. If people want an overload of information, there’s Facebook for that. Personally, I mainly use it as a business tool to keep up with the video industry news and so far I love it. I get the latest news in a couple of scrolls and if I want more info on a post, I just click the link and that’s it. I think the problem is that Twitter is trying too hard to be "cool". For that, theres Instagram and Snapchat. They should just focus on what it is best for: getting the latest news and trending info in a fast and efficient way.
By Emilio888 on 01.27.16 3:43am
There has to be way to expand tweet beyond 140 characters. It is possible for years already via Twit Longer, but the necessity to use that separate login and user interface is annoying. I agree with Dorsey that it should be built-in.
No one, however, will force anyone to tweets longer than 140 characters. And presentation of tweet will also be only 140 characters maximum — as it always was. There difference will be only in "…" sign in the end that would allow readers to see full text of tweet, if it did not fit to standard limitation.
By UsernameAndPassword on 01.27.16 9:54am
Doomed? It’s still very much popular among the young people.
By Abby94 on 01.26.16 1:31pm
Yes, but does it make money and its is growing? Are investors willing to keep investing it in? These are the questions.
By Fkeefe4th on 01.26.16 1:40pm
Is it?
Define "young people", because the teenagers don’t really seem to be into it. They are more into snapchat and messaging.
By aarontsuru on 01.26.16 3:47pm
I was wondering when the twitter is doomed articles would start appearing. Everyone who wants to be on twitter is probably there. Maybe there is no more growth to be had, just steady profits. If the stock price drops low enough someone can take it private and happily enjoy steady profits.
By low_tech on 01.26.16 1:32pm
In it’s current form, sure. But that’s the point of this whole conversation. What do you do to improve and make it more accessible? I love the idea of Twitter, and am often lurking and consuming others tweets to get news in real time, but it’s a pain trying to follow the right people, find the right content, etc. I like the more tools for power users and content creators, and easier discovery for end users and consumers. Not sure what that would look like, but it would open it up to a whole lot more people.
By sillygoosen on 01.26.16 2:27pm
Twitter continues to be a much stickier social media platform for me personally (i pretty much always have a monitor devoted to Tweetdeck) but I can’t offer any solution to their growth problems as they certainly seem to have stalled out on that front.
By web0rama on 01.26.16 1:34pm
If Twitter devolves into Facebook (algorithmic feeds), I wager they’ll: A) make more money in the short run B) piss off everybody that likes Twitter over Facebook.
Like Nilay said, the beauty of Twitter is its chaotic nature that is, more so than most other media in this day and age, unfiltered. I’d hate to see that beauty sacrificed for short-term revenue.
By erains on 01.26.16 1:36pm
Its long term revenue too, because people could leave. Twitter has problems that people can’t control their feed, who contacts them and who sees their tweets. That is fine if you’re boring or not talking about anything of substance. But say you didn’t like a specific movie or talk about your love for the new Star Wars film, some clown might just start talking to you for no reason but to argue. I speak from personal experience.
By Fkeefe4th on 01.26.16 1:42pm
I was wrong about the short term aspect; like you said, losing customers is a long term issue. Good point!
However, you can edit who sees your tweets (private account), what’s in your feed (follow/unfollow), etc. If you have a public account, you can’t prevent people from talking to you, I suppose, but I think that’s a worthy sacrifice for a useful, public media source. Besides, you can do all you said in Facebook, but the algorithm ultimately decides what people see anyways.
By erains on 01.26.16 2:00pm
It sort of works, but if you are in a business or need an open facing account, it doesn’t. My wife is in a band and she had two accounts for just that reason. Her public, band member account sometimes talks promotes lady drummers or contests for female musicians. And like once a month she need to set it to private because some group of clowns doesn’t like women having opinions on the internet about music or other stuff.
The binary options of twitter are not really the solution people are looking for. And its why some groups lean into other services, like Facebook. Better moderation, better tools, better ability to control your space. Twitter does not offer that and people/companies are starting to notice its limitations.
By Fkeefe4th on 01.26.16 2:10pm
Ironically the world of Google+ and its use of Circles could have been quite a revolution in the use of social media. Post specific things targeted as specific folks and nobody else sees it unless you let them in. Then post publicly when it’s not offensive (read: cat videos).
And unless you really care to think about who to post to on Facebook using their controls, it’s a similar issue as Twitter but just to your friends instead of the world. They never made it easy to manage your friends into groups or lists or circles, which is unfortunate.
I suppose I’d be curious what the better or best solution is to the space control with what we share if it isn’t binary. Facebook has the tools but nobody really uses them. Google+ has all the tools and it’s easy to use, but unfortunately not many people are using as it a social platform.
By gmacek on 01.26.16 4:52pm
Exactly, I use twitter because of that mostly.
By Runner50783 on 01.26.16 1:47pm
Maybe a microblogging platform that limited it’s users to 140 characters was never meant to be a billion dollar company to begin with?
By redbeardedsf on 01.26.16 1:44pm
This x1000.
By Francisco.G on 01.26.16 2:33pm
Precisely. Twitter’s biggest problem is the notion that a beloved platform enjoyed by millions – but not experiencing hockey-stick growth – is dying/dead.
I believe Twitter’s largest expense is R&D. Millions of dollars later, we get ‘likes’ instead of ‘favs’… If they just screwed the lid on and let it run, I would be quite content to carry on using it, and glancing at the occasional ad.
Twitter’s second biggest problem is that it’s a bit daunting for stupid people. To me, that’s its greatest feature.
By hagfish on 01.26.16 4:10pm