Ultimately, Twitter’s service is so confused and undifferentiated in the market that it’s increasingly difficult to make a clear case for its existence. We live in the Age of the Upgrade, and the generation raised on the Internet is the most fickle of brand champions: it loves something passionately, until it doesn’t. And, for many users-particularly young users, according to a recent survey-Snapchat is already their most important destination. Considering the fact that Kevin Weil, the head of product, left the company to join Instagram, it’s easy to imagine that service mutating or bifurcating into a speedier, more social platform for sharing links and having conversations. If Twitter’s real-time feed is its most powerful asset (and it is), it’s not difficult to see a future in which Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat, or even a newcomer like Peach (yes, I am citing Peach) focus enough on real-time news that they obviate the need for Twitter’s narrow, noisy, and oft-changing ideas about social interaction. ( USA Today reported that, given its cash reserves, the service could run for another four hundred and twelve years with current losses.) What should worry Twitter is irrelevance, and there is growing data to suggest that that is where the company is headed. Snapchat has almost caught Twitter, too.īut what should worry Twitter isn’t the value of its stock. Instagram, WhatsApp, and even WeChat all now have more individual users than Twitter does. Facebook has surpassed the company by orders of magnitude, but it’s hardly Twitter’s only foe. Even more troubling was the service’s penetration in the U.S.: it remained completely flat for the first three quarters of 2015. In the yearlong stretch leading up to Dorsey’s return, the number of active users on Twitter only grew by eleven per cent. After a summer of turmoil and indecision-a summer spent largely rudderless after the resignation of the C.E.O., Dick Costolo-the company reappointed its co-founder, the Silicon Valley wunderkind Jack Dorsey, and signalled that, perhaps for the first time in a long time, Twitter could find its focus. Of course, getting noisy isn’t the only problem Twitter has today, though it seems to be one of the more pronounced symptoms of a company that has lost its direction, or, more worryingly (and perhaps more accurately), never had much direction to begin with. In August of 2014, Robin Williams’s daughter, Zelda, was driven off the service after a series of vicious attacks. Even its beloved celebrity users couldn’t be protected. The company seemed to be wholly unprepared to handle mob violence, with few tools at its disposal to moderate or quell uprisings. More troubling was the growing wave of harassment and abuse that users of the service were dealing with-a quagmire epitomized by the roving flocks of hateful, misogynistic, and well-organized “ Gamergate” communities that flooded people’s feeds with hate speech and threats. A lack of rigor in verifying reliable sources made information suspect or confusing. Changes to the product made it hard to follow conversations or narratives. It was raw, but it was streamlined.īut cracks in Twitter’s façade had been showing already. And Twitter provided the view, an unedited, unscripted look into the world as it changed, through police-scanner blasts, eyewitness reports, and grainy citizen-journalist photography. When bombs went off during the Boston Marathon, in April of 2013, users sat glued to the feed, suddenly privy to something visceral and real, something happening. A stream of those hundred-and-forty-character tweets was how you found the most crucial, critical, and thought-provoking stories of the moment. I would have told you that Twitter was more like a utility, a service so fundamental that I could imagine a scenario in which it was literally underwritten. It wasn’t that long ago that I-and many other people I know-would have argued that Twitter was more than just another social network. Twitter might rebound in the wake of Jack Dorsey’s reappointment as C.E.O., but the service is still in trouble.
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