Look, I understand the sentiment, but here's the thing.
Twitter only exists as we know it today because a lot of people have poured a lot of money into it. Without that money, Twitter would be an impossibility. It simply would not exist, at least not at anywhere near the scale it exists at today.
My guess is that, for the people who poured in all that money, "leaving a mark on humanity" was not the primary reason they opened their wallets. They opened their wallets because they expected to make more money by doing so. They were making investments, not charitable contributions. And at some increasingly near point, those people are going to want to see a return on their investments. That means that, barring an acquisition, Twitter needs to find a way to turn a (hopefully large, from the investors' viewpoint) profit -- and sooner rather than later.
Why would you ever have thought things would be otherwise? Twitter is a company. Companies that don't make money usually don't survive. The best case scenario is that they get bought out and operated as a vanity project by a deep-pocketed patron, the way a lot of magazines are. But a magazine is a much smaller and cheaper-to-run enterprise than a centralized, global real-time communications network. Whose pockets are deep enough to run Twitter at a loss indefinitely?
If you organize yourself as a for-profit corporation, and take on investors, at some point you have to bring in more money than you burn. Otherwise you will at some point have to scale back your ambitions, because you simply will not be able to afford them anymore.
Twitter, in other words, is meeting its destiny. Maybe that destiny is not to make as big a "mark on humanity" as people wish. But without all the money they took from those investors who are breathing down their necks now, Twitter would never have been able to scale up to where it is today at all. And that money came with the condition that Twitter would at some point figure out a way to pay it back, with interest.
That point is now.
You don't need to have $1Billion dollars in financing to offer a service like this -- this is what the likes of app.net are teaching us.
A $50million Twitter could have "easily" sustained it's vision/objective without having to cannibalise it's entire ecosystem.
However someone promised the moon to a bunch of financiers and now they have to deliver above and beyond of what Twitter could have been, or should have just been.
As far I'm concerned that is the story of Twitter, a company that took the money and ran.
Sometimes you do. We've seen a dramatic amount of "overfunding" of social media startups, and I have a theory why.
When your business model doesn't involve well, actually making money at its core, you end up in a position where you have to staff up massively so you can pursue an enormously vast range of monetization strategies in the hopes of finding something that sticks.
How many people on Facebook do you think are working on the core product - as in the Facebook that end users interact with on a daily basis? How many instead are working on a enormously numerous systems that Facebook hopes would make them monetizable? Ad platforms, billing systems, support systems, analytics systems, etc etc.
So yeah, Twitter as defined as "that thing where you submit strings of 140 chars or less and follow others doing the same" probably didn't need $1bn to get off the ground. Twitter in the "this might actually make money" sense though, probably isn't THAT overfunded.
2) Don't you think it's a little early to compare app.net and twitter? App.net is in it's infancy and is nowhere near the product twitter is
3) What could Twitter have been exactly? How did closing a few API's off prevent it from getting there?
4) Have you ever imagined that perhaps your vision for Twitter and Twitter's vision for Twitter just do not mesh?
Any centralized system that has to support tens or hundreds of millions of users in real time is going to be seriously expensive to operate. There may well be a point at which it's simply economically infeasible to do it without splitting the expense into tiny slices borne by lots of different parties, the way we do for email.
There have been previous, less successful iterations of the same common idea. Twitter hit critical mass in terms of it's user base and has created neat and unique nuances that make it's version of human-human communication on the web innovative and fun and successful. Kudos to them. It's the social network du jor for fast communication. But there will eventually be other iterations in the future. Some more successful, some less. Perhaps some new incarnations from Twitter itself as they evolve their product over the next decade.
If Twitter has a "mark", it's that they created a way to "flatten the world of communication" and take discussions to a realm where everything and everyone are drawing on the same board at the same time.
But in the end, these are all services that facilitate human interactions that have existed for thousands of years. We've just taken those interactions and put them all on an even plane at the same time, and exposed them in a way that is amazingly accessible.
