Missed Opportunity

I’ve always thought that Twitter was held back by the early insistence on staying true to its mobile roots when, instead, there could have been significant benefit from building out parallel solutions which extended the standard stream of 140 character utterances.

The network has been due a shakeup for years and features like Event Pages and Discover seemed to be taking things in an alternative direction but we have instead gone full circle.

There is a fine line between adding new functionality and losing a network’s identity but there comes a point when decisions must be made in order to forward the service. I can’t help but feel that opportunity has gone begging.

One such opportunity would have been to marry the real time stream with an enhanced conversation platform and, to this day, I still believe that Twitter could have gleaned real benefit from acquiring Branch and integrating a fully fledged, longer form discussion tool to run alongside the stream.

Perhaps this could have lead to initiating conversation in a longer form rather than “branching out” from tweets (maybe negating the need for Medium to exist) but that’s all history.