> The twitter clones seem to play things very close to twitter's style. At least it looks that way to me as someone who isn't a heavy twitter user.
A lot of this is they're trying to capture the user base of an incumbent and users like familiarity.
> Also what is "failed as a social network" when Twitter, one of the biggest bleeds money as it is?
Twitter has millions of users and it doesn't cost a lot in infrastructure to host tweets. Twitter bleeds money because the company has been mismanaged (going back long before its current ownership), not because putting ads on a social network with that number of users couldn't turn a profit.
A "failed social network" is one that nobody uses.
> Or maybe UX where I actually feel like I can find or interact with things I want just doesn't work for profitability (Facebook doesn't show me what I want)?
There's probably a short-term/long-term thing here. Big companies run on metrics, so they make a change and the number goes up so they keep the change. But the way the change works is by frustrating people into spending more time on the site, which short-term increases the metrics and long-term makes people hate you and be eager to switch away at the first opportunity.
What you probably want here is a service with a single owner who actually uses it and cares about making the service good (and, most importantly, is competent), but what usually happens instead is it becomes a publicly traded company controlled by shareholders who institute the aforementioned metrics-based bureaucracy.
The key is somehow getting the one with benevolent leadership and the one with millions of users to be the same one.