So when we talk about "Twitter changing the world", I get confused. It's always humans that change the world, we're just using a different vehicle and techniques to get there. So... Rhetorical flourishes and hyperbole aside... How was Twitter changing the world, and how is it not anymore...?
Twitter was a utility. Now it's ABC. It could have changed the world in the way that, you know, the web changed the world. But instead it's changing the world in the way that cable news changes the world. That's what's so bizarre about Ev Williams to me. He's so damn talented but he doesn't give a shit about anything but the flip. It's true of so many founders these days; everyone worships Steve Jobs and not enough worship Tim Berners-Lee.
Yes, that's reality. Yes, it's unfortunate and we wish it wasn't so.
I love Twitter the medium. I wish Twitter the company would find a way to monetize without taking this route. I like to think that I would have done something different in their position, but who knows.
Founded by a hacker-idealist who wanted to bring people and technology together like never before. The experiment worked wonderfully at first as millions of people flocked to Facebook's revolutionary platform from around the world. Soon, questions of profitability came into the picture, forcing executives to compromise ethics for additional revenue. Chaos erupted and millions began to question their loyalty and wonder about their safety/privacy. Over time, the platform has become overgrown with ads (that are rarely clicked), spam (that embarrasses it's victims), and scandals (that frighten even the most loyal users). Fear of extinction due to unexpected competition has pushed Facebook to become even more aggressive by inflating the value of the company to astronomical proportions, acquihiring dozens of startups, and raising billions in an IPO. Today, the future of Facebook is in the air. No one knows how the variables will compound and what this corporate gene sequence will evolve into...
Some of us devs just have to admit that we are not that important to the success of Twitter, at least, not anymore. It's also not a charity so they need to make money somewhere, I don't really see the problem here.
My problem with this stance is the same problem I have with so called "browser share".
I am not beholden to a single interface. I'm human. I'm dynamic. I move and change.
That means sometimes I use the website. Sometimes I use the mobile app. Sometimes I embed Tweets on a website. Sometimes I use a website's embedded tweets to follow them instead of following them on Twitter. I send photos and tweets from apps, and I consume tweets from multiple sources.
Twitter is almost as ubiquitous as water for me, the ways I consume and use it in my day to day. There is no single one size fits all interface to Twitter in my workflow, only Twitter the service. Because if there were, if I had to go to the website and only the website, or the app and only the app, I wouldn't use it. I don't use things that get in my way. You either fit into my workflow, or you don't.
And I'll miss the Mac OS desktop client if the rumors are true, because the website doesn't have a simple way to switch between multiple Twitter identities if I'm running a personal Twitter, a brand Twitter. And also because they bought Tweetie only to, eventually, kill it. But we've had this discussion before.
My gut reaction is to agree with you that the Hacker community is overreacting to getting screwed over and that Twitter will go on fine without us. But without any facts about how popular and widely used these third party apps are, my opinion is really just a guess.
As for the website... Twitter loses all its value to me if I have to open a browser every time I want to read content.
"Very true. Along the same lines, Google+ is the Major League Soccer of social networks. Other countries have very successful soccer leagues that happened organically. The US tried to manufacture a soccer league, and it spent a ton of money in doing so. It so happens that the most talented athletes in the country prefer sports that are already popular. The most interesting people in the league are has-beens from Europe. Still, nothing wrong with being the fifth or sixth most popular sport in the country." -Diego Basch
http://bleacherreport.com/articles/1290390-nba-and-nhl-get-t...
It took an old idea and make it new and relevant again.
In the second movement, it went huge and was the new sensation.
The conclusion of the story will be bland and all over the place. With pundits failing to see that the emperor has no clothes.
It was an easy, no fuss way of getting social media into software. Facebook caused me no end of bother, its API was (still is?) an 'it exists, and here's the calls, good luck buddy' affair.
Now, I'm not sure the functions I used would pass the API ToS.
Twitter is such a disapointment for me and i'm looking forward too to see their first profitable year.
Twitter was originally thought of as a small family/close friends network.
