My 2 Cents on Twitter’s Future

Twitter has taken a beating in the markets and the press the past few weeks. I agree with Ben Thompson’s analysis that the big problem isn’t ease of use or feature set, it’s that the vast wealth of attention unlocked by mobile phone has now been swallowed up by Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat, so Twitter is now arguing for why people should *change* habits, not create ones, a much more difficult task. So while everyone’s throwing ideas on the table of how Twitter can avoid MySpace’s fate (at much greater scale), I thought I’d offer one suggestion for Twitter: Go back to being the communication platform you were in the beginning, not the media platform you are today.

In the early days, Twitter was an open and flexible communication platform.

It served as completely free relay between web, RSS, and SMS protocol. It had an unrestricted development API. It was widely respected and trusted for its ability to transfer information in 140 character bites from a seemingly endless number of end points, be it blog readers, chat clients, webpages, or feature phones. As such, developers flocked to it, and innovation thrived on top of it, and everyone was invested in helping grow the community.

Instead of staying on this path, Twitter decided to become a media play.

Turned off RSS, limited SMS, restricted the API, shut down 3rd parties. This led to some important things like standardizing retweets and advertising tools. But I believe the loss of support of the developer community and the reduction in platform flexibility was a major contributor to its stalling out in growth and decline compared to Facebook (which is doing its best to add features like Sports Stadium that could steal the few remaining advantages Twitter has left). Especially when you consider that many of the great elements of the Twitter experience were built by third parties, including the best clients, search tools, rich media products, and vertical experiences.

Twitter lost a lot of trust and credibility that isn’t easily won back, so this won’t be an easy move.

Not only would it have to turn back on full support for protocols (e.g., RSS), It would have to consider a big step like making the platform an open standard. This would reduce control of the product but give developers security in returning to the platform. The goal here would be to combat the increasingly scary trend of people relying on closed communities for communication, such as iMessage and Google Chat. Being the only open standard with any real scale (an advantage other attempts like Identi.ca have lacked) could potentially lead to renewed interest and growth.

Twitter would then have to evolve it’s business model to be a premium service provider.

It would still be a primary contributor to the product, helping govern decisions like how to handle attachments within the 140 character construct. But it would primarily become an application developer on top of the platform — offering services and experiences like Moments (broken out as an app), Vine, and Periscope. Business services like storage, advertising, and analytics. And new services that cater to niche communities, such as the fantastic ClutchPoints NBA app or Nuzzel. Competing for these services might all be less lucrative than being the only real game in town, but a slice of a growing pie is better than all of a shrinking one.

I’m sure I’m way oversimplifying this idea. It may not even be possible. But Twitter’s problems are real, and Twitter’s challengers are getting more formidable. It will take something big like this to dramatically change Twitters fortunes. It’s at least worth considering.