How Twitter lost the stream wars
This post was also published in VentureBeat. Unlike other category-defining Internet companies, Twitter has struggled to meet both user growth metrics and Wall Street’s expectations. There are a lot of possible explanations for Twitter’s user growth problems, but they really boil down to one simple thing: As the content shared into streams grows exponentially, the streams have to get smarter in order to remain relevant to users. Twitter presents cards in a straight reverse chronological stream that shows all content. The more people you follow and the more you use Twitter, the worse the Twitter experience becomes. Facebook took a very different tack. Back in 2008, Mark Zuckerberg established Zuckerberg’s Law of Information Sharing , which predicted that the rate people share information like status updates and photos would double every year. In 2009, Facebook acquired Friendfeed for $50 million , integrating a team that was using content shared from external sites to learn what