You’re slightly missing my point. I’m not claiming twitter’s niche is bigger. I’m saying for a social network to plateau at 300M users for 7-8 years that’s very embarrassing. Especially when the positioning was that “we’re a Facebook alternative.” For a social network to figure out tablestakes monetization 7-8 years post-ipo, that’s equally damning. The biggest offender is actually the glacial product development that Twitter has. Several Rudimentary features non-existent or canned because of analysis paralysis.
I’ll actually challenge you on the niche point. Twitter is niche because they completely failed to elevate the product experience to the masses. Mark was able to bring Facebook beyond a college network, Spiegel built snap beyond teens and texting, but Twitter continually fails for the average mom and pop. Every single piece of user research and UX audit finds Twitter to be very confusing for new users.
So Twitter being niche isn’t a victory. It’s an admission of defeat a la segways
I agree with you that Twitter's feature velocity has been terrible. Although in the last year or so they've definitely been trying more new things, so maybe they've finally fixed the internal barriers to that.
But I'm not getting what you think "Twitter for the masses" should be. The current value prop is something like, "globe-spanning discussion around hot topics". Fewer people care about that than "keep in contact with family and friends" or "look at pretty pictures". I don't see a mom-and-pop version of Twitter in the same way that I don't see a mom-and-pop version of the WSJ or the NYT. The mom-and-pop version of the NYT is perhaps USA Today, but that's not an expanded product, just a different one.
Yep! I think they’ve slowly learned to ship over the last 1.5 years.
Gotcha, honestly what I meant by mom-and-pop, I was thinking of growing Twitter just beyond the power user. Similar to you, I don’t believe twitter’s addressable market is as big as Facebook’s. If Facebook’s TAM is N, twitter’s is n where n<N. My main issue with them is that they’re actually 3/5ths of that n. I genuinely think they have an opportunity to make the product more accessible but they really have been not good :(. And I say this as a big Twitter fan!
I’ll actually challenge you on the niche point. Twitter is niche because they completely failed to elevate the product experience to the masses. Mark was able to bring Facebook beyond a college network, Spiegel built snap beyond teens and texting, but Twitter continually fails for the average mom and pop. Every single piece of user research and UX audit finds Twitter to be very confusing for new users.
So Twitter being niche isn’t a victory. It’s an admission of defeat a la segways