By Sarah Frier
Investors came to Twitter’s first analyst day with doubts about the microblogging service’s potential. The company left them with a long list of promises about how it will change.
Whether Twitter can deliver remains to be seen. Twitter laid bare its to-do list for the service, complete with a vision of how big the company could get if everything goes perfectly (more than $11 billion in revenue in five to eight years). It was their answer to months of investor questions over slowing user growth and management turnover. In response, the company’s stock rose 7.5 percent.
Here are some of the more notable promises Twitter made to Wall Street:
- An “instant timeline” that would allow new users to get value out of the service right away, without having to follow anybody first. Twitter would use algorithms to figure out what might be important and interesting. The feature would also be shown to returning users who don’t have “healthy” timelines, Chief Executive Officer Dick Costolo said.
- By early next year, ways for people to “record, edit and share” video using the Twitter application.
- A “what you missed” feature to show people the most important tweets that were posted since they last logged in.
- Starting next week, an update that allows people to share public tweets within private messages.
- Changes to the Twitter homepage, which draws 125 million people each month who don’t log in or sign up.
- New mobile applications besides Twitter and Vine.
- Content organized around geography and events.
- A “quick promote” option so that users can turn their tweets into advertisements with a couple of clicks.
And many more. Keep in mind that Twitter is known for years-long internal debates over product changes. The company has had five heads of product in five years.
“It’s hard to know how meaningful their new initiatives are,” said Brian Wieser, an analyst at Pivotal Research. – Bloomberg
