Introduction: The online version of *The Atlantic Monthly* today published an article reviewing two paths that Twitter once abandoned. Initially, Twitter had the potential to become a podcasting company, and subsequently it had the opportunity to become an extremely open medium.
Below is the main content of the article:
Twitter announced on Thursday that it has confidentially submitted IPO (initial public offering) documents to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). Rumors circulated as early as August this year that the company was about to go public. Recently, Twitter revamped its website, abandoning the practice of strictly time-sequenced message sorting, allowing the public to better understand the messages.
At some point in the next six months, Twitter will become a publicly traded company. Twitter will no longer be young, nor will it still be considered a startup. The company will have its own stock price, trading code, and regularly released financial reports. Twitter will become part of the traditional American business world.
During the establishment and development of Twitter, the company could have taken different paths.
1. A regular podcast company that would never have hatched Twitter
Twitter was not initially a company but rather an experiment by several employees of the podcast company Odeo. In February 2005, Evan Williams, co-founder of Odeo, articulated the concept of a podcast company on his personal podcast Evhead. At that time, Williams had already achieved significant success by selling his previous company Blogger to Google.
Williams described Odeo similarly to the "read-it-later" app Instapaper from the iPhone era. He said: "One day, Biz Stone and I came up with this idea while going home after work. We were talking about Audioblogger, but we didn't often listen to this service. However, I would pay to download audio content from the internet and listen to it on my iPod. We wondered why there couldn't be some interesting audio blog content on the iPod, synchronized and listened to under reasonable circumstances?"
Despite Williams being excited about this idea, the developed product did not perform well. He once said: "I am very pleased with the development of this business; it's a story similar to blogging, but based on a completely new medium, much larger than people imagined. It will develop rapidly." This sounds like a discussion about Twitter, but it wasn't. Twitter did not exist at the time.
2. Twitter becoming a medium
In 2010, one of Twitter's earliest employees, Alex Payne, wrote a blog post titled "The Last Thing To Be Written About Twitter." At the time, he had just left Twitter, and the article discussed the new interface that Twitter had recently launched.
He stated: "Twitter's importance and popularity among mainstream audiences are increasing, but the company hasn't yet adopted a clear strategy to succeed in the mass market. I believe #newtwitter will change this situation, transforming the site into a platform for discovering rich information."
However, this blog post was not just about the interface update that Payne called #newtwitter but also predicted how Twitter could develop healthily in the long term. Payne believed that as a business, Twitter could not survive. He said: "I think the Twitter as a medium should differ from the Twitter as a business. This isn't a new perspective; others talked about it years ago, calling for the decentralization of Twitter."
He pointed out that the internet technology community believed that everything on the internet should be free and open, regardless of the content. An internal document from Twitter also showed that Twitter must decentralize or it will perish. Although it may take a long time, all communication media will eventually need to decentralize, and the "walled gardens" will inevitably fall.
There were many employees within Twitter who held similar views. They believed that Twitter must decentralize and differentiate itself from Facebook and LinkedIn, which are "walled gardens." In such an environment, there would be many other microblogging service providers besides Twitter.
If Twitter decentralized, it might face technical challenges. After opening up, Twitter might not remain the source of breaking news it is today, and it might need to explore different business models, such as charging users or providing value-added services. A decentralized Twitter might currently become part of a personal information delivery ecosystem, differing from Facebook and other large social networks.