What Is Twitter’s Problem? No, It’s Not the Product

This article makes some great points, but the bigger question is "Does Twitter have a problem?"

All of this silicon valley hand-wringing is a tempest in a teapot. Twitter is a company built on the backs of early adopters and its developer community to be sure, but where do they go from here? A bunch of whiny and entitled nerds chomping at the bit for the next big thing do not a market make. Twitter's gonna piss people off, and they're gonna have to if they ever want to monetize.

Granted this could kill the golden goose, but that's a risk any unprofitable company with a useful product faces, especially one as revolutionary as Twitter. Thinking about business models earlier is no guarantee of better results. On the one hand they might have been clearer communicators and pissed people off less down the line; but on the other, they might have failed to base their business model on the ultimate potential of the company, or worse yet, created a stillborn product that no one ever heard of.

As far as I'm concerned they played their cards right; whether Twitter will be a success as a business remains to be seen.

If they continue to make small changes spaced out over longer periods of time they'll be fine. No matter what they do a good number of people are going to declare their hatred for it but these type of people tend to burn themselves out pretty quickly because there's always something new and exciting to declare hatred for. Ironically Twitter is a great outlet for Internet hatred so of course these folks aren't going anywhere. Not their opinions don't matter just that they are a poor barometer of how normal people react to change. If it's gradual most people just accept it and move on with their lives. You just can't overwhelm people with too much change at once.

Excellent and highly topical article! I especially like this statement "The features and product evolution are the fun part of the startup, and thinking about possible ways to make money can be soul numbing."

It's indeed a dilemma, choosing between the product-centric and business-model thinking. The coolest imaginable features may not always be easy to cash on, why a second (or even a third..) best version oftentimes ends up being launched.

Managing to merge both the your best version product and best way to monetize is critical, and in the end what entrepreneurial creativity is all about.

I didn't read the article but I'll tell you how Twitter can become profitable, and I feel somewhat qualified to say this, given Twitter (and others) have emulated my own site (http://twitya.com) in more ways than one over the last couple years.

Search advertising: so I run a search within the web client.. why isn't there advertising on the right hand side?

Rev share with Tweeters: the tweeters bring traffic to Twitter, so how and when will they be rewarded beyond just having free usage of the system? Twitter should have buy-a-tweet and offer rev-share to those who select to use it. The key is relevance - they need to insert tweets that people will want to read. The tweets can even go in the right column. Or, they can go in stream, immediately under the tweets from the users who have opted-in. If the viewer doesn't like the ad tweet, they can unfollow that account of the tweet, to which the ad belongs. The web interface can limit the number of ad tweets a timeline has seen over the course of a day.

-- so accounts get a new metric beyond followers, following, listed, created, etc -- "ad intensity" based on some ratio of ad tweets/normal tweets/time.

-- additionally, you can have power users pay a fee to not see the ad tweets, or some percentage of them, and that becomes another metric in the API for a user: "% ads being blocked." Then there can be some interesting configurations options, like trading ad-insertions for ad-blocking.

Power client: why doesn't Twitter have power-client version of their web interface, with multi-account capability? OK, some people will get it for free elsewhere, but not everyone.