TWITTER'S HEADING WHERE?

The article in a September Newsweek was titled:

TWEET SURRENDER

THE TIDE IS TURNING AGAINST TWITTER, WHICH NEVER HAD A PLAN OR A REASON FOR BEING.

I put on my reading glasses. Was twitter.com in trouble? Every day I TWEET links to my blogs to twitter followers, who are my regular readers.

Skimming the article, I studied the names of the founders of TWITTER -- all were formerly CEO's at "Odeo," a podcasting company that makes audio-video files.  (Podcasts and audio video files are used on sites you listen to, wearing earphones.) 

Odeo CEO, Jack Dorsey, back in July 2006, was fiddling with techie stuff, listening to the CB Radio. Folks were gabbing about nothing important. Suddenly, It hit him. Why couldn't those folks do the same thing on the small message service, SMS, that's on Mobile phones? (SMS means small message service.)

Dorsey borrowed a name a co-worker invented, and put "twitter" on "Odeo" without much thought or planning. Since SMS was limited to 160 characters, he launched TWITTER for a fun thing to do that used 140 characters for the message, 20 for the name.

July 2006 turned into an auspicious month. Smartphones with keypads were catching on. Lots of people were using SMS. There wasn't any competition -- Facebook, founded in 2004, was still a PC-and-browser product, and Apple’s iPhone hadn't been introduced yet. There TWITTER was -- free, fun, and easily available.

TWITTER caught on, though how to handle it wasn't clear. Another co-worker told trade papers, "I'm not driving the train, I'm trying to see, like, where are those tracks going," and he brought in a Google guy to take over TWITTER.

As Facebook dived into mobile, as Instagram and Snapchat were flooding the Smartphones that everyone was acquiring, the Google guy tinkered with user's rules and "how-to" routines on TWITTER.

(I've gotta say, the rules are unfriendly -- if you don't obey them, they put you in 'jail' -- you can't send or receive tweets for a couple of days and that is definitely not fun!

In the corporate world, the boss, king, preacher, leader is money and TWITTER wasn't raking it in. Out of the blue, Dorsey, as the main man of Twitter.com, told everyone, "We need a more disciplined execution. We need to simplify and deliver Twitter faster. We need to better communicate our value."

And that's what TWITTER more or less does right now. It's got ads now; it promotes your tweet if you pay extra; it has small red hearts (like Facebook) to indicate you like/love a tweet.

Okay, TWITTER isn't as big as Facebook -- it's been the home for 3,900 employees, 300 to 304 million active users, though latest information from the Financial Times reveals that "active users" hasn't grown more than 0.7 percent; in the past year 450 employees, 12 percent of the employees, have left the company.

So is, or isn't TWITTER fading away? Will it be bought by Zuckerberg and turned into a Facebook thing? Or bought by Google and reformatted like YouTube? Yiiii, I'm hoping TWITTER won't disappear -- boiling down one's ideas is a fun thing a social-networker needs to do!   

Oh dear, it's not fun, I fear,
but I run from fun just like I hide from the sun. 
         The habit of tweeting isn't like eating --
         It takes thought, and I ought to confess, 
         I need to work less. 
         But my tweets on online are a fine way
         My TWITTER followers have said,
       To get my writing read!