I don't see why they have to live off advertising. Right now they're charging a ton of money for firehose access through Gnip. They could charge power users for access to cooler features and better analytics, or just charge developers gradually more money for more traffic instead of having a hard rate limit.

Yes, I don't understand that either. A power user of Twitter needs a suite of third-party apps and pays for them. Why not provide them for premium users? This makes Twitter officially pay-to-win, but it already is inofficially.

Features I use via third parties is mostly analytics. When to schedule tweets? Whom to follow/unfollow? Which accounts are fake/spam? Who favs/retweets me a lot? I would like to see some overlay in the UI which gives me stats about other users.

If I would have something to sell, then we enter the world of conversion tracking. Twitter should support A/B testing. The interface for teams managing a single account seems weak (haven't used that much).

Imho the core service of Twitter is to connect brands with people. It still does that job better than Facebook.

Social networks need to be free so they can gain as many users as possible and generate network effects. Anything but advertising messes with the incentives. https://stratechery.com/2014/ello-consumer-friendly-business...

Ello made things weird for new users. The stuff I'm talking about would only affect commercial users, or people who are already heavily invested in being on Twitter.

But is Twitter really a social network?

Force the users of the feeds to put your advertising in their feeds.

As far as I remember the reason why Twitter originally scaled back access to their APIs was that 70% of their traffic happened outside of the twitter client.

The second you allow the feed to be presented outside their control they loose any ability to control how people deal with it. It would be easy for a developer to remove the advertising in the feeds.

Wat?