LinkedIn has taken advantage of its core competency – business networking – and has built a viable business model based on online recruitment with a competitive advantage that cannot be matched by online job boards (people only put their CVs on job boards when looking for a new job. Most candidates are ‘passive’, and yet many of those passive candidates have searchable LinkedIn profiles!). There is no reason that Twitter cannot leverage its competency in knowledge generation, and I do believe the best way to do that is to open up its firehose to businesses that want to do this kind of big data analysis, and either charge them for it or take a cut of their revenue. Yes, big data has become a buzz-word, but as analytical tools become more and more sophisticated, it is going to become more widely used. All they need to do is get ahead of the game so they can become the only choice for real-time knowledge analysis.

Totally agree with you and I would say the big opportunity for them is to make the feed amazing and the #discover tab as their next big offering, regardless of photos, videos or whatever. The ability to surface interesting things could provide more stickiness than anything.

I would like to respond to this comment, but then I would respond with the content of this post. You are looking at all these tactical minor moves of theirs. The question I am putting forth: what is Twitter and the answer to that question defines its business strategy — nothing to do with filters, cards, or whatever little stuff they throw out there.

I could care less about photos but I still use the network based on my interest and that seems the logical place to innovate!

Twitter is a communication platform.

Its core competency is and should be focused on maintaining and easing communication. For example, pretty fucking impressive that they have scaled the service so that it can handle 340,000,000 tweets per day.

Honestly, who gives a shit if they use in house dev to make filters or not?

Filters and photo editing have nothing do with Twitter’s future.

Twitter Cards have everything to do with it. Letting people natively ad card content to the stream is incredibly valuable to the company. It’s great they used Aviary, that way they don’t have to have engineerings tinkering with currently in-vogue technology when all they really want is a way for people to add photos in a fun and easy way.

Where Twitter is really competing with Instagram is offering a stream of photos. Twitter has barely gotten started at this, but if you go to my profile page on web you can start a slideshow view or on the app you can endless scroll through. Twitter will be doing a full refresh of this so images are just as easy to scroll thru as the feed for every user. That is what Instagram should be scared of that Twitter’s photo feed (which displays all photos with twitter card support) will be as compelling as my Instagram photo feed.

So everything is about the feed, and that is what twitter stands for. Everything else is just Kardashian kabuki theatre

The “make or buy” decision takes into consideration a number of factors – cost, learning curve, time to market, organizational structure, resource allocation, and so on. Twitter’s decision on filters is neither inherently good or bad, it just reflects a number of parameters.

Is there a company in recent times that has been so loved on one hand, and buggered on the other?