Twitter offers a way to manage how you see these publics. The problem is that its 140 character restriction is a blunt instrument. The site does not reflect the potential or nuance in which a public can speak to itself online.

Twitter as a network is an ungodly mess. From the onset, the site has allowed users to register aliases on custom URLs and because of it, usernames are inconsistent and confusing. It’s hard to find people who you know and its often even difficult to deduct wether that person is who they claim to be. Twitter is mobbed by impersonators,some of them hilarious, others manipulating. Twitter addresses thisissue recently by creating a ‘Verified Account’ stamp, its sloppy butmore importantly, perpetually incomplete.

There are a host of other problems related to reputation and maintaing users but the biggest issue concerns its identity, which is also where the leaked documentsgot interesting. Twitter employees are so clearly uncertain about whattheir product is even doing. Shots at it swayed from, “Twitter  is fordiscovering and sharing what is happening right now,” to, “Twitter makes you smarter, faster, more efficient and more powerful.”  

Twitter became popular before it had a mission. What this means is that its employees and investors will forever be trapped in boardrooms having these inane cyclical discussions about its identity. Twitter will either perpetually be simple insofar as its millions of users will have to hack the service to reflect their own values or it will roll the dice on a focus, put the site through chronic redesigns, and risk a mass user exodus.Either way its top talent will likely get frustrated and leave thecompany. Its top users will drift to something else then jump.

The first thing to realize is that thereprobably isn’t going to be just one product to replace Twitter, therewill be several and they will battle it out or find niches. I see theirdesign following two trends with a potential for a hybrid.

The first trend is a service with the most minimal centralization possible. Both Dave Winer and Anil Dash have discussed plans for such a product. Winer calls his the RSSCloud and Dash describes the project more generally as the Push Button web. The RSSCloud grew from discussions with Jay Rosen over frustrations with Twitter and how its users have been bootstrapping. The line of thought is that your data belongs to you, not Twitter, and you should be able to use your data how you like with as little brand interference as possible. The proposal is to build RSSCloud, a loosely coupled service that will push your data to any website in real time.

The second is a product that is centralized but has an elegant way of organizingits content and attracting users. This is a product that would look andscale much like Facebook. It would start in a single target market anddevelop as a place for users to hear and communicate to thatpublic. Ideally it would begin in a cloistered network like auniversity where establishing members is as easy as checking their .eduemail address.

Addressing what’s wrong with Twitter isn’t going to come from thin air. It’s going to take a lot of time, development, and platform competition.

Many will soon be working on this, myself included. What will fill the blank is likely to define modern news production.

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