Twitter is the Benjamin Button of startups.
Dusk approaches when Twitter sheds its desire to leave a mark on humanityLook, 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.