Alexis Madrigal thinks the answer for Twitter is, gulp, Facebook. At first I thought that was like saying the answer to life is death, but I have calmed down, and maybe this reasoning holds water:
Imagine, then, a Facebook-owned product called “Now.” You pair the Twitter timeline, showing you the real-time global text conversation, based on a list of people you follow, with the best of Live video from around the world. This would be the best real-time media product imaginable, especially with Facebook’s corporate muscle behind it.
For Facebook, a Twitter purchase would join a long line of strategic acquisitions made to enhance the company’s core capabilities. When Facebook bought Instagram, it didn’t just want the app’s users—Instagram brought deep, native knowledge of the mobile game into the Facebook house, where it could be used to enhance Facebook’s primary app. Same with WhatsApp, which was purchased, in part, to augment Facebook’s knowledge about the messaging world.
Twitter would bring deep experience with the real-time world to Facebook. And as a nice bonus, Twitter would bring in a squadron of elite power users from across the celebrity and media landscape, who have gotten used to reaching their fans on Twitter.
For hardcore Twitter users, a Facebook acquisition would be something to celebrate. In the past several years, as Twitter has bounced from strategy to strategy in an attempt to chase user growth and justify its value to investors, the core Twitter experience has gotten a little schizophrenic—Twitter Moments appearing one day, hearts replacing stars the next, autoplaying Periscope video suddenly appearing in feeds, axing Vine, weird decisions about reply threads, and so on. (As our Felix Salmon pointed out last year, Twitter’s push for mass market growth “comes at the expense of some of the characteristics which cause its most active users…to love and value it.”)
But if Facebook bought it, Twitter wouldn’t have to change at all—it would simply become the backbone of Facebook’s Live offerings, and fill a niche that Facebook has had trouble building on its own. For the mainstream Facebook user, there would be Live Video. For people who wanted in on the real-time text conversation, there’d be the timeline formerly known as Twitter. Rather than trying to become something it is not, Twitter could double down on the core real-time components of its experience, while attaching itself to the most powerful mobile ad infrastructure in the world.
And besides, what other choice does Twitter have, aside from finding a Bezos?
Yes, maybe Twitter becomes one experience in the Facebook cavalcade of experiences. Ok. I give. Uncle.
from Stowe Boyd http://www.stoweboyd.com/post/152702093547
