Why Twitter risks a similar fate as BlackBerry

Twitter's woes are well-known. Its user-base has been stagnating, it's been looking to be acquired, but nobody has stepped up - apparently Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Salesforce and others have looked but walked past. (Personally I'm quite glad - I'd be very upset if either Google or MS bought Twitter as they own this blog's platform and my LinkedIn account respectively, and I don't want any further consolidation of my online presence).
 
Other companies in the "social", "messaging" and "information flow" spaces are out-stripping it in growth and coolness - for example, SnapChat for consumers, with the addition of broadcast media-type streams from celebrities or TV channels.

But I think one important comparison and lesson from history hasn't been well-described: Twitter has some of the characteristics of BlackBerry, c2012-13. In particular, it's very hard to continue growth when your company has very disparate groups of users and use-cases, especially split between consumers and businesses.

BlackBerry had a whole range of tensions stemming from keeping two main groups happy:

• Businesses and government users who wanted secure email, plus some optimised Internet access and maybe a few serious productivity/enterprise mobility apps.
• Teenagers and young consumers, who wanted BlackBerry Messenger (BBM), unfettered Internet access and a wide range of apps from games to social. This was especially true outside the US, where younger prepay customers had to pay per-SMS rather than getting plans/bundles. It also had a separate PIN identity, which appealed where people didn't want to give out a phone number, eg Middle East.
• (Note: both groups liked the keyboard)

The tensions here were very hard to reconcile. One group was interested in security, integration with corporate IT infrastructure and (hopefully) enterprise apps. The other wanted cheaper / cooler devices, support for social networking, and messaging that evolved to compete with Whatsapp and its peers with emoji and stickers etc. 

The consumer team was competing (fruitlessly) against Apple's app support and brand, as well as Android's plummetting device margins. The enterprise team needed systems integration support, and was working against the BYOD tide as employees demanded to be allowed to use iPhones. Microsoft was also spending huge sums to become the #3.

I see something similar as a risk for Twitter. It too has multiple constituencies:

• Consumers are using Twitter to update friends, cross-post pictures from Instagram, follow sport or celebrities or politics, watch realtime news events unfold - and perhaps engage in group activities from finding food trucks to becoming involved in protest movements.
• Brands are using Twitter for some forms of social CRM and advertising - perhaps informing people about airline delays, or fielding complaints and customer-service questions.
• Business users look at Twitter as a discussion platform, a way to promote company news or events, or share news items and analysis. 

I fall into this last category of business users. I don't really use @disruptivedean for personal stuff, although occasionally I'll use my follower numbers as a "do you know who I am?" blunt-instrument if I want to make a point, or complain about something (sorry about that!) as I suspect it makes me appear more "influential" and prioritised for action, than a random anonymous egg account.

But that doesn't stop me getting irrelevant notifications like this, from the new Twitter Highlights service:

 I also have screen real-estate wasted with the pointless "explore" tab, mostly giving me suggestions about sports I never watch or as right now - and I'm not making this up - "When Justin Beiber plays at your pub" and "A baby iguana chased by snakes has nation in a frenzy".



Now I recognise that other people are fascinated by this stuff. But the ongoing drift of Twitter to try to compete with SnapChat, Buzzfeed on Facebook and assorted news/media sites detracts from my (and many of my contacts') use-cases. I also need to try to keep as much of Twitter's curation algorithms away from me as possible - I want a raw feed, not what it *thinks* I want to see first, and I don't want mentions or retweets to be filtered.

Personally I try to firewall my personal social stuff (Facebook, Instagram, in the past SnapChat & I might try again) from my business life (Twitter, LinkedIn, this blog, maybe Slack in future). A couple of communications apps like Whatsapp and Skype cross the boundary, but I view Twitter as an important part of my B2B interaction. I don't want to see it getting too consumerised. Incidentally, Twitter makes some money out of me too - I sometimes pay for advertising, for example if I publish a report. (Blatant plug: buy my eSIM study! link)

So the question I have is how Twitter manages to reconcile its B2B, B2C [CRM], B2C [Media] & C2C uses without alienating any of its constituencies. Based on BlackBerry's experiences, I think it's going to struggle - unless perhaps it positions itself more as a platform, or gives users much better filtering tools.
 
