Twitter, to Save Itself, Must Scale Back World-Swallowing Ambitions
But what if the best path for Twitter, as a service, is for Twitter the company to abandon that dream? What if becoming a $25 billion, $50 billion or $100 billion world-swallowing Internet giant just isn’t in the cards for a niche service like Twitter?
Perhaps there’s more promise in a future as an independent but private company; as a small and sustainable division of some larger tech or media conglomerate; or even as a venture that operates more like a nonprofit foundation.
.. Instead of aiming for something like Facebook, Twitter could mold itself on some other template for success. It could become a venture like Wikipedia, run by a nonprofit that depends on donations, or a business like The New York Times Company, a publicly traded enterprise controlled by a family that has a preference for journalistic ambition.
.. But because Twitter is an accessible, real-time network that has become the nerve center of the world’s journalists, politicians, activists and agitants, it has, for better or worse, demonstrated an unrivaled capacity to influence real things in the real world.
Consider the Arab Spring, #blacklivesmatter or “Make America Great Again.”
“Twitter has created space for the amplification of the voice of marginalized people in ways that we have not seen before,” said DeRay McKesson, one of the founders of the Black Lives Matter movement. “It has redefined our understanding of the public sphere to be more inclusive and more accessible and to have substantive impact on real-world events.”