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Business News/ Opinion / Columns/  Twitter’s quest for innovation reveals a scattergun approach

Twitter’s quest for innovation reveals a scattergun approach

It has been pursuing a bunch of ideas that haven’t enthused users

Twitter chief Jack Dorsey has done well with Square Inc, a fintech play

There is a joke on Twitter about Twitter that goes like this: The biggest innovation the company achieved after spending more than $3 billion on research and development (R&D) over the last five years was doubling the character count of a tweet. That characterization isn’t exactly fair, but there’s enough truth in it to make it funny.

There is a joke on Twitter about Twitter that goes like this: The biggest innovation the company achieved after spending more than $3 billion on research and development (R&D) over the last five years was doubling the character count of a tweet. That characterization isn’t exactly fair, but there’s enough truth in it to make it funny.

In the face of such criticism, Twitter’s chief executive officer Jack Dorsey early this year promised a different mentality. At the company’s analyst day in February, he vowed that Twitter would “double development velocity" of features to achieve its long-term financial goals. The message was clear: Twitter was on a new course, headed for rapid-fire innovation and game-changing product roll-outs.

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How is it going so far? The early returns are in, and it turns out that a lot of people are still using Twitter in much the same way they did five years ago. Unless the social-media platform fundamentally rethinks how it develops products, that may not change anytime soon.

Last week, TechCrunch reported that Twitter’s highly anticipated Super Follows programme, which enables users to charge a monthly fee for subscriber-only content, generated negligible revenue in its first two weeks of operation. According to app research firm Sensor Tower, US consumers spent a paltry total of $6,000 for Twitter in-app iOS purchases during that time period.

The company has emphasized that it’s working with only a small group of creators to hone that offering before a wider roll-out, but the data for its hand-picked cohort of 77 popular accounts indicate that so far demand has been very limited. That’s troubling for Twitter because Super Follows was a centrepiece of the product road map that had excited investors the most. They hoped it would be the beginning of the company finding new ways to make money beyond advertising.

Super Follows’ anaemic start follows a string of offerings that haven’t quite taken off. After Twitter unveiled its Tip Jar payment feature in May, security researchers discovered potential privacy issues that should have been caught in its testing phase. About a month later, the company released its first-ever paid subscription offering called Twitter Blue, which allows users to organize saved tweets into folders, get access to colour themes, and delay the appearance of posts for as much as 30 seconds for possible revision. That product is still in the process of undergoing tests, but promises to appeal mostly to a few power users. And finally, Twitter shuttered Fleets, its knockoff version of Instagram Stories and Snapchat Stories, just months after launch.

Except for its new live-audio feature Twitter Spaces, which is seeing some success for prominent accounts, the company doesn’t seem to know what its users need or want. Instead, it appears to be offering a little bit of everything. The company’s latest befuddling experiment is a format change of the main app feed that will look more like Reddit’s design. It feels as if Twitter is throwing spaghetti on the wall to see what sticks.

Twitter’s head of consumer products, Kayvon Beykpour, has said that the company is consciously trying to cultivate a taste for “for terrifying, ambitious bets." And in its blog post announcing the demise of Fleets, Twitter noted that if some products don’t wind up getting pulled, “we are not taking big enough chances." The company has also pointed to its host of new features in the last year—besides Spaces, there’s Ticketed Spaces, Communities, Safety Mode, newsletters, and more—as evidence of its speedy innovation.

But so far, none of that has lessened the frustration for Twitter enthusiasts like me. I love the service and believe it has limitless potential. With a properly cultivated list of ‘follows’, logging on can be like plugging into a matrix of brilliant thoughts from the smartest people in the world.

Yet, the company has failed to listen to its most ardent supporters, who have for years clamoured for basic features, including direct messaging content search, a more advanced version of TweetDeck, better analytics and an edit button. We’re still waiting.

Perhaps the most perplexing thing is that Twitter’s CEO Dorsey also runs Square Inc, a fintech powerhouse that has created hit product after hit product and has disrupted several industries. Indeed, its merchant point-of-sale system and Cash payments app are known for their smart intuitive designs and best-in-class user experiences.

If only Dorsey could figure out a way to bring some of that product magic to his other company.

Tae Kim is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering technology.

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