It's fear. Twitter was a neat little idea that scaled easily. It doesn't need many people to keep it going. Twitter could have been the next Craigslist - so cheap to run it takes only a tiny team, but so powerful in concept it crushed the classified ad industry.
But it's such a simple idea that Facebook or Google or WeChat could add a "tweet" capability and perhaps crush Twitter. So there's a desperate attempt to get big enough to fight back, or come up with a second product, or something. Sometimes that doesn't work.
> But it's such a simple idea that Facebook or Google or WeChat could add a "tweet" capability and perhaps crush Twitter.
So why don't they?
The reality is that both Google and Facebook have made their attempt to own "real time" and both efforts failed. Google even had to pay for the Twitter firehouse for a while, and eventually just gave up.
When people need to know what's going on RIGHT NOW, neither Google nor Facebook is where they turn. Twitter is the fastest publishing platform on the planet. Tweets beat an earthquake from Virginia to New York, just like XKCD joked they would. Contrary to popular belief, this is is not easy to do.
But it's such a simple idea that Facebook or Google or WeChat could add a "tweet" capability and perhaps crush Twitter. So there's a desperate attempt to get big enough to fight back, or come up with a second product, or something. Sometimes that doesn't work.