Back to the Future of Twitter

If you’re going to basically declare that Twitter is a sacred public good, the world’s town square, you’ve got to at least acknowledge—and presumably have an argument to justify—the fact that there’s something just a little troubling about the richest man in the world buying the town square. 

lon intends to retain as many shareholders as is allowed by the law in a private company, as opposed to maximizing his ownership of Twitter. While he can technically afford to pay out shareholders, it’s about having a public platform that is broadly inclusive and maximally trusted. “It’s extremely important to the future of civilization, I don’t ca... See more

Twitter’s incompetence didn’t simply make Facebook’s advertising business look more dominant than it should have; it led all of us — including the FTC — to miss the point that friends and family was Social Networking 1.0: something imported from the analog world that, as time goes on, will be viewed as inferior to the far richer universe that is So... See more

So let’s review: there is both little evidence that Twitter can monetize via direct response marketing, and reason to believe that the problem is not simply mismanagement. At the same time, Twitter is absolutely essential to a core group of users who are not simply unconcerned with the problems inherent to Twitter’s public broadcast model (includin... See more