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With rumors swirling that Twitter may<\/a> (or should<\/a>) sell, it\u2019s time to ask: Is that for the best? Will it maximize what Twitter can \u2014 and should \u2014 become?<\/p>\n In short, no.<\/p>\n Twitter doesn\u2019t need to sell. Instead of going external for a shot in the arm, the networking brand should work internally \u2014 get creative with offerings and tweak current features.<\/p>\n Perhaps that creative nudge will come from the\u00a0recent hire<\/a>\u00a0of Keith Coleman as vice president of product. Coleman\u2019s background in launching social apps such as Frenzy and W2D could be just what Twitter needs to get back to the creativity that took it to the heights it reached in the first place.<\/p>\n A decade ago, Twitter entered the marketplace as a small early-stage company based on gutsy, simple concepts: brief, indexed, subscription-based messaging across a social network. Twitter rode that paradigm to the heights of social network fame and market penetration, boasting a user base of\u00a0317 million<\/a>\u00a0and a\u00a0top 10<\/a>\u00a0ranking by Alexa.<\/p>\n But if sold, Twitter\u2019s drive for\u00a0disruptive<\/i>\u00a0innovation could give way to simple window dressing, such as cleaner user interfaces. Leadership at large companies is often unwilling to take bold, paradigm-shifting chances because that risks backlash \u2014 even\u00a0lawsuits<\/a>\u00a0\u2014 from shareholders if projected earnings fall short.<\/p>\n Most importantly, Twitter\u2019s technology has applicability to exciting verticals, from factory automation to media. It just needs to overcome some of the internal resistance any public company has in pursuing the innovative changes that originally put it on the map.<\/p>\n Introducing a new paradigm \u2014 beyond its current hashtags and handles \u2014 doesn\u2019t just help Twitter open up to a broader user base; it also allows for scaling, like Facebook. When your specialty is connecting people through a familiar interface and you have enough momentum built up, that disruptive future is only a matter of vision and will. Let\u2019s imagine a couple of ways Twitter could jet forward.<\/p>\n Customizable viewing preferences:<\/b>\u00a0One idea is a Twitter \u201clens,\u201d which would allow users to view a handle or persona through different points of view. Consider Twitter\u2019s current model. Everyone who follows a user, such as a celebrity, sees the exact same content with no filtering.<\/p>\n This lens feature would filter tweets from that handle (or hashtag) by criteria. Let\u2019s say, for instance, you wanted to find entries of Donald Trump critiquing Alec Baldwin\u2019s impression of him on Saturday Night Live. The lens mechanism would help sift through Trump\u2019s account to pull up those examples.<\/p>\n Lenses could be based on geolocation, tweet history, contexts from other users \u2014 anything. Clever lens crafting could be an intellectual pursuit that further engages the user base.<\/p>\n Hashtags already serve as coarse filtering, but using machine learning on the backend to introduce more subtlety would give filtering a new richness and precision that exceeds hashtagging \u2014 which is limited to the simple user-created categories.<\/p>\n Hashtags were ideal early on when Twitter needed to filter the site\u2019s enormous \u201ctweet space,\u201d which generates about a\u00a0half a billion tweets<\/a>\u00a0daily. But it\u2019s time for them to apply research and launch something akin to Google\u2019s algorithms to understand the web\u2019s evolving content.<\/p>\n It\u2019s clear that Dorsey and others are already thinking in this direction. In June, he blogged about increasing the app\u2019s\u00a0investment in machine learning<\/a>, citing its acquisitions<\/a> of machine learning<\/a> startups Madbits<\/a>,\u00a0Whetlab<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0Magic Pony<\/a>.<\/p>\n Twitter-specific devices:<\/b>\u00a0Twitter could also throw its hat into the growing IoT market, making the app the go-to source for devices capable of generating real-time tweets. The buzz is growing around\u00a0putting IoT centers<\/a>\u00a0in homes. Twitter is the perfect enabler of this because of its brand recognition.<\/p>\nUnexplored avenues Twitter should travel<\/h2>\n