What can Twitter be?

As Elon Musk acquires Twitter, I think it is a good time to revive my plan for better Twitter. It has the potential to disrupt many industries. Hope Elon Musk is listening.

Nov 03, 2022

I think Twitter is more valuable than even Facebook (or Meta if you ask me), and it will be a core architecture for the social web. Here are my thoughts on Twitter's business model and how Twitter can disrupt multiple industries.

First, about my Twitter use

I have been a Twitter user for some years now. I don't over-tweet, but I guess I should be in the approximate middle as to tweeting. But when it comes to consuming the tweets, I think I am a super-user. I have neatly segregated lists, and I scan them using Tweetdeck. I also like to share what I read on/through Twitter. You can find/follow me @rahuldeodhar by clicking my username. So let us begin.

Tweets fall into the following categories -

Link to content from the web - for example linking to videos etc. [Sharing domain]
Comment on content on the web (on Twitter / outside Twitter) [ Commenting domain]
Opinion/Views about things - including witness view, etc. [Content domain]
Personal updates - status updates [ Personal domain]

The Twitter Stream is like a river with all these mixed up from various sources. It is impossible to make a head or tail of it if you want to read it. It is like watching the river from a bridge. It is all ok for some time but is not critical - it is a leisure activity. If you really want to do something interesting with it - you can't. If you want to track trouts - well, from your perch, you cannot. If you are a master user, you are like a diver facing the current trying to analyse the water. Whatever analysis you do is useless because the stream has changed by then.

So that is why advertising on Twitter is so damn difficult. As difficult as it is to interrupt a diver studying water with a TV commercial. The diver doesn't dive that often, and when he does, he doesn't want to look at your TVC. It is very difficult to read the Twitter stream - ads make it worse.

Twitter is like a monologue for most people most of the time. Till others start commenting and sharing and you start getting reactions (not the button-based reactions but real comments). Then it becomes interesting. If you are too popular, it turns nasty (sometimes) and resembles a bar fight or a cake fight from Charlie Chaplin movies.

But Twitter can become more relevant.

Twitter can become the default commenting engine of the web - become disqus++. Twitter sits at the junction of comments and sharing. This is a win-win for websites that generate comments as well as commentators and for Twitter. If someone is posting a long-form comment, the first 140 characters will only form part of the tweet. This will force people to summarise their comments, and it will be easier for authors and really interested parties to parse the detailed long-form reply on the web page itself. [swelling the stream]

It can also become the default Reviewer of choice. Reviews are essentially comments on something - products, services etc. The ease of being able to pinpoint what we are reviewing remains a challenge. So say when you are reviewing a Phillips table lamp, should it be tagged to the product page in your country or to the product page of Phillips international - well, those things are what Twitter's R&D spend of $800m should be used for. It can substitute product reviews on amazon, sites like good reads etc. [swelling the stream]

But it may be better to avoid hosting content. A few good things Twitter has done is to integrate photographs and videos into the stream. Twitter can choose to partner with YouTube and Google Photos or, say, Flickr for it, or it could go on to become a content development platform - like a medium (say). To me, there is value in letting content reside on YouTube or Flickr and using the Tweets themselves to gather data. There are many arguments as to whether sequestering content behind login walls is good or bad. (Facebook likes it, but google is fairly open). I prefer open architecture. It is like building cities v/s building walled communities - cities are much nicer. [swelling the stream - though not too much]

If you note carefully, Twitter can address two strong models - create once publish everywhere (COPE) and Diverse Information Sources in one stream (DISOS). I concocted the last one, so apologies if it sounds clumsy. While the first allows ease of creating content, the second allows ease of consuming content. Remember, for advertising models consuming content is important.

Twitter also need universal Tweeting and specialised Stream reading. It already has universalised tweeting. You can tweet from any app/webpage etc., from a phone or computer. Or you can go to the Twitter website or its app and tweet from there. I use the Twitter website / App for reading the stream rather than tweeting itself. But reading is cumbersome. Tweetdeck is one way of segregating content based on usernames and hashtags. But even Tweetdeck is difficult to parse. Flipboard is easier to parse but a bit weird in formatting. Twitter needs to develop apps that help users read the Twitter stream better. [Reading the stream]

Twitter stream-reader must complete the information picture the way Microsoft's Photosynth compiles the photographs from various sources. Twitter is its information equivalent. If I pivot the Twitter stream on a person, it should give me the subject-clustering of tweets of that person. If I pivot the Twitter stream on a topic, it should people-cluster the tweets into groups - my followers and within that based on my lists. In both these views, we should have the ability to go back at least one day (for consumers). [Reading the stream]

