Twitter, to Save Itself, Must Scale Back World-Swallowing Ambitions
Mr. Jones used to be the chief executive of Myspace, the once-giant social network, but he rejected any comparison between Twitter and that now vastly diminished network.“For me and for lots of people, Twitter has actual utility to it, and for those people, that’s what will keep it around,” he said.So instead of figuring an unorthodox way to take it private or set up a donation scheme ala Wikipedia, why not just charge the superusers with tens of thousands of followers, like Mr. Jones, who really do get some tangible benefit from the service?I also take issue with the author's opening assessment of Twitter:Twitter is the world’s most important social network.That might sound like the ravings of an addict, but look at the headlines in every morning’s newspaper and the obsessions of every evening’s cable news broadcast. Just about anything you encounter in the news media these days has some foot in the controversies and conversations occurring on the 140-character network.We live in a hyperconnected world where every tiny little twitter controversy gets blown massively out of proportion, draining people's time and energy on things that really don't matter in the face of much larger and more important problems. At the end of the day, Twitter is used mainly for entertainment purposes. The author can keep pointing to the Arab Spring, #blacklivesmatter, etc. but the fact remains that revolutions and social movements occurred long before Twitter existed, long before cell phones and computers existed, and that Twitter is not some be-all-end-all enabler that we need to rescue for the betterment of humanity.If it's really worth $5bn, someone will figure out how to get the service there.  If it's really worth $100bn, someone will get it there. Let the market settle things with Twitter.