By Zach Weigel
Twitter is a business, and it has a bottom line, and at the end of the day (month, year), a business needs to make money in order to be a viable service. Even President Trump’s appetite for Twitter hasn’t proved to be enough of a boon to boost Twitter’s profits. So, Twitter has looked for ways to make its product both more profitable and productive for users. To this end, word has leaked that Twitter is exploring two changes to its service.
First, in an effort to improve its profit, Twitter contemplates a change to tiered membership. Unlike its social-media big brother Facebook, Twitter has not been able to generate much money from advertising. Thus, by creating different levels of membership, Twitter would be able to charge a subscription for premium services.
Second, Twitter is looking into how artificial intelligence could help users become more engaged on Twitter through building a larger base of followers and perfecting their tweeting habits. Functioning as a critical tool that mines users’ activity, a tool called “post intelligence” would help users craft tweets that cater to their followers and even suggest certain times to tweet based upon their followers’ use of Twitter. Post intelligence could even schedule specific times for users to tweet.
Whereas a potential change to tiered membership would directly raise Twitter’s bottom line, the prospects of how artificial intelligence could alter Twitter is especially thought-provoking. Creating different tiers of membership with different services is nothing new. Many apps have in-app purchases while media platforms such as Spotify and Pandora use this system to boost their profits. Therefore, this move by Twitter appears to be purely motivated by the bottom line. However, tiered membership coupled with AI could serve to rebrand Twitter altogether.
At its current state, Twitter is largely a social-media platform known for memes, gifs, and witty phrases to express people’s opinions and emotions. But Twitter has been breaking into the professional news game more and more as newspapers and other media outlets have turned to Twitter in an effort to reach out to consumers in a more accessible format. With the inclusion of AI technology, Twitter would effectively gear itself toward a professional platform in addition to a social-media platform. And while it’s perfectly normal to expect a business to adapt, I do wonder how users will respond to Twitter’s transition.
What will the overall effect of this overhaul be? With tiers, will Twitter morph into two different Twitterspheres? Will a separate professionally oriented Twitter develop for journalists and avid news consumers, or will Twitter be able to blend the professional Twittershpere with the more fleeting, expressive enterprise it was originally designed to be? Will Twitter be able to facilitate a mixture of users’ subjective feelings with objective professional news, or will the two domains drift apart?
Personally, I love Twitter as it is, because I can get the best of both worlds: news combined with opinions and reactions. I can understand that Twitter needs to reinvent itself to turn a greater profit, yet I hope Twitter can find a way to balance both. Especially given the incredibly divisive nature of the world around us today, it’d be nice to have something unifying.