No shit! They should charge companies and news agencies, and anyone representing companies per tweet(1k per tweet or similar). They provide a valuable service - why should they give it to corporations for free?

fb doesn't do that. Twitter can follow what fb does. Right now twitter is very light weight, un-cluttered. It can change UI/UX to advertise more. Of-course there has to be value for advertisers as well - which I think is there (350M users).

Yeah. Twitter is a broadcasting platform. It is different from FB. FB feed has your mom and their friends' posts. Twitter doesn't, unless you explicitly ask for it. Not everything should be about advertising. Twitter can stay as it has, and just charge people with money, money.

The feeds of both are whatever the algo thinks - which will be some compromise between what you want and what the owner of the algo wants.

What is algorithm-driven in my twitter feed? The 'While you were away' stuff at the top? Other than that, as far as I know it's always been a chronological feed of whoever I want.

Are you sure? http://fortune.com/2016/03/20/twitter-algorithm-social-marke...

If you don't even notice it, the algo has got you...

Wow, didn't know that either. But I don't "follow" people. Rather, I simply add them to different lists (finance, news, science, tech, right, left, etc.) and use tweetdeck to follow the multiple lists.

I wonder if they're also messing with the lists... In any case, as far as I can tell, I seem to be getting all the tweets of people in the list in chronological order.

that's a good point too, I have a couple lists I look at for close friends and such and only go onto the timeline every now and then

Oh, wow. Does this effect third-party clients as well? I use Echofon almost exclusively.

I can't imagine not - would Twitter give people an easy way to avoid sponsored content etc? That's one reason they cut off all the devs.

Twitter's basic problem is that they opened up to third party clients back while they were still growing, and those third party clients quickly outpaced them in new usage features.

Twitter has been trying to reign that in since (various things their official client can do is not accessible via the public APIs), but they can't just drop their third party support or they would see the usage rates dwindle in no time flat.

The tweet is the advertisement. Keep everything as it is today, but if you have 1mm+ reach per tweet, you pay $$$/tweet.

Outside of Bloomberg, most news organizations are struggling. They couldn't foot the bill at ten billion.

This is a model that Line has taken, and had some success with (particular in parts of Asia and Europe).

Um.. This is exactly what advertising is.

Twitter just has a terrible advertising platform. FB is making huge amounts on what should be basically the same product.

The two platforms are completely different. The users of FB (and LinkedIn) put their real information on the website, allowing advertisers to target effectively which raises the average ad value on the website. Intuitively, revenue = ad value * # impressions.

Twitter is in between anonymous forums (unfortunately they all died) and FB/LinkedIn in terms of ability of advertisers to target users. They're living off of high impressions, and they've basically already saturated the market. Now they need to somehow raise ad value, which would mean integrating hundreds of free, quality services to gather data like Google or tying Twitter accounts to real identities (like the Google+ attempt)

Yes, the anonymous accounts are a problem - but mostly because of the trolling, not the lack of identity. Snapchat and Instagram both have anonymous accounts and don't have a problem.

Yet Twitter has people like Kim Kardashian selling tweets for $200K/tweet[1] (so there's your measurement of ad-value), and yet Twitter can't make money.

Meanwhile, people are moving to Snapchat stories which is exactly the product Twitter should have built. Twitter, on the other-hand make the ground breaking decision to not include URLs in the 140 char tweet count.

Twitter can't ship new product.

[1] http://haveuheard.net/2015/08/kim-kardashian-how-much-money-...

Different yes but it's not that hard to look at the people you follow, the content you consume and generate what Twitter called the "taste graph". I'm not privy to what the issues are but I feel Twitter should/could've had a lot more success in terms of ads

Not necessarily. They could pay for the platform to be around just so that people are there to banter and generate content for the news programs.

I can't imagine politicians funding Twitter.

I most definitely saw a Trump ad in my twitter feed.

I marked it as offensive ;)

It's true, the money only ever goes in.