Twitter celebrates its 10th birthday. Will it live to see 20?
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Social network website Twitter turned 10 years old this week, prompting media outlets to launch lists of the most memorable Tweets of the decade, as well as Twitter founders and users to fondly recall their first tweets.
Of course, not everyone was singing Twitter’s praises on the occasion. Most notably, Mashable’s Lance Ulanoff, who predicted the platform’s death as early as 2007.
“My relationship with Twitter is best summarized as the kind you have with a sibling. I love it, deeply, but also question its choices,” Ulanoff wrote in an article for Twitter’s 10th. “Yet, at the end of the day, we’re tied together.”
While Ulanoff admitted he was incorrect about Twitter being “doomed” circa 2007 in his newest article, he might have just been off on the date. As Twitter celebrates a decade online, many media experts can’t help but wonder if it will celebrate another.
First, Twitter changed CEOs, with outsed founder Jack Dorsey taking over last year just as the platform launched a rocky transition on Wall Street. Twitter’s lackluster stock performance and the sliding activity of its millions of users worry many about the platform’s future potential. Then, last year, Twitter rival Facebook threatened to put the final supposed nail in Twitter’s coffin with an algorithm for trending news — infringing on Twitter’s signature turf.
But as Mashable’s Seth Fiegerman reported, the bottom dropping out of a social network of Twitter’s size (about 300 million users) is unheard of, which is not to say it couldn’t happen. But it does take some of the mystery out of what Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey’s wish might be as he blows out Twitter’s first 10 candles.
“If the central question of Twitter’s first decade was how to build a real-time news platform that hundreds of millions of people would want to use, the key question of the next 10 years will be deciding just how much it can push the users it has with new features intended to satiate investor appetite for growth before the community breaks apart,” Fiegerman wrote. “Tread carefully, Twitter. The next decade may be even tougher than the first one.”
Email: chjohnson@deseretnews.com
Twitter: ChandraMJohnson
