Twitter isn't going anywhere, it just might not fulfil the high expectations of the later stage/ public investors. Worst case for Twitter is probably a massive acquisition by Facebook/Google/Microsoft.
Disagree about a lack of improvements. Some recent ones I'm a fan of: better handling of multimedia, better "quote tweet", polls, engagement metrics, and a bunch of UI improvements.
Twitter is expanding its product offerings with Periscope and as of today's press releases is looking to expand past 140 characters.[1]
The curiosity is what becomes of the 2,000 engineers on staff. What is the break down in terms of their roles within the company, i.e. back-end, development, user-experience. When does the twitter back-end become a mature platform and you can start to wean down the number of engineers.
As an aside, I would love an app or system that will trace the origin of a story within the web eco-system. One comment from Re/Code is recounted / repackaged across the entire system.
Also, I was trying to find the original Periscope iterative development post through Google and Bing, no luck thanks to the two sites now integrating news into their search results.
Twitter's core product is still useful for a lot of people, it's just never going to be Facebook. It will eventually be bought by someone, probably Google.
I don't expect it to disappear (not completely, not over night).
But they're burning through $130M+ a quarter and growth is stalling. They don't seem to have leadership with a vision of where to take the company from here.
Twitter still enjoys some cache with celebrities, but how much longer will that hold true?
So how will they stop bleeding? Maybe they'll transform Twitter into something profitable, or maybe they'll look to the 2,000+ engineers, and ask why they need so many.
The fundamental problem of the current market is that it's all sustained by VC injections and trivial revenue streams. No-one is prepared to pay for something like Twitter (or Tumblr, or, or...) because we've gotten used to the idea of Stuff For Free. But the model just isn't sustainable, particularly given the ongoing attack on the only (ad) revenue stream that these services do have.
2k+ engineers on staff without notable improvements to the core user-facing product in a while.
Declining signups, declining engagement.
Nobody stepping into the permanent CEO role.
I don't see how this ends well.