What can Twitter do to maintain their value? Right now, anyone can duplicate Twitter's functionality (i.e. App.net). Myspace lost because Facebook did everything better. Because Facebook continued to innovate, it would be hard to replace. Twitter on the other hand, hasn't done much that's irreplaceable.

I think Twitter's move to remove the "Find my friends" feature is because they're scared you'll move the conversation elsewhere. Just look at what I'm doing here with Branch.

They need to be a platform for people to connect. An open platform. They need to continue to let its developers (and in turn its users) dictate the future of Twitter. Just like they have in the past (RT, @mentions, Lists, Favorites, etc). They are too busy focusing on monetization strategies that they are losing sight of their original goal.

The last thing they should do is shut out the companies backing them. Companies encouraging their millions of users to use Twitter. Without this support Twitter is just a platform. Users will get tired because the only people taking Twitter to the next level is Twitter itself (with their misaligned goals).

Haha, yeah. I began to fear for Twitter a couple years ago when it appeared there was a revenue-based fork in the road: ads or fees.

Twitter chose ads.

So now we have Promoted Tweets, spam galore, and a bloated userbase consisting primarily of people who use U and R and 4 in lieu of actual words.

Had Twitter decided to charge for their service (and I would've happily paid a hefty yearly fee if they had), we wouldn't have to ignore ads, spam would be much less prevalent, and the average IQ in the Twittersphere would be dozens of points higher than it currently is.

At a deeper level, I think the fork-in-the-road was less "ads vs. fees" and more "quality vs. quantity." Guess which road we're all stuck on now.

Nobody can just duplicate Twitter's functionality – at scale. Sure, anyone can write a CRUD Rails app with an out-of-the-box API that emulates Twitter's basic features. But to make that app work with millions of users is a whole other ballgame.