More generally twitter has spent the last 14 years painting itself into a corner.
It seems the world need a massively scalable messaging backbone, and when twitter was created I thought (IIRC, this is a decade ago and I can't remember if and where I wrote it down) something like that would happen:
Basic Twitter would stay free and there would be all kinds of paid services on top:
- it could be extended to allow APIs for machine to machine communication.
- it could be improved to be used for groups and one to one messaging (WhatsApp, later Telegram took this market. Google+ had a decent chance to get a slice of another part of it.)
- they could charge for API access or for more than what clearly personal usage (more than a few groups, multilanguage distribution, near realtime machine to machine communication etc)
When I think about it now here's another one:
- paid subscriptions to feeds. Examples: news feeds (maybe you pay for access to your newspapers)
Instead they become what I would describe as a spam distribution machine where you can follow celebrities.
It seems the world need a massively scalable messaging backbone, and when twitter was created I thought (IIRC, this is a decade ago and I can't remember if and where I wrote it down) something like that would happen:
Basic Twitter would stay free and there would be all kinds of paid services on top:
- it could be extended to allow APIs for machine to machine communication.
- it could be improved to be used for groups and one to one messaging (WhatsApp, later Telegram took this market. Google+ had a decent chance to get a slice of another part of it.)
- they could charge for API access or for more than what clearly personal usage (more than a few groups, multilanguage distribution, near realtime machine to machine communication etc)
When I think about it now here's another one:
- paid subscriptions to feeds. Examples: news feeds (maybe you pay for access to your newspapers)
Instead they become what I would describe as a spam distribution machine where you can follow celebrities.