After Years Asleep at the Wheel, Twitter Is Trying Again

Bold bets in Twitter’s transformation

For people that use Twitter regularly, the social network has been frustrating for the last few years — it felt like it wasn’t really improving, let alone evolving as a product.

Apart from a handful of experiments and design tweaks, the platform largely remained the same as over five years ago, leaving power users like myself wondering if the company was asleep at the wheel, or at the very least terrified of making changes to its core features.

There were occasional signs of life, like when the company launched a separate, totally overhauled app called ‘Twttr.’ The app was a bold attempt to redesign the social network from the ground up — but it was eventually shut down. Fleets, the company’s attempt at disappearing tweets, experienced a similar fate, shutting down in 2021 after the company admitted it wasn’t working out.

But, in the last year, the company appears to have woken up and started making meaningful changes to the platform again, with a series of bold bets that fundamentally change the way Twitter works for the first time in years.

First, Twitter launched Spaces, which allows people to host an audio room and have an actual conversation with their followers. Then there were…