Blindly speculating on Twitter’s future

I think Facebook is fine. For all the yammering about how going public is forcing them to change, the reality is that FB is just doing what FB has always done- trying things out and promoting their vision of sharing. Some plans work, some don't, but it's nothing to do with chasing revenue. Lazy common wisdom narrative is lazy.

Twitter, on the other hand, seems like it's destined for a crash. Not yet, they haven't pissed off the users yet, but they're headed in that direction. They're clearly taking control of how tweets are consumed with a plan to make them more annoying via revenue seeking. It's going to be a mistake.

Facebook has tremendously strong user lock-in, which people here tend to dramatically underestimate. It's a true social network of people with mostly real-world ties. Moving people off that will have to take place en masse or it won't happen.

Twitter, though, has very very weak lock-in. Unlike FB, the most use of Twitter comes from a small number of accounts. The entire service is driven by a handful of percent of the users. If they leave, the service is dead. And they'll go whereever they can build an audience.

Google+ stands to gain from Twitter's missteps, and that's where they should be aiming. G+ has zero hope of taking on FB, but they could siphon off Twitter completely once Twitter starts pissing off the few users who matter there.