Check out this recent story on Politico discussing Twitter pitching the Russians (RT) to advertising in 2016. Compare that with their announcements about preventing manipulation by the Russians. Hypocritical? Dishonest? You be the judge.
Years ago I had a startup, JockSpin, that aggregated sports news from thousands of sources and tweets that users could view specific to their chosen preferences. As we developed the app, I was stunned to find in our analytics that users views pages of Tweets less than 5% as much as headlines. I didn’t believe it, actually; the difference was more than seemed possible. I reviewed the activity tracking code carefully to make sure there was not something incorrect, then ran isolated tests to make sure pages were being counted correctly. All was correct.
I realized then that Twitter, was for the most part, was junk, and that all the hype about it was just that. It struck me, “oh yeah, I don’t use Twitter either.” It feels a little bozo-esque in hindsight, but in the shadow of all the Twitter billions, I assumed many did use Twitter. After all, I’m not much of a customer for McDonald’s, but they seem to do alright without me. I also recall evaluating – and to a small extent using – their advertising options. It looked to me like the ROI would be but a small fraction of that of Facebook advertising, itself considerably less than Google. Twitter, simply, sucked. Still does.
Thus, of course they were pitching the Russians. They need the business. Their business model just doesn’t work. Sure, when our President sends out one of his controversial tweets, everybody is using it, but do you know of any commerce related to it whatsoever? Twitter is fueled by a VC community that assumes there must be some pivot just over the horizon that will allow Twitter to monetize its user base. Enough time has passed that one has to doubt this. It is surprising, actually. One would think there would be some way to turn this into a profitable beast, but maybe there is just something about Twitter as it is that keeps is from becoming anything worthwhile.
Email was a killer app, as was Facebook, and Google, even Yahoo (for its day). Twitter, instead, is just junk getting in the way of something else that would have developed but for the attention and mental energy allocated to it.
Die, Twitter. Die. Get it over with; get out of the way. Just freaking die already.