I'd be surprised if Twitter ever is actually profitable. Investors got their exits, employees will start heading for other, brighter stars, and Twitter will go the route of a long, drawn-out corporate "death", coasting on their $2b from the IPO. This is all my own opinion, of course, so I could definitely be wrong!
I think this is reasonable. Twitter has been doing a lot of things that make it a much less attractive platform: Limiting the developer API in all sorts of unpleasant ways, poor attempts at integrating ads into the feed, and layout redesigns that are unpleasant to use.
Plus, there's the fact that it's a banal and mostly useless communication medium and an echo chamber. But I might be projecting on those last two.
I can at least understand the API limitations, even if I don't agree with them. They're trying to keep control over the user experience by not giving away too much functionality.
When your offering is personalized RSS feeds with char limits, you have got to hold on to what you've got. I think the ultimate thing that could damn the company is that they won't adjust their functionality to keep up with various market trends (e.g. the way Facebook and Linkedin have).
Maybe they could take a few hundred millions of that, and their staff on hand, and develop something that is actually useful and monetizable when it becomes obvious Twitter will remain unprofitable.
They probabily will, in fact; the real question imho is whether they try to build it on top of the Twitter serviceor in spite of it.
Sometimes I like to imagine what Twitter or other social networks might look like as a subsidized public utility. I'm sure it would more than likely be poorly executed in practice, but it would go a long ways in eliminating the need to squeeze every last ad-dollar from a service, a process that often dilutes what is at its core a valuable public platform.
Obviously an idea that runs contrary to the usual thinking around here, but something worth a quick muse over.
Ultimately isn't this what RSS and email were / are? Open methodologies that work across a wide array of technologies and are not owned by specific corporations?
I don't like my technologies (especially the ones I invest heavily in) to be owned by particular companies that need to please investors / shareholders. I know that my needs will always come second to their financial goals--this is particularly true for unpaid services (twitter, Google, Facebook, etc.).
I don't know why we were so quick to abandon "outdated" technologies in favor of corporate owned ones. It short of seems like we forfeited our data and collective ownership in open platforms / public utilities in favor of things that were easy and looked cool.
Not a fan of the idea that 45% of their revenue goes to employees that would leave if they weren't paid so highly. That logic is suspect because Twitter has done very little in the way of innovation over the last several years. Yeah they introduced cards, but that wasn't too complicated. A Twitter clone could be made by a dozen capable programmers over a summer. The programmers shouldn't be taking so much of the revenue.
Also the fact that the ads aren't as targeted as Facebook or Google hurts it's advertising capabilities. Still I don't think Twitter will go anywhere anytime soon, it seems like the go-to social network for power brokers, the press, and the intellectual elite. That's gotta count for something, right?
For me it's the cleanest user experience. And as opposed to Facebook, get's better with the more people you follow instead of worse. It's also got less spamming ads than Facebook and much more interesting content.
Twitter's product started out highly focused and never really deviated. It's a fun platform to use but I wonder if maybe they were too locked into their one thing and thus too limited in the ways they could grow the product.
