Twitter's unrealized potential

Hi everyone, it's Tae on the Bloomberg Opinion team. I love Twitter—just not any of its latest product rollouts. But first...

Today's top tech news:

Blizzard lost the executive producer of its Overwatch series as the company grapples with a discrimination suit and an SEC investigation
Facebook's oversight board called for more information about how the company moderates posts by famous people
Netflix is in talks to buy the catalog of the late British novelist Roald Dahl, its biggest acquisition ever

There's a joke on Twitter about Twitter that goes like this: The biggest innovation the company achieved after spending billions on research and development over the last five years was doubling the character count of a tweet.

That characterization isn't exactly fair, but there's enough truth in it to make it funny.

In the face of such criticism, early this year Twitter Chief Executive Officer Jack Dorsey promised a different mentality. At the company's analyst day he vowed that Twitter would "double development velocity" of features to achieve its long-term financial goals. The message was clear: Twitter was on a new course, headed for rapid-fire innovation and game-changing product rollouts.

But now that the early returns are in, a lot of people are still using Twitter in much the same way they did five years ago. And unless the social-media platform fundamentally rethinks how it develops products, that may not change anytime soon.

Last week, TechCrunch reported that Twitter's highly anticipated Super Follows program, which enables users to charge a monthly fee for subscriber-only content, generated negligible revenue in its first two weeks of operation. According to app research firm Sensor Tower, U.S. consumers spent a paltry total of $6,000 for Twitter in-app iOS purchases during that time period.

The company stresses that it's working with only a small group of creators to hone the offering before a wider rollout, but the data for the hand-picked cohort of 77 popular accounts indicate that so far demand is limited. That's troubling because Super Follows was a centerpiece of the product road map for Twitter that excited investors the most. They hoped it would be the beginning of the company finding new ways to make money beyond advertising through paid subscription offerings.

Instead, Super Follows' anemic start comes after a string of offerings that haven't quite taken off. After Twitter unveiled its Tip Jar payment feature in May, security researchers discovered potential privacy issues that should have been caught in testing. A month later, the company released its first-ever paid subscription offering called Twitter Blue, which allows users to organize saved tweets into folders, get access to color themes, and delay posts for up to 30 seconds for possible revision. That product is still in testing, but promises to appeal mostly to a few power users. And finally, Twitter shuttered Fleets, its knockoff version of Instagram Stories and Snapchat Stories, just months after launch.

Except for Twitter Spaces—that feature is seeing some success as a live audio broadcast medium for prominent accounts—the company doesn't seem to know what its users need or want. Instead, it appears to be offering a little bit of everything. The latest befuddling experiment is a format change of the main app feed that will look more like Reddit's design. It can feel like Twitter is throwing spaghetti on the wall to see what sticks.

Twitter's head of consumer product, Kayvon Beykpour, has said that the company is consciously trying to cultivate a taste for "for terrifying, ambitious bets." And in its blog post announcing the demise of Fleets, Twitter noted that if some products don't wind up getting pulled, "we're not taking big enough chances." The company will also point to its host of new features in the last year (Spaces, Ticketed Spaces, Communities, Safety Mode, newsletters, and more) as evidence of speedy innovation.

But so far, none of that has lessened the frustration for Twitter enthusiasts like me. I love the service and believe it has limitless potential. With a properly cultivated list of follows, logging on is like plugging into a matrix of brilliant thoughts from the smartest people in the world. Yet, the company fails to listen to its most ardent supporters, who have for years clamored for basic features—including direct messaging content search, a more advanced version of TweetDeck, better analytics and an edit button. We're still waiting.

Perhaps the most perplexing thing is Twitter's CEO also runs Square Inc.—a technology company that has created hit product after hit product and has disrupted several industries. Its merchant point-of-sale system and Cash payments app are known for their smart intuitive designs and best-in-class user experiences.

If only Dorsey could figure out a way to bring some of that product magic to his other company. —Tae Kim

Amazon's robots get a lot of press, but when it comes to getting people packages on time, its algorithms are just as important. Bloomberg went inside Amazon's flagship warehouse near Seattle to learn how a single building has managed to scale up to ship a million items a day—and how that's changing the jobs of the people who work there.

Timnit Gebru, Google's former AI ethics chief, has a plan to rethink big tech.

Salesforce has integrated most of its products with Slack, the chat product it acquired in July.

Uber wants its delivery business to be "fully green."

Google is spending $2.1 billion to buy St. John's Terminal in New York.

A correction: A link in Tuesday's newsletter gave the incorrect figure for the two-week decline in the market cap of large tech stocks. The correct number is $500 billion.