For years, Twitter has remained pretty much the same. One of his most memorable product updates was in 2017, when he doubled the number of characters that could fit in a tweet.
But in recent months, the company has signaled a yearning for change, with plans for an audio chat service, a platform for newsletters writers, ephemeral content and new moderation tools that give people more control over their conversations.
On Thursday, Twitter took it a step further, announcing ambitious expansion plans with new subscription options and communities for specific interests.
“The notion of Twitter even changing seems like a new concept,” said Kayvon Beykpour, Twitter’s head of consumer products, in a recent interview. “It is still a long way from reaching its potential, despite how much influence and value it has in the world.”
The heart of Twitter, launched in 2006, is still tweets. But the company urgently wants to attract more users – many more users – and impress skeptical investors while not overloading its service with bulky resources that look like later reflexes.
While Twitter was at the center of last year’s tumultuous presidential election and continues to exert an uncanny influence in political and media circles, younger social media colleagues like TikTok, Snapchat and Clubhouse have grown much faster.
Snapchat now has 265 million daily active users, more than Twitter’s 192 million. TikTok, which became widely used in the United States in 2018 and does not regularly publish usage numbers, said last fall that it had about 50 million active daily American users. And the Clubhouse, created 11 months ago, has 10 million users.
Over the next three years, Twitter wants to increase its number of daily active users by at least 64%, to 315 million; increase the speed with which it presents new resources to the public; and at least twice its annual revenue, Jack Dorsey, chief executive of Twitter, said on Thursday at an event for industry analysts and investors.
The move, Twitter executives and employees say, has been delayed. “It all comes down to three criticisms: we are slow, we are not innovative and we are not reliable,” said Dorsey.
Mr. Dorsey has been pushing in recent years for the company expand your mandate as well as 280-character conversations and broader discussions.
But Twitter has resisted change for a long time. The leadership of the company’s product development team changed regularly, and the small adjustments Twitter was able to make were routinely ridiculed by its users. After taking over product development in 2018, Beykpour used to joke that he, like the product leaders before him, could end up on the chopping block.
Last year, Elliott Management, a hedge fund, quietly accumulated a 4 percent stake in the company and then tried to oust Dorsey, arguing that he was not focused enough on creating innovative new products on Twitter because he too oversees the financial company Square.
Twitter made a deal with Elliott Management to retain Mr. Dorsey. But the episode led the company to a wave of acquisitions. He snapped up a mobile advertising company, a social video app, a podcasting company, a design company and a newsletter provider.
“We have bought nearly 20 companies for hundreds of millions of dollars in the past few years,” said Ned Segal, chief financial officer of Twitter, in an interview earlier this month. “I think our M&A pace is consistent with the pace of innovation within the company. We are moving faster. “
Twitter has also added a number of features, including ephemeral stories that are dubbed “fleets”, moderation tools that help users limit who can respond to their tweets and live audio chats called Spaces.
It also overhauled its network, which had been largely built during the early days of Twitter, before modern cloud computing services were widely available. The company is also experimenting with subscription products, such as newsletters, that would help creators make money on Twitter.
“This is the change that Twitter is now in: there are many different things that Twitter is willing to try,” said Esther Crawford, senior product manager at Twitter. Ms. Crawford co-founded the social video application Squad, which Twitter acquired in December. “People are really in a moment of excitement around the experimentation we are doing.”
On Thursday, Twitter introduced new features, such as community groups and “Super Follows”, that would allow users to subscribe to exclusive content from other tweeters. The company also said it would hire engineering teams in regions it plans to grow, such as India and Africa.
Some of the latest features of Twitter are not available to all users, so it is difficult to quantify their impact. But the company’s audience is growing. Twitter said it added more daily active users in January than the average for the previous four months. And Twitter shares are higher than they were years ago, and more than 100% over the previous year.
Last week, several Twitter designers held a Space to discuss what the app should look like. About 30 users heard what, before the pandemic, could have been a brainstorming session in a conference room at Twitter headquarters. On Wednesday, a group of Twitter engineers responsible for building the company’s Android app held another open meeting.
“When you work in public, you work faster because you are responsible for the people you are interacting with,” said Crawford.
But some analysts remain skeptical that all of Twitter’s experimentation will mean a somersault in the competition.
“They try all this experimentation and it looks like a lot of little pieces that don’t necessarily pile up into a larger cohesive app experience or social media experience,” said Jessica Liu, senior analyst at Forrester, in an interview earlier this month. “I just want to understand with your senior leadership, what is the long-term vision for Twitter?”