Pulling Twigs from Twitter’s Nest
Twitter is Getting Craigslisted
Back in 2010, Andrew Parker from Spark Capital published The Spawn of Craigslist. The post, along with an iconic image of the Craigslist homepage surrounded by startup logos, went viral amongst the venture capital and startup communities.
A few years later, David Haber (who also worked at Spark Capital) refreshed the image, adding dozens of new logos:
These blog posts highlighted an important dynamic:
Dozens of startups were carving off Craigslist’s use cases and some were even building billion dollar companies (see Lyft, AirBnB, Etsy and Care.com)
Fast forward to today and a similar dynamic is happening with Twitter. The company’s top competitors (as opposed to startups in the Craigslist example) are cloning and, in many cases, drastically improving its use cases. Many, but not all, of these use cases were invented by Twitter. I’m not claiming that all of these are “copied” from Twitter but rather that all of them were real or latent opportunities that Twitter has largely failed to capitalize on:
- #Hashtags and @Replies were carved off by practically the entire web, including Twitter’s old arch rival, Facebook
- Instagram carved off Images
- Facebook Live carved off Live Video (which Twitter-owned Periscope pioneered)
- Medium & WordPress have carved off Long Form Text (a feature Twitter never built but that users had jerry-rigged with screen shots and text images)
- Snapchat carved off Impulsive Self Expression (albeit in an image/video format, as opposed to Twitter's plain text). Snapchat’s Stories proved to be such a big success that Twitter created a similar feature called Moments.
- Direct Messaging (an old and under developed feature) was carved off by Facebook Messenger, Kik, Line, WhatsApp and hundreds of other pure play chat apps
Why have Twitter’s competitors been so effective at capitalizing on its core use cases? Lets return to the Craigslist analogy.
Both companies have their origins as free flowing, capital P Platforms where users are empowered to create new use cases from whole cloth. Remember how #Hashtags and @Replies were invented by early Twitter users? These became core features of Twitter and they were invented by users, not Twitter employees – that’s a free flowing platform. Craigslist, by way of comparison, has always been, and continues to be, a free flowing platform. Craig creates the categories and users fill them with millions of unexpected requests.
Is there a solution for Twitter? I’m skeptical. Twitter’s product iteration cycle is notoriously slow so trying to recapture all of these use cases would be futile. At this point, focusing on one thing and being great at it is a better strategy than trying to recapture past glory and going head-to-head with faster growing competitors.
Jack’s strategy of focusing Twitter on LIVE (NFL, Wimbledon, MLB, NHL and other live streaming deals) is an exciting new approach that is showing signs of early success.
“Twitter is live: live commentary, live connections, live conversations” — Jack Dorsey
I’m rooting for Twitter. This strategy is unique, exciting and ties directly into the core of what Twitter is (“What’s Happening?”).
Feel free to reach out via email at russell@russellsamuels.com, and follow me at @Russsamuels on Twitter. Learn more about our venture fund at WhitecapVP.com
