It hasn’t been a stellar 12 months for Twitter. The company went public three years ago to a $25 billion valuation and the promise of growth that would launch it into the upper echelon of social networks. That vision hasn’t panned out, and 2016 furthered Twitter’s fate as a struggling Silicon Valley giant.
2016 furthered Twitter’s fate as a struggling Silicon Valley giant
Twitter has watched half of its market capitalization vanish. It’s also been plagued by leadership exits and reshuffles, which have only accelerated since original co-founder Jack Dorsey took the reins as the official CEO last fall. Twitter’s vice president of product position was filled and vacated numerous times, while two of the company’s most influential executives resigned back in January.
Since then, a number of other Twitter employees and execs have either jumped ship or been laid off, draining the company’s artificial intelligence, commerce, media, and engineering teams of talent. In the last two months alone, Twitter lost both its chief operating officer and chief technology officer.
Over 2016, Twitter tried to reinvigorate its service with countless design tweaks and product launches. In February, the company rolled out its controversial algorithmic timeline in an attempt to increase user engagement. It inked a deal with the NFL to stream live football games and deployed a big product change that expanded the number of characters allowed in tweets. It also shut down Vine and integrated Periscope’s live streaming capabilities into the main Twitter app. (Twitter has since relaunched Vine as a standalone camera app with none of the social features.)