Some people may also recall that I used to run a paid (locked) Twitter feed called DApremium (link) about 4-5 years ago. It was a nice idea and generated some revenues for me, but interaction like retweets and multi-party debates was hard because the tweets were protected. I'd definitely be interested in mechanisms to do something similar in future - and would happily do a rev-share with Twitter if it was well-designed.
 
Meanwhile, I'm definitely interested in other options in case Twitter decides against business users as a strategically important group. I am increasingly getting more followers on LinkedIn (it distinguishes contacts from followers if you post articles - some people don't realise), and it's a pretty good platform for discussion in comments. I'm open to other suggestions too. Meanwhile, if you're not already following me, I'm @disruptivedean for now at least! (link) as well as here on LinkedIn.

Microsoft / LinkedIn helps kill the phone number as a primary B2B identifier

I'll keep this focused, as there will be hundreds of articles dissecting the MS / LI acquisition that will no doubt cover most angles.

For me, the key element is that LinkedIn has one of the only "identity spaces" that allows people from different companies to connect. The two other most-popular ID types, which cover company-to-company communications, are phone numbers and email addresses. Unlike those, LinkedIn actually has a functioning searchable directory, with real names and mutual-connection "opt-in" model to reduce spam. It also follows people from job to job.

Other options are very minor - some business-people connect via Twitter's messaging function, some have industry-specific IM systems like Bloomberg & Symphony in finance, and some interact via channels on Slack and similar services niche collaboration platforms. 

Three other identities stand out - Google ID (used for HangOuts and a few strange folk on G+), Skype, and Lync/Skype for Business. Some business-people probably end up communicating via iMessage but that's usually triggered via an initial phone-number exchange, as is WhatsApp and pretty much all the other major mobile messaging services.

None of the other UC/UCaaS services from Cisco, Avaya, Unify, Mitel or Broadsoft-enabled operators really have their own inter-company addressing, directory and search/discovery function, although they can sometimes use specific federation techniques, or indeed integrate with Microsoft's Office365 and other systems.

If it can put the pieces together, Microsoft now has:

• LinkedIn's real-name addressing
• Outlook / Office365's ability to link email addresses to presence and Microsoft's own identity space
• Skype IDs for both consumers and individual business-people
• Phone numbers provided for SkypeIn and PSTN Calling in Skype4B
• WebRTC/ORTC for "guest access"
• Dynamics for CRM / sales automation

It is thus now the only company that can legitimately claim to control directories for both internal and external connections among business users, plus a fair number of consumers as well. It is already quite common for people to use LinkedIn as a surrogate contact database, when they cannot immediately find someone's phone number or remember their email address - especially when they move jobs.

(It should however be noted that LinkedIn tends to polarise opinion quite a lot - while it has a proportion of regular users who exploit it for networking, recruitment, groups and articles, it also has many members that have neglected profiles and limited active use. I'd been expecting LinkedIn to add realtime communications with WebRTC for some time but nothing has appeared - although it will be interesting to see if there's been anything behind the scenes that Microsoft will accelerate).

That has big implications for two groups:

• Telcos will see the role of the phone-number diminish further in a B2B context, as it becomes ever-closer to being just a lowest common-denominator fallback option. Added to its diminishing scope for B2C (because of in-messaging chat, app notifications etc), this doesn't augur well for E.164's continued primacy
• Cisco, Broadsoft and others need to think closely how to tie together inter- as well as intra-company connections. I'll be interested to see if Cisco tries to leverage its Apple relationship, or if the UCaaS platform-players try to lean on Google [Which has been cropping up regularly at events, pitching Android for Work]. We could also see attempts by competitors to federate their various cloud platforms - perhaps using something like Matrix.org as an intermediary.

This also puts the pressure on Facebook to step up with its long-promised enterprise offer, and means that any sign that Slack, HipChat or peers are gaining viral adoption will be greeted with enthusiasm (and perhaps acquisition offers). We will also see redoubled interest in industry-specific federated messaging in healthcare or finance or government verticals.

[There are also impacts on other companies like Salesforce in the CRM arena, but I'll leave that for others to discuss]

Of course, all this is contingent on Microsoft/LinkedIn gaining approval from competition authorities - and of course also assumes Microsoft can do a rather better job with integration than it managed with Skype in the first place.

But overall, this is hugely important - and has ramifications that extend across the business communications sphere, and may ultimately prove to be (another) nail in the coffin of the phone number & PSTN as the primary B2B identity-space.