Pressure on Twitter to Change

Twitter's already changing for the worse, but once that IPO is consummated, it could be all downhill.

From Farhad Manjoo, at WSJ, "Please Twitter, Just Stay Weird: An IPO Will Pressure Twitter to Change—and Not for the Better":

Dear @Twitter: PLEASE let me turn off "retweeted a Tweet you were mentioned in" notifications. Drowning.
— Michelle Malkin (@michellemalkin) October 8, 2013

I am an inveterate Tweeter. I use Twitter more than any communications medium other than email. I check it first thing in the morning, last thing at night, and about a billion times in between. (Assume that for every sentence in this article, I've refreshed Twitter three times.) I've tweeted my wedding, my kids' births, and my major surgeries.

I have joked with my wife—who, like most sensible people, doesn't use Twitter but loves Facebook FB +0.12% —that by neglecting the microblogging service, she's missing out on the most interesting facet of my personality. The sad thing about this is that, most days, it isn't really a joke: @fmanjoo is usually a lot more fun than Farhad Manjoo.

But as for all true loves, I've never been able to explain what I get out of Twitter, or why exactly I find it so enthralling. I don't think I've ever convinced a single person I know in real life to join Twitter. Twitter Inc., the company, seems to have a similar problem. It has long struggled with huge "churn"—many people who sign up don't use it—and reports suggest that its user growth slowed. Part of this stems from Twitter's insular conventions, all those mysterious @s and #s.

But there's a larger reason for Twitter's mainstream difficulty: Twitter is, fundamentally, a strange, nearly surreal service. Unlike Facebook, it isn't for everyone. That's what the initiated love about it—but now that Twitter is going public and looking for growth, Twitter's inherent weirdness is at risk.

When it is public, Twitter will be forced to do a couple things that it might not have otherwise considered. First, it will have to run a lot more ads. This isn't surprising—every website turns on the spigot at some time—and it won't be ruinous. Twitter's ads, which show up as regular tweets, are some of the least annoying ad units found anywhere online. But Twitter will also face intense pressure to alter its service in order to make the service more widely appealing.

To meet investors' expectations of growth, Twitter will increasingly be pushed to mimic services like Facebook and Instagram: to favor pictures and videos over texts, to highlight interactions with friends, or to impose some kind of order on your chaotic, fast-moving stream of tweets. The danger in Twitter's IPO is that it will be pushed to turn into something for everyone—something it isn't.

As I've argued before, most Web services take off by offering an online analogue for activities we already do offline. Facebook is an online phone book, Google an online library, Amazon an online store. These services instantly make sense to new users. Twitter isn't like that. What's Twitter? It's an online ham radio. The activities Twitter is good for—posting public links and commentary, making "friends" with people you don't know offline, following breaking news—aren't mainstream pursuits. Twitter is a natural platform for celebrities, journalists, politicians, marketers, and anyone else who wants to cultivate a public following or connect with strangers. But most people don't have anything to sell, they don't have a brand to burnish, and a lot of us are justifiably leery of posting publicly...

Continue reading.

It's already trying to be more like a "social media" site, and a lot of the changes aren't working too well, as indicated by Michelle Malkin's tweet above.

We'll see how it goes.