How to Generate Revenues

Twitter has been a platform of choice for news dissemination. Twitter must take it to its logical conclusion. Twitter can replace the newswires - all of them in one go. For this, Twitter needs to use pre-identified usernames. It already does that with verified accounts. It will need a customised App for distributing and reading newswires. I cannot see why it cannot be done. By itself, the newswire business is about $3-5 billion with possibly about 12-14% profitability. For Twitter, it may be more profitable. [separate newswire business]

Twitter-based News channel is also a possibility since the news is there in the stream, videos are there, and you can combine those using pre-selected usernames (handles) and tags. It can set up programming automatically just by relevant people tweeting about it. Facebook and YouTube have started live video dissemination, but in a stream, they make no sense. But curated videos allow you to create topical channels. Twitter should also be able to hash YouTube's existing video library into a proper playlist of sorts. Advertising through this will be easier. [reading news stream]

Twitter Stream-Reader Pro can be a fully loaded stream-reader that can help clients get an easier view of the data stream relevant to them. Imagine Ford Mustang Twitter Stream-REader Pro (FMTSR Pro); it will read the streams about Ford Mustangs and then give you detailed analytics. If I were Twitter, I would hard code "Ford Mustang" into this FMTSR-Pro and charge Ford for yearly use. The same App with modified hard codings can be deployed for others, say Lego. For Glaxo or Pfizer, it can drill down doctors and non-doctors into categories. Twitter currently does sell stream analytics, but the revenues from that are quite low - about 10% of the revenues. I would presume it should account for 80% of the revenues. So there is a lot of potential in this. [ corporate stream reading]

Customer Service Pro can mine the stream for companies to listen for customer complaints and engage the customers using DM. I can see Twitter being able to add analytics to aid customer services. Personally, I had a great experience with Hyatt, who solved my problem through Twitter. From then on, I personally air my grievances on Twitter so that if any company is listening, then I can get help quickly. Indian ministers use Twitter to solve emergencies - Railways and External Affairs ministries are quite active. I presume companies would love to use Twitter to solve their customer's problems. This function should ping companies when a customer tweets about a bad experience he is having with the company. It should allow the companies to set criteria as to when alerts are triggered from the stream reader.

Twitter Topic Tracker can be a reader that tracks specific topics - say, windsurfing, pottery or something. At present, users have to create lists as per their own specifications, and these lists can be public. The problem is in a list of economics, we get general tweets (say happy birthday to my daughter) by economists but miss the economics tweets by other people who are not on the list. There should be some way of fixing this. Advertising in the viewer of this Topic Tracker will be more relevant and, therefore, more lucrative and sensible. [ to curate better advertising]

[Note: I suggested this in 2016, and it has since been implemented in a basic form]

Twitter can create publicly sourced Subscription Magazines just like Flipboard or Paper.li with relevant tweets compiled into a readable magazine. Twitter can take a share of these subscriptions through a twitter-owned store and distribute subscriptions to contributors (original and those sharing them) using some acceptable equation. (So content creators take 75% of the revenue based on reads, clicks, shares etc. the individual share of creators can vary While those sharing get 1% of the share of the content creators and Twitter takes 20%). Using the stream, Twitter can compile edited-book like special editions giving a complete spectrum of opinions on selected topics. There can be advertising within these magazines and revenue sharing with content creators. So, for example, Twitter can compile a special edition on "Manufacturing Policy" or "Dodd-Frank Bill" by experts and add value to the journalistic discourse. [content curation and advertising]

Twitter can also give an Event Live-view using tweets by the general public (those by reporters go through the wire, I am presuming) and create a Stream reader view that gives an overall picture based on live tweets as to what exactly is happening. This might require integration with AI algorithms to parse the value of information shared by a particular Tweet. Currently, search results that give "top tweets" tends to tell us this, but it needs improvement. [Stream Reading]

In Sum

Now with all these developments, I think Twitter should have been more valuable to news websites. It is indeed sad that Twitter cannot monetise itself better.

Disclosures:

I have no investment in Twitter.
First written on my personal blog on October 24, 2016.
[Shameless plug: The background for the discussion is my interest in business models and my ideas of firms and how they create value. The frameworks are detailed in my book "Understanding Firms: A Manager's model of the Firm" - please buy it. ;-)]