Twitter has figured out what it wants to be when it grows up. It wants to be The New Media. Twitter doesn’t want to come to you. It wants you to come to it. This, we’re told, will provide a better experience. And it will – for their advertisers and their investors.In its youth Twitter might have thought it purpose was to empower us as creators. But it has grown up, and the conventional wisdom of grownups is that it’s far more profitable to think of everyone as consumers.
This is just the natural outcome for a social network once it leaves the hands of its early adopters and reaches scale. Twitter isn’t trying to create a Horrible Network for Kardashians. It’s just a reflection of all the normal people that showed up to use the service. At least, that’s what Anil Dash argues. But Anil is wrong. Twitter has the hand that guides the users, not the other way around. Twitter gets to decide whether the engineering priority is to support Justin Bieber having millions of followers (here’s @biz with the Bieber boxes) or whether all users should be able to access all their old tweets.
What Twitter Wants – Orian Marx. Hard to feel hopeful about Twitter’s future.