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>Most of those logins happen over my phone, meaning I don't see the "trending" ads...or any ads at all.

That's the actual problem with Twitter regarding monetization, not the function of the site. Twitter is more a service/platform than a website, and thus Twitter consumption is decentralized. Therefore they're not able to capitalize on their broad reach through ad publishing. It's just as well, since Twitter has shown a staunch unwillingness to place traditional web ads on their site.

If they did have a FB/Google style ad setup, one apparent next step would be to charge for API services, to make up for lost revenue from people not using the official site. Third party developers would be forced to pass on the cost to consumers, most likely through hosting their own advertising.

Since Twitter doesn't seem to want to do that, this leaves customer data as their major capitalizable asset. Therefore the question is how capitalizable all the data flowing to Twitter is.

>Twitter is more a service/platform than a website

Yes, and this is the problem. They're providing coders, and bandwidth, and datacenters...and they're trying to do all of it for free. This is fine, and obviously twitter figured out a way to make it work for them (projections for $100 Million in revenue is freaking awesome for them), but I doubt it will go much higher than that.

...but then a new service came along and replaced it for me

What's the new service?

I think he means Facebook.

Thingist (http://thingist.com), which is one of my side projects.

/Warning: Rant/

Status updates as they exist right now freaking suck. There's not any context, no way to organize them. They're disorganized. I used to always post songs that I liked to my facebook or twitter feed so that I could share them with my friends (as well as find them later). A problem was that I had to search through 5 years worth of statuses to find the songs.

On thingist, it's just a list: http://thingist.com/t/list/38/

I used to do the same thing with quotes. If I found a quote I liked, I would usually share it on facebook or twitter. Same problem as with the songs...and now I have a list for it: http://thingist.com/t/list/51/

Or bars I like: http://thingist.com/t/list/65/

Or things that blow my mind: http://thingist.com/t/list/134/

etc. etc.

Most users don't want to add context or have to organise stuff. I signed up for your service, added something I like, but having to fill out a form after? Ugh, I am lazy.

The reason why Twitter is successful is that its so simple, there are millions of use cases.

I agree with you on the form thing, which is something that I'm adding within the next week (the ability to add something to a list without having to fill out the second form [this was something that the users asked for]).

That said, people are willing to fill out extra information about (look at digg, reddit, youtube, fark, etc. etc.)...maybe not for status updates, but thingist isn't about status updates.

Use cases for twitter? I get hashtagging events (I saw this first hand at the intel appup conference last week), but what else beyond that?

I definitely do the "want to share but also 'bookmark'" thing with my Twitter updates. And, yes, hashtags somewhat solve this, but not really - at least not for me. I like the idea of lists on Thingist, but I don't want to have to categorize all my tweets.

If Thingist could automatically categorize my updates, but have a way for me to re-organize them, that'd be ideal. Seems like a decent amount of people fall into your same use case, where they tweet quotes, songs, videos, etc. Some of these would be easier to detect than others, but it's somewhat doable.

This seems some like weird cross section between Twitter, Tumblr, and delicious to me.

There are services that add links you tweet to delicious

This is something that I've been trying to figure out for a while now...

Categorizing them is really, really hard to do. Look at the ways that this user uses the site: http://thingist.com/t/item/3051/

"Things that make me feel better when I'm sad" would be impossible to detect programatically.

"Show me all of the links to youtube or soundcloud I have posted" is totally doable, and is something that will probably happen within the next couple of days.

Touche. I'm thinking way too much like a programmer. Thanks for posting that link, it's a good reminder of how different people are.

Twitter is not a status message service. It is an instant information conduit for people. Its continued evolution in that capacity gives it a shot to be even more enduring and meaningful than Facebook. I love how you claim TW is what FB was 5 years ago... given that 5 years ago nobody would have bid $8BN on them. Further invalidating your assertion, is the fact that FB itself is bidding for Twitter

Agreed. The only time I've seen value in twitter is during times of emergency: my hosting provider goes down and has no other way to communicate than through twitter; people being rappelled from the ski lifts where I ski but there are no news outlets reporting on it so I go to twitter to find out; stuff like that. I remember a Charlie Rose interview with Mark Andreeson a few years back where Andreeson talked about the future of tech and the instant dissemination of news. From what I can see, twitter is the news outlet where the story breaks first.

Facebook is games, and photos, and chat, and events, and groups, and coca cola's official page

So, what? All that matters is how much time a user spends on their site.

You're right, but by your own criteria people are more likely to spend more time on Facebook since those activities are traditional time sinks.

What does tradition have to do with anything?