Hey Ethan,

I think you're right about usage patterns. For example, I know many teens and college students use protected Twitter accounts for communication (private, follow 25 people, 25 followers). It definitely varies by region, and even friend group.

I'm curious why you disagree about the opportunity for Twitter though? Do you think the brand is too strong, in a limiting way?

What about Facebook? Do you agree that their brand is irreversibly poor? What about the email opportunity?

Looking forward to discussing, and feel free to add anyone else that you think might have an interesting perspective.

The kind of traction you describe - where a product just takes off and "goes viral" (e.g., Pinterest, snapchat, twitter in the early days, Instagram) isn't something I believe you can engineer. It requires a whole host of enabling factors - many of which we don't even fully understand. Much of it has to do with what a particular group of people deems "cool".

So my thesis would be that Twitter couldn't decide to "focus on this demo" and have it work successfully. Undoubtedly, there are things they could do to the product to make it more attractive to high schoolers or some other group, but I bet that would be viewed by the group as akin to friending their parents on Facebook - not cool.

If I were at Twitter, I'd be doing everything I could come up with to follow the direction that their many existing rabid users want to take the product - not trying to take it a different direction to attract new, different users.

Thoughts on this? Would be curious to hear your (and your sisters) reactions.

I have to disagree, solely from my own experience. Until my junior year of college I thought Twitter was incredibly silly. No, dumb. (I didn't "get" it, more than anything.) Then I started following tech folk once I got interested in startups and, low and behold, today I'm a power user. It's one of those products that you don't get until you GET it.

Twitter already is viral. It already is "cool," with lot's people. Just not all. And the company's biggest challenge isn't where to take the product from here — that's already clearly defined — it's how to message it in a way that attracts many, many more users. They need (massive) scale. And they have a good a chance as any to get teens since they're adventurous technologists.

I guess we don't disagree though, really. Neither of us think the company should build anything *new* to attract a younger demographic. Where we differ is I think their shortcomings are with on-boarding and product positioning – not feature set. (I think the Discovery tab is a wasted effort, for example.)

Yes, but Twitter didn't change. You changed. It's not like they built a new product geared towards you. That's how Twitter grew and as you changed your interests and Twitter naturally evolved in that direction, it became more useful to you. It's not like Twitter said "let's go attract a technically savvy audience so that people like Josh will like it".

I'm not saying it can't grow to appeal to new audiences as it evolves. That's clearly happened many times over with Twitter and Pinterest both. In the case of Twitter, it now appeals to mainstream media types (@andersoncooper has 3.5m followers) not so when it first came out. But it went there organically as its users took it in that direction - not born of some purposeful, strategic effort.

Agree on the Discovery tab and your general conclusion though. Precisely because I don't think Twitter can go mainstream by trying to force it. However, I think these initiatives are purely monetization-related and you can't blame them for doing some unnatural acts like these to make money. It was inevitable.

It did change (and it is changing)! The product hasn't changed much but look who's joining!

Kobe Bryant started tweeting today, for example. As a middle schooler growing up in Los Angeles, I would have been on Twitter in seventh grade if Kobe was talking on it. I'm sure there's an equivalent person for my sister and her friends.

Agreed - it evolved and looks a lot different. But they always went with their users!

I disagree here. While the core of twitter didn't change at all - you follow people, see a timeline of the people you follow, can tweet, etc. the product around that changed radically over the past few years. When you sign up now, twitter does a much better job helping people find and follow what they care about (still a long way to go). And if they wanted more teens they could help on board them too. For the initial burst of users, they hear about a product and will go through a lot of hurdles to use it. But to really mainstream, you need to figure out how to bring the product they want to them rather than other way...

Do you think it would work if Twitter actively targeted a specific demo and courted them?

Yes. I wouldn't underestimate how much having folks like Bieber on Twitter and the way he talks about it to fans, at concerts etc. it is more of a matter of getting the right people and partners to talk about using twitter than say directly marketing to teens to get on twitter. This is some of how they have targeted new geographies too

I guess I see your point once they are already mainstream but not sure this recipe would work that well for a company with traction in one type of user trying to appeal to another.

It depends you have traction in one demographic and have a good model and understand how you grow and how it scales. if you know that and think your product is generally useful for others too, key challenge is just figuring out whether you can start the wedge in each new group. It won't always work or takes time. For LinkedIn it was fascinating to watch how it jumped industries and geographies and how we helped that

I had an almost identical experience with Twitter--totally misunderstood the purpose at first (thought of it as a "news aggregator," much like RSS Feeds). It wasn't until I became a professional and started following other web designers & developers that I "got" it. What's interesting, though, is that my youngest brother & his wife (24yo and 21yo, respectively) use Twitter in a MUCH different way than I ever would. Whereas my tweets are generally professional, theirs are almost universally personal. Their feeds are filled with what can only be described as "mass texts" to their large group of friends, tweets like: "Feel like cooking, but need a grocery runner. Free food for volunteers!" are the norm vs my "Interesting article..." tweets.