- I don't personally don't believe that's inevitable at all. But that's kind of beside the point. It's not that the fact that it's video that makes it a weak play.

- They launched Twitter photos well before Facebook acquired Instagram. The only thing they launched after that were filters (which was a questionable use of resources, in my opinion. Again, filters aren't adding defensibility to Twitter's core value proposition).

- How is that a fail for Twitter? Twitter's core value proposition has historically been that you can post statuses and links to interesting articles/media/etc. from anywhere to a single stream. If they want to do some rich display of those links, I'm all for that. But if the argument is...

...that they're a media creation product, I think that has yet to be proven out, since most of the media I see (anecdotally) posted to Twitter comes from other outlets. If Twitter wants to take on Instagram, YouTube, RSS, Instapaper, etc., they're well within their rights to do so (and I see how that mental leap coule be made), but I think Twitter's as much a media-creation product as Apple is a cloud services company. They have the traffic and users to try it, but it's going to be a long, grueling battle waged on multiple fronts. And in the meantime, their core Twitter apps are languishing and the web experience is only so-so.

I think Twitter's core value is more a content distribution network than it is a content creation network. So I get the point that it would be nice to see innovation and resources directed to that core mission. And of course they are. The supermajority are. Vine is a tiny investment resource wise. As was photo filters.

Maybe they seem disproportionately big bc they are new and end user facing.

attention isn't free. i've made that mistake too many times. at my company, when we lightly dip into any endeavor that isn't core core product & core core network, we end up regretting it... because doing anything really well (core core product & core core network) is really really hard. so if your core product & network has big potential, best off to focus on it