Back to flock one, enable conversations

By now, the news of Twitter’s slowing growth has ricocheted through the markets, causing a nearly 20% dip in prices, wiping out nearly 8 billion USD in market value over the last 3 days.

While I really like that the company has gone from strength to strength in attempting to increasing monetization of their platform, and are creating real value with real time conversations, a huge part of the user experience is missing.

The early days of Twitter is surrounded by being simple. 140 characters, and people are all around the Twitter town talking about random conversations that interest them. The town has since become populated with brands, influencers, celebrities that make it oh so vibrant like Hollywood.

I will like to ask myself, a not so avid user, is that really what I want? Products like Whatsapp, WeChat, Facebook Messenger and the likes have enabled me to communicate with my friends so readily that I have no clear need for Twitter. The use cases around the product is decreasing. I post pictures using Instagram (if I ever do), status updates on FB, share articles on FB/ LinkedIn, but in 2 years since 2012, I have not needed to use Twitter actively.

Before you scream BIAS, I must say that this is definitely a personal use case problem, and I will not generalize across to everyone. Taking a more elevated view, if Twitter is about conversations, why am I not captivated? Perhaps, it is the barriers to entry of user interface, the spam from irrelevant people I followed, or simply that most of my existing conversations are on chat apps. Whatever the case is, it is a fundamental problem that is crucial to be solved should the platform want to increase user growth. (That is my humble opinion)

Why not acquire Whatsapp, I ask. That will increase the engagement of users, allow users to have better conversations with friends and in the public sphere. A slightly more controversial idea will be to take a leaf out of Wechat’s book and really create a standalone mobile ecosystem around conversations for people globally. Given the strong engineering, marketing and design talents in Twitter, I see no reason why such efforts will go to waste. The difficulties are tremendous, and potentially costly, but the cost of not doing anything is more costly.

On another note, as if directly answering my personal thoughts, I read that Dick Costolo announced the four part plan of a better Twitter:
Source: http://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffbercovici/2014/02/05/dick-costolos-four-part-plan-for-making-a-better-twitter/
1) Onboarding improvements
2) Media content with products like Vine
3) Encouraging conversations
4) Topic based discovery

There you have it, speculation aside, I will really like to see what Twitter’s next move is. Are you? Share with me your thoughts.

Cheers!