TheOverAnalyzed

In the earliest draft of this post, I started out with the sentence “Twitter is hard to explain to non-nerds.”

Oh, the irony.

What’s so telling about Twitter’s present situation is just that: it is precisely because even I’d have trouble explaining Twitter to my friends, that the social network is what it is (or, more importantly, what it isn’t).

When Jason Del Rey and Kurt Wagner of Re/code published their piece, they couldn’t have known that three days later, Twitter would announce Dorsey as the full CEO, dropping his interim moniker.

I won’t quote their whole piece, but there are a few takeaways that really hit the nail on the head.

Firstly, the comparison to Steve Jobs:

Whether by coincidence or design, Dorsey’s comeback closely resembles the Steve Jobs Narrative — a modern myth Silicon Valley entrepreneurs hold up as a map to absolution. Like the Apple co-founder, Dorsey was the impetuous, petulant CEO pushed out by his allies. And after a soul-searching exile, he’s welcomed back as the savior to a troubled enterprise. Even his line that every CEO is an editor is said to have been borrowed from Jobs.

Importantly, Del Rey and Wagner (along with just about everyone else), suggest that Dorsey’s time away (“exile”) is what helped him prepare for his eventual return (remind you of anyone?):

Dorsey set expectations so high, and made them so widely known, that there was sometimes nowhere for these people to go but down. At least two of his one-time favorites left Square within a year of joining.

Over time, Dorsey has learned from these episodes, sources said, and has been helped by the recruitment of a team of senior leaders who sit between him and most divisions of the 1,200-person company. Twitter, Square and Dorsey declined to comment for this article.

Comparisons to Apple’s late co-founder aside, Del Rey and Wagner also focus on Twitter’s future. Specifically, what does Dorsey plan to do with Twitter the product?

Beyond new communications skills, the new Jack Dorsey has also demonstrated a willingness to make big shot calls. People within the company have discussed the idea of tweaking how Twitter measures its 140-character limit by removing things like links and user handles from the count, according to sources, a discussion that has been ongoing for years but has resurfaced in recent months. (Dorsey is a supporter.) He even signed off on a separate project that would allow Twitter users to publish content longer than 140 characters, either in a tweet itself or appended to it in some way.

Part of the beauty of Twitter is the built-in truncation. Many people—myself included—take way too many words to say what can often be said with fewer words. With that in mind, Twitter’s resistance to modifying the 140-character limit seems well-intended, if nothing else. Still, there’s no reason @mentions or links should count against the limit.

The @mention tax is especially egregious, because it punishes people for having conversations with multiple users.

Consider this conversation from a few days ago:

If I wanted to reply to that conversation, I would have only had 84 characters left—and that’s with only five people in the conversation. In this example, the “character cost” of the @mentions is a 40% decrease in maximum tweet length. You can see how adding even more users could compound the problem.

Admittedly, the average Twitter user wouldn’t experience this stifling effect. But this is an example of Twitter’s failure to acknowledge the product’s past and current failures.

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Over the past three years, Twitter has become my social network of choice. I agree with Ben Thompson on multiple fronts:

1. Once the user goes through the rigmarole of curating their Timeline with Follows, Unfollows, Mutes, Lists—all of that nerdy stuff—the social lens of Twitter is better than anything Facebook or Instagram can produce^[1]
2. If Twitter can harness this notion, they should use it to their advantage, it can finally become something great
3. As long as Step 1 is difficult,^[2] Step 2 can’t come to fruition

Twitter is the real-time social networks. There’s no arguing with that, and this fact will probably never change. But Twitter can be more than that. That’s the whole point. It doesn’t have to just be the best source for “happening now” news. Here’s hoping that Dorsey can make Twitter what we all want it to be: the social network our non-nerdy friends want to check out. Because that certainly isn’t the case right now.