Twitter not dying, but nor is it healthy

The Atlantic magazine thinks Twitter is in terminal decline. 

It could be right. However, despite falling use and missed financial targets there’s still plenty of life in the terse online chatter service.

Twitter’s problem is turning hundreds of millions of users and billions of tweets into money and profit.

There’s no easy way to do this. Any attempt to insert more intrusive advertising or other money generating clutter into people’s Twitter feeds will only turn more people off.

And as for charging customers to use Twitter? You have to be joking. It would drop out of sight over night.

The simple truth is there isn’t a business model to make Twitter a viable stand-alone operation. All of them kill the service’s strengths and diminish its value to users.

It could be a good fit with other media services. Maybe. But then traditional media companies are not awash with lazy capital looking for a new home.

Twitter may not be dead , but it is in a dead-end. It remains influential but in its current form it will never be a money generating machine like Facebook.