Why Twitter will keep growing: Its best ideas come from the users

November 13, 2013 Leave a comment

Why Twitter will keep growing: Its best ideas come from the users

By Brian Fung, Updated: November 12 at 2:56 pm

Twitter’s just unveiled a new offering that’ll surely delight organizers and curators everywhere: It’s called Custom Timelines, and it lets users compile a list of selected tweets in any order for others to look at — whether on Tweetdeck, embedded in a Web site or on Twitter.com. For things you want to keep a record of but don’t necessarily update very often, this can be a good way to hand-craft (and share) an archive. For instance, if you’re an app developer, you might build a custom timeline that functions as a changelog, helping people understand how your app has evolved over the past few versions.Of course, Custom Timelines looks pretty similar to another curation tool — Storify. Storify offers a bit more functionality in that you can pull in more than just tweets; also available are Instagram photos, YouTube videos and other forms of media. Still, it’s not hard to imagine Custom Timelines drawing away some Storify users simply because it’s more tightly integrated within the Twitter ecosystem.

It’s reminiscent of Twitter’s earlier moves to clamp down on the third-party Twitter app market, which used to be a dynamic (if chaotic) place. In 2010, the company acquired the developer behind Tweetie, one of the most popular Twitter clients on the Mac platform at the time. That was followed a year later by a $40 million-plus deal to snap up Tweetdeck.

The pattern stretches back even further to Twitter’s very early days, when the service didn’t support one-click retweets, hashtags or a convention to address other users. People had to make those up as they went along. It took nearly two years for the so-called “manual” retweet (in the format “RT”) to catch on.

Even though Twitter has a long, tough climb ahead if it wants to fulfill investors’ expectations, the fact that it can — and does — draw inspiration from its own userbase gives it a significant boost. (A spokesperson for Twitter did not return requests for comment Tuesday afternoon.)

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Kee Koon Boon (“KB”) is the co-founder and director of HERO Investment Management which provides specialized fund management and investment advisory services to the ARCHEA Asia HERO Innovators Fund (www.heroinnovator.com), the only Asian SMID-cap tech-focused fund in the industry. KB is an internationally featured investor rooted in the principles of value investing for over a decade as a fund manager and analyst in the Asian capital markets who started his career at a boutique hedge fund in Singapore where he was with the firm since 2002 and was also part of the core investment committee in significantly outperforming the index in the 10-year-plus-old flagship Asian fund. He was also the portfolio manager for Asia-Pacific equities at Korea’s largest mutual fund company. Prior to setting up the H.E.R.O. Innovators Fund, KB was the Chief Investment Officer & CEO of a Singapore Registered Fund Management Company (RFMC) where he is responsible for listed Asian equity investments. KB had taught accounting at the Singapore Management University (SMU) as a faculty member and also pioneered the 15-week course on Accounting Fraud in Asia as an official module at SMU. KB remains grateful and honored to be invited by Singapore’s financial regulator Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) to present to their top management team about implementing a world’s first fact-based forward-looking fraud detection framework to bring about benefits for the capital markets in Singapore and for the public and investment community. KB also served the community in sharing his insights in writing articles about value investing and corporate governance in the media that include Business Times, Straits Times, Jakarta Post, Manual of Ideas, Investopedia, TedXWallStreet. He had also presented in top investment, banking and finance conferences in America, Italy, Sydney, Cape Town, HK, China. He has trained CEOs, entrepreneurs, CFOs, management executives in business strategy & business model innovation in Singapore, HK and China.

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