Twitter Has Lots of Problems, Fab CEO Says in 44-Tweet Storm

If you were hoping “tweetstorms” wouldn’t endure into 2015, you might want to look away.

Over the span of 44 tweets this morning, Fab CEO and Twitter shareholder Jason Goldberg said Twitter has lost its way. And tweetstorms, he said, are in fact a symptom of its problems.

“TWTR should not be monetizing it’s [sic] users, it should be monetizing its usage,” Goldberg said. “… Monetizing usage is Apple App store, enabling app makers to scale up fast & then make real money. This silly tweet storm — There should be awesome long form publishing tools for TWTR, and TWTR doesn’t need to build them.”

Goldberg said Twitter has spent too much time trying to wring ad revenue out of its 284 million monthly active users a la Facebook, when instead it could be capitalizing on the ways it is different from Facebook — chiefly, the ease of getting a message on the site from “one to many.” Everything from new media startups to “The Interview” to the hit podcast “Serial” should be created, seen and heard on the site, he added.

https://twitter.com/betashop/status/551374388365258753

His advice comes as Twitter finds itself without a clear path forward. Its stock is down 47 percent from this time last year, and the company lost nearly a billion dollars between October 2013 and September 2014.

Fab has had its own share of hardship in the past year-plus. The e-commerce startup, once valued at $1 billion, had to abandon its original “flash sale” business model at Fab.com and shifted to Hem, a furniture sales site. The company has laid off hundreds of employees starting a year before Hem’s launch last July. First, it sacked 100 people in July 2013. Then it laid off 101 more in October 2013. And 50 more the following month. And then another 80 to 90 last May. As of November 2014, the company was in talks to sell itself to PCH International for $15 million in cash and stock.

Despite that, e-commerce and social media are still largely separate worlds, and Goldberg is arguing from the stance of a Twitter fan and shareholder, declining to bring in any of his personal experience running a trouble Internet company.

His ultimate recommendation, though? Sell to Google, and become the next YouTube.

https://twitter.com/betashop/status/551377557669425152

This article originally appeared on Recode.net.

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