David McManus says the social media interface may struggle to expand

Twitter. It’s a word that has become almost synonymous with the internet and yet despite the fact that there are around 6,000 tweets sent every second, so few people seem to actively use it.

The problem would appear to be that of those 6,000 tweets a large percentage are automatically generated from news and information sources which, in turn, are automatically followed by a large percentage of automatically created accounts or, to use the recognised term, bots.

The net effect is that it is easy for Twitter stats to sound effective but that effectiveness quickly melts away to nothing when you realise that a large chunk of those amount to content that is being generated by nobody and read by nobody.

Twitter is in that strange but all too frequent position of being profitable but not profitable enough. Its shareholders want their pound of flesh so the company is looking at ways in which it might generate a greater revenue; no mean feat when your ultimate selling point is that you deliver short, ephemeral text messages.

Facebook is so often seen as the obvious competitor to Twitter and it turns a gigantic profit so the same potential must be there for Twitter, right? Well, no.

Despite being routinely lumped together at the forefront of the social media phenomenon, the two services are actually radically different.

Facebook is largely about multimedia communication with family and real friends – or, at least, people who you once knew in the real world.

Twitter, on the other hand, is all about reading things from people you are much less likely to know in person.

This disconnect, coupled with the fact that there simply aren’t the advertising opportunities on Twitter’s website that there are on Facebook, makes it difficult for Twitter to exploit its user base.

Various ideas for how to do this have been mooted, none of which actually express how they might specifically raise revenue without littering someone’s Twitter feed with adverts which would only serve to quickly alienate regular users.

One suggestion is that the very idea upon which Twitter has been built – the brevity and urgency of its 140 character message limit – might be increased to 10,000 characters which is a terrible idea Surely the single biggest reason for people to keep half an eye on their feed is its lack of ramble? Introduce the option of slipping in essays and long form rants into the mix and it would rapidly lose its chief appeal.

Another change up for consideration is to do what Facebook does and mix up your timeline so that it serves you the things it thinks you would be most interested in rather than a strictly chronological stream of posts.

Again, this is a dreadful idea which would remove a key reason for using Twitter in the first place.

As a publicly-owned company, Twitter has to constantly grow.

It’s very difficult to see how it might do that.