Twitter has No Long-term Vision? Think Again

“Twitter has no long-term vision yet,” Dick Costolo who took over as CEO last month,  told The Telegraph. The reason for a foggy vision is because millions of users are defining Twitter’s function and purpose on a daily basis. It is hard to nail down what Twitter really is.

Twitter has experienced explosive growth over the years and it is evident that users have played a big part in defining Twitter. (Check out our post on ‘14 cool things people do on Twitter’)

Twitter has become one of my top news sources powered by people who I trust. And that explains why I’m excited over the possibility that Twitter might create its own news network. For social networking purposes, Facebook would be my preferred choice.

I believe Twitter is employing the wait-and-see strategy. At the same time, it embraces and supports its users’ behavior and needs. They need not have a clear long-term goal for now. Just by providing what users need would be a good enough formula to grow its user base. With 370,000 users joining Twitter every day, the plan clearly works. Does Facebook know its long-term vision when they first started? I don’t think so. It started out as an Ivy League social platform. But look at what it is today. It turned out to be a social-network for the world. I don’t think this grand plan was planned from the start (or at least not revealed to the media at its initial stage). If it were, Mark Zuckerberg wouldn’t have bothered to restrict the initial network to Ivy-leaguers.

The Twitter team is made up of talented individuals; no need to be concerned or alarmed. Twitter probably has already formulated several hypotheses that define what Twitter really is. It takes time to test and verify them. Perhaps, Twitter already has a long-term vision with a strategy in mind. It wouldn’t have a whole range of plans if it didn’t have one.

In anyway, there isn’t a need to reveal its core strategy to the media. Why would they?