The magic of Twitter to me is in its minimal and ephemeral nature. However, I fear success (as typically defined by funded start ups in the community realm) will drive it toward a development path that is almost always feature driven: a feature list with business goals that use words like traffic, conversion, time spent, bounce rates, page hits, and stickyness etc. which I think are counter to sustaining said magic. As products and services grow up, it can't help but self-destruct. Beautiful, isn't it? Unless of course they can resist.
[Thought: If Twitter keeps heading toward becoming an alternative communication platform on the level of email and chat then wouldn't it only become more and more difficult to monetize? I can't ever imagine paying to use email.]
At the same time those that do resist features and enhancements or resist any form of perceived evolution at all is ripe to getting over taken by a new kid in town. That's a fine thing in the larger picture - renewal is completely natural to the web. But what if I don't want Twitter to go away just yet? I think the challenge is not only to have such resistance, but I'd even offer the suggestion to further subtract. And lots of prayers.
After having genuinely and actively used it for many months I have grown tired of it. Fatigue. Its lightness has been overtaken by the darkness known as Twitterrhea - "too many twitters per hour". Well sure I made the choice to click "follow me", so yes I've since done some pruning in my friends list. Well sure nothing forces me to visit the stream so often either, so yes I've since quit endlessly running Tweet Deck in my dock. But these are all negative steps in reverse of adoption. Perhaps consider yet another constraint on top of the 140 character limit: limit the ability to tweet to x times per day? And if it isn't realistic to be so brave, what are friendlier ways to guide/encourage best use?
Limiting the number of tweets per day could yield: higher quality and sincerity in content; reduced noise and fatigue during consumption; more visits; keeping the stream constantly on or plugged in; more valuable information/data; and perhaps even allow Twitter to charge micro-amounts for additional tweets.
Too much engagement is bad. What might often seem as user engagement, or in other words your best customers, is what will eventually result to users kicking it. For example, when public chat rooms first got popular we all knew someone who just spent way too much time living their lives in it. They eventually learned that such abuse wasn't healthy and quit it completely.
The product has to be small enough to fit into our lives in a big way, in a healthy way. Business goals should not drive the product to where it encourages usage that isn't sustainable on the long run. A product should seriously consider its long term relationship with a user and not base their goals around an eventual 'exit'.
I think we've so far seen that there is certainly room in people's lives for a way to publish bits of status. An active, public memoir. An archive of our memories. A peek into the separate lives within our ever growing address book. An entertaining break in between tasks. An easy way to dive into a room filled with thoughts, whispers, screams. A safe way to satisfy the stalker in you. It would be nice to see Twitter become more significant, survive the natural pull toward irrelevance.
If they have to put their energy (and funding) into something I'd say integrate well with all other popular products people already use and focus on developing a great brand.
And ultimately, the weaving question I always ask myself is: How can the online be more interesting in the offline, and the offline become more interesting in the online?
