Twitter’s Value
Chris Sacca’s ever hopeful What Twitter Could Be is quite a read. Too long and often meandering, it nevertheless shows how deeply he thinks about every aspect of Twitter as a product and a business. I like to imagine a hush fell over Twitter HQ as the entire staff took the time to read then re-read the entire thing.
Sacca lays out a way to capture a bigger audience and reinvigorate what, from the outside at least, looks like a muddled company. He shifts from grand strategic thinking (“live is the biggest opportunity yet”) to very specific feature recommendations. There are several great product ideas buried in the post worth pursuing — by Twitter, some plucky upstart, or even more established companies.
Sacca insists Twitter’s problems are the result of not telling its story, either to investors, potential new users, or users who have abandoned the platform. That strikes me as charitable, not just because telling the right story is a fundamental purpose of any business, but because it seems like Twitter itself doesn’t know what story to tell.
More than monthly active users or revenue growth, this lack of direction is the most troubling. Twitter has a mission statement — “to give everyone the power to create and share ideas and information instantly, without barriers” — that expresses a purpose, but they seem to lack foundational values. This has led to a near-perennial change in direction that for now seems to be focused on live events and broadcast, especially with the Periscope acquisition.
It wasn’t an investor or analyst who identified Twitter’s primary tension but, fittingly, writer and artist Teju Cole when he noted it’s a genuinely novel form of communication but also a corporation. Others have made similar points, that Twitter wasn’t so much invented as discovered, and everything fundamental to how Twitter works was built by the people who use it, not the company itself.
This tension has made capturing the value of Twitter from the top down elusive, however, there’s something perhaps just as valuable: the individual corpus of every user’s interests and passions. Twitter has one of the biggest data stores in the world, maybe the value is in all of the little data. Mining the big data of all of Twitter is interesting for knowing what’s happening all over the world, but giving everyone who uses Twitter insight into everything they care about is equally valuable and, potentially, much more lucrative. To make this work would require unwinding years of strategy, starting with reversing the infamous v1.1 of the API. It would mean not merely competing for users to show ads to, a la Facebook, and not insisting on a top-down, completely controlled approach to product development like Apple. It would mean more third-party apps and letting Meerkat exist alongside Periscope.
Everyone who wanted a microblog or novel communication app signed up for Twitter long ago. The question Twitter can answer for everyone else is how do they connect to everything they care about.
Originally published at flickerfusion.com.
