One of the chief amusements of the current technological age is that Twitter, a social network built on posts 140 characters in length, is constantly called upon to explain itself at exhaustive length.
On the plus side, the social network claims 270 million users and 500m tweets a day and is one of the fastest and most useful sources of news and entertainment on the planet.
But there are problems that cannot be answered in a tweet: the slew of management departures; the financial losses; and the rate at which it is gaining new users.
Most analysts and users who follow Twitter's progress take an almost maternal tone, a protective sense of ownership that includes some sharp corrective tut-tutting about potential improvements. This is particularly true about the company's great strength – its rapid-fire delivery of information – which is also its great weakness in appealing to untutored users.
"Twitter may be great for the media, and great for people like me who care about very specific topics. That's extremely useful and saves me tons of time and money. But your average internet user is not going to use it," says Youssef Squali, an analyst with Cantor Fitzgerald. He suggests that Twitter's first order of business is to become more user-friendly: "The platform needs to be dumbed down."
There is, however, no shortage of company defenders to rebut such criticism. More than one venture capitalist bristles when asked what Twitter could do better. "I think Twitter is amazing," says one investor. Jason Stein, the founder of New York social-media branding agency Laundry Service, calls Twitter an "incredible company" and an "awesome platform".
And Twitter is making progress, albeit not as fast as many would like.
The company's second quarter earnings last week excited investors, with revenues rocketing 124% to $312m and a 24% increase in users, including a 29% jump in coveted mobile users. On Wall Street, where only apathy is punished, Twitter gets some credit for its constant attempts at self-improvement. "The most important thing is the product, which has improved, and [chief executive Dick Costolo] has improved the user experience, increased new users and increased engagement. Those were the things that were very clear, that I as an analyst look for," says Anthony DiClemente, a digital media analyst at Nomura Securities.
Twitter, by most Silicon Valley measures, is a success, one of the few companies that escaped the nerdy, limited orbit of techland and enters the global consciousness. And its potential growth is huge, says DiClemente: "It's still a company that's still in its infancy."
But there are only so many breaks that critics are willing to give Twitter. It has yet to escape the shadow cast by the Death Star of social media, Facebook. Facebook is only a few years older than Twitter but many times the size, and it is customary for analysts to measure Twitter's progress in Facebook years: "Twitter is where Facebook was two years ago," or "Twitter reminds me of Facebook in 2009," for instance.
This is, by any stretch, an intimidating comparison. Facebook has more than 1 billion users, increased its sales by 44% in a year, and is one of the tech industry's five biggest companies in market value. And that is the pressure point: If Facebook can launch itself into the stratosphere, the thinking goes, so can Twitter.
Of particular concern to those who want Twitter to shoot for the moon is the company's slowing growth in the US, with the addition of only 3 million American users in the last three months. "That doesn't help them in any way," says Stein.
Squali agrees: "If they add 10 million or 12 million or 15 million users a quarter, it's not going to cut it. Facebook has proven you can get a platform that can get over 1 billion users. Facebook in 2009 was growing 100% a year. These guys are clearly not. They're growing at 30% a year."
Another area where Twitter lags behind Facebook is user engagement.
"Twitter, at 270 million users, is one of the largest mass media platforms ever," says Squali. "If you look at that, then it's clearly a success. Then you look at user engagement at less than five minutes a day… [When you] compare it to Facebook, with 1.3 billion users and average engagement of 40 minutes, you think it's not as impressive."
This is not an idle rivalry. Twitter and Facebook are competing for advertising dollars, which bring survival and growth. Stein says Laundry Service sees 75% of client dollars go towards advertising on Facebook, with only 25% going to Twitter.
Companies like Stein's – shepherding corporate ad budgets to social media companies – may decide the futures of Twitter and Facebook. A survey of 1,700 advertisers by RBC Capital Markets and Ad Age found that 71% of the companies planned to increase their social media ad spending in the coming year, with Twitter and Facebook neck-and-neck and YouTube only slightly behind. Facebook is also making roughly $1.81 on each user in advertising dollars – far outstripping Twitter's $0.89 rate.
Facebook has reached out to brands with sophisticated analytics that help them target users, alongside promoting content from those who pay for ranking. It is a neat trick to execute without losing users. Brands appreciate the effort: "On the advertising side, [Twitter] have a long way to go until they get as good at targeting and measurement as Facebook is," Stein says.
Another issue that Twitter is frequently queried about is its management changes, which tend to happen quickly. Mark Mahaney of RBC Capital Markets noted that in the first three months of the year Twitter announced the resignation of its chief operating officer, Ali Rowghani, and replaced its chief financial officer with former Goldman Sachs banker Anthony Noto. While Mahaney told clients he was "supportive" of Noto, he also added that "the magnitude of these two changes less than a year after Twitter's IPO strikes us as somewhat unsettling".
None of Twitter's flaws are enough to kill the company, say analysts in that maternal tone. But everyone wants it to do just a bit better.
Luckily, everyone has a suggestion: better curation, sharper algorithms and so on. If Twitter is indeed still in its infancy, the entire village of the tech world is ready to raise this child.
