There was a time when Twitter could be described as “plumbing.” Now the best description might be “giant bank account with a company attached.” It’s hard not to see this as a big step backward, and to wonder whether the standard venture-capital-to-public-company trajectory is turning out to be entirely wrong for an enterprise like Twitter.
Let me explain, starting with the plumbing. The quote comes from the author, tech thinker and now public-TV personality Steven Johnson: “The history of the Internet suggests that there have been cool websites that go in and out of fashion and then there have been open standards that become plumbing,” he told David Carr of The New York Times in January 2010. “Twitter is looking more and more like plumbing, and plumbing is eternal.”
As Johnson had described it in much more depth in a Time cover story a few months earlier, what made Twitter so promising, interesting and important was “the fact that many of its core features and applications have been developed by people who are not on the Twitter payroll.” Most of its conventions (the hashtag, for example) had been developed by users. And “the vast majority of its users interact with the service via software created by third parties.” It was basically an open-source enterprise, and seemed to owe most of its remarkable success to that openness.
Of course, that “success” didn’t come with a lot of revenue. For its first four years, Twitter was able to keep the servers running thanks to mainly to $150 million in funding from venture capitalists and angel investors. Then, after a few of those investors ousted co-founder and CEO Ev Williams in a boardroom coup late in 2010, Twitter raised another $1.2 billion in less than a year. Not surprisingly, the company stopped glorying in the openness of its ecosystem not long after that. Spooked by the investor and entrepreneur Bill Gross’ attempt to build a sort of shadow Twitter by buying up the most popular third-party apps, Twitter began cracking down on those third-party software purveyors and taking control of its relationship with users (in order to better “monetize” them). Users’ creating and sharing still gives Twitter its value as a business, but their activities are now mostly channeled and managed by the company itself. And while Twitter has taken some limited steps lately to win back outside app developers, the bigger news has been its apparent intent to move away from its simple chronological timeline to use algorithmic methods to determine what users see, as its rival Facebook has done for years.
This incipient change has met with a hugely negative reaction among Twitter users, who seem to want to keep things just the way they are. As a pretty regular Twitter user, I have that knee-jerk reaction, too. But keeping things just the way they are seems like a bad idea in today’s rapidly evolving digital environment. If Twitter were still open to such contributions, entrepreneurs and hackers would probably be experimenting feverishly with new ways to present the timeline, and users would likely be trying them out rather than complaining. But when Twitter itself does this, it feels to users like Big Brother is messing with their world. It’s no longer a user-created ecosystem. It’s just a company trying to make some money.
Now, it’s true that Facebook acts in Big-Brother-like fashion all the time, and despite incessant complaints over the years it has proved remarkably successful at keeping users engaged. Twitter started in a different place, though, and its users have different expectations. The company has piles of money – $3.6 billion in cash and short-term investments – and my sense from looking at the numbers for the past couple of quarters is that it could probably be making some money, too (that is, generating positive free cash flow), if that were a priority. But the priority is instead growing fast enough to generate adequate returns on the more than $4 billion that investors have plowed into it. (The company raised another $1.8 billion in its 2013 initial public offering.) And the company’s latest earnings report (from Oct. 27) doesn’t really show that kind of acceleration. “They’re not yet able to generate the kind of topline growth we’d normally expect to see in a company with the asset size they’ve got,” James Gellert, an analyst at Rapid Ratings International, told Forbes after the earnings came out. A few days after the earnings report was released, the company’s stock price was down 44% from its peak last December.
In the early days, Twitter clearly owed much of its growth to its open, ecosystem-like approach. That growth would have slowed eventually in any case, but it’s hard not to think Twitter’s prospects as a network and as a societal force would be much greater if it had remained more like an ecosystem and less like a conventional corporation. I think there’s at least a chance that Twitter Inc. would have brighter prospects under that scenario, too, but that’s easy for me to say. I’m not one of those investors who poured $4 billion into Twitter over the past four years and now understandably want the company to figure out how to make lots of money, pronto.
Could Twitter have chosen not to follow the standard VC-to-IPO path that has brought it to this pass? It would have taken a great degree of self-abnegation on the part of the founders, and a remarkable ability to resist Silicon Valley peer pressure. But there are alternatives. Many companies over the decades have simply chosen to take things a bit slower and not become entirely beholden to outside investors. Ello, the new anti-Facebook that has gotten a lot of attention and $5.5 million in VC funding in the past few weeks, has organized itself as a public-benefit corporation with a charter that says it will never accept advertising. WordPress operates as an open-source ecosystem with a venture-backed corporation, Automattic, at its heart. The Internet itself is a giant cooperative endeavor that allows lots of companies to make gobs of money but most likely wouldn’t work at all if it were controlled by one of them.
At every corporation there are tensions between the demands and needs of shareholders and those of employees, customers and other stakeholders. But many of the most important new enterprises of the digital age are especially dependent on their users – a group of people who are neither customers nor employees but often seem to generate almost all the enterprise’s value. Fitting such organizations into the shareholder-dominated straitjacket that is the publicly traded corporation could be more than just irritating to these users. It might also be really bad business.
Justin Fox is executive editor, New York, of the Harvard Business Review Group and the author of “The Myth of the Rational Market.”
