If you take a feature away from a popular service you need to have a really good reason and communicate that reason clearly. Any change of course for a company is tough, and if the decision has been made, good communication with the users is vital. If you want to bring them along with the pivoted product, they need to understand why.
Twitter rarely does well in that regard, but even less so this week. The changes at the company continued with media appearances on the Today show and the Charlie Rose table for CEO Dick Costolo, accompanied by some rather densely worded blog posts. These spots including such gems as “tap into a stream of useful and entertaining information personalized for you” and “the future of Twitter is that we’ll have a true platform… an API that allows third parties to build on top of Twitter in a way that creates accretive value for the user.”
In-between these ‘death by PowerPoint’ phrases, users have had to deal with the dilution of Twitter’s iPad client from a UI that worked with the large tablet form factor to an up-scaled version of the iPhone client; the removal of third-party image services from all the mobile clients; and the nagging feeling that their third-party apps are not long for this digital life, apps like the popular ‘macro’ service ‘If This Then That‘ which is losing all its Twitter features on September 27th.
Then the biggest irony so far.
In the week Twitter added the new banner image to better express yourself, they switched off the ability to use animated gifs in a user’s profile. Some profiles will remain grandfathered in until they change the picture, but again a method of expression on Twitter has been removed by Twitter, with little communication to the end users or clear reasoning why.
From here, it looks like Twitter is picking up its football to go home, and refusing to play with the developers and users that gave Twitter its position of popularity. Costolo has said the 140 character limit is sacrosanct, but it seems that everything else is fair game to disappear with no warning or quarter given.
There was a time when we thought MySpace could not fail. There was a time we thought Twitter would not fail. We were wrong about MySpace. What about Twitter?
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