Farhad Manjoo writes in the New York Times today,"Twitter, to save itself, must scale back its world-swallowing expectations." He hints that Twitter might be better off if re-taken private, although the management doesn’t want to do that; of it might do better as a division of a larger company (Facebook?) or as a non-profit like Wikipedia. He also suggests that, being “too easy to join” isn’t such a good thing, and may add to stalking, harassment, and even terror recruiting (which Twitter doesn’t have a really effective way to stop, if the enemy is determined enough).
Yet, it is a “public utility” we take for granted, next to Facebook.
Manjoo describes Instagram as like a “luxury cruise”.
But Hayley Tsukayama writes in the Washington Post, p. A14, about Twitter’s loss of core users in the fourth quarter, as its share price declined.
But I can remember a few years ago when Ashton Kutcher (who at one time blogged a lot on Myspace) describing to Larry King how great an invention Twitter is. Now, even the proper behavior on Twitter is a subject of disagreement or (if you will) “choice, not chance”.
And nobody seems to be debating the 140-character limit just right now.
It's worthy of note that Twitter's growth hit a snag about a year ago, too, as with this video from Bloomberg:
In the meantime, I continue to get questions as to why I won’t join more things, or pimp content aggressively, like “most people”. Some people whine that others giving away their stuff passively by search engines is breaking their business models, almost in a manner analogous to the collapse of oil prices.
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