It's such a shame, really; arguably Twitter, much more so than their competitors, tries to stick as close to the original form of their product as they can. I admire that.

Facebook (and Instagram) and Snapchat have both transformed from their original incarnations, in ways that have improved the companies' valuation, but have not always improved the experience of users. It seems every single social network is trending towards feature parity with each other -- Facebook now has streaming video, Snapchat now has a decent text chat with messages that need not disappear, Instagram has an algorithmic no-longer-timeline wall and private messaging, they all have ads, even Tumblr now has IM and livestreaming. Some (important) differences remain, but from an observer time-travelling forward from 2012, the social networks of today would appear nearly interchangeable.

But there's Twitter. All these years, it has stayed remarkably close to the original concept of microblogging. Instead, it developed (or acquired) other formats and cultivated them as separate services, separate communities. It's unfortunate that not even wide societal impact can make a service profitable, or at least quell the pressure to feature-creep outside of your original scope.

Twitter just doesn't have an idea about where to evolve. They've tried small changes, and nothing helped their bottom line. Rumors are that part of the reason is that they are not sure what their "secret sauce" is, so they are reluctant to change anything in fear of harming it.

Also, they are dying. They have never turned a profit. Facebook or Google or Microsoft will eventually buy them, because of the users - but they have so far given no indication they can survive independently. And they have had a few billion dollars in funding and ten years to give that indication.

Twitter (the service, not the company's) secret sauce is:

You can have a public platform, using an identity you choose for yourself, to broadcast snippets of information.

Where do you evolve this? Blogger, Blogspot, Livejournal, Tumblr, Medium, they're all in this same space, except they focus on traditional, long-form content. I don't see Twitter as a social network (although many do, that's okay). I see it as a broadcast medium, a soapbox, a blogging platform.

But if you see Twitter as a social network, you're subject to a different set of pressures than a blogging platform.

Also, Twitter holds no value to FB, Google, MS, or Yahoo. They all have subsumed parts of its core functionality into their offerings. If they ever get acquired, it's by some 'outsider' that wants to enter this space, like Verizon or Yandex.

> Blogger, Blogspot, Livejournal, Tumblr, Medium, they're all in this same space

So why does Twitter need 3,800 employees? Why does it need 1,500 technical employees?

Sure, it gets more traffic than any of those other sites, but growth has slowed and the traffic is more or less stable. The core product hasn't changed significantly. Their most ambitious innovation in recent years (Periscope) was an acquisition. What do the bulk of these engineers work on, day to day? It seems like Twitter is optimally set up to burn money.

[1] Fabric, an SDK for mobile apps - https://docs.fabric.io/android/fabric/overview.html

[2] Heron, a realtime, distributed, fault-tolerant stream processing engine - https://github.com/twitter/heron

[3] Finagle, a fault tolerant, protocol-agnostic RPC system - https://github.com/twitter/finagle/

[4] FlockDB, a distributed, fault-tolerant graph database - https://github.com/twitter/flockdb

[5] Ruby implementation of the ICU (International Components for Unicode - https://github.com/twitter/twitter-cldr-rb

[6] Clockwork Raven, Human-Powered Data Analysis with Mechanical Turk - https://github.com/twitter/clockworkraven

[7] Gizzard, a flexible sharding framework for creating eventually-consistent distributed datastores - https://github.com/twitter/gizzard

[8] Twemcache, a Twitter fork of Memcached - https://github.com/twitter/twemcache

[9] Twemproxy, a fast, light-weight proxy for memcached and redis - https://github.com/twitter/twemproxy

[10] Iago, a webapp load tester - https://github.com/twitter/iago

[11] Ospriet, a bestof/voting app - https://github.com/twitter/ospriet