As recently as a few months ago, Twitter seemed to be on a path to world domination, with incredible growth rates and massive media attention. My grandmother even started talking about Twitter, after hearing Oprah talk about it. But now, I’m not so sure. I recently heard someone use the phrase "flailing around" to describe some of Twitter’s recent announcements, and I have to admit that I understand the sentiment. Let me explain why.

First, though, let it be said that we at MIX Online have a soft spot in our hearts for Twitter. Twitter’s founder, Evan Williams, met with Bill Gates in 2006 just months after creating Twitter, to give advice about our MIX conference. And the MIX conference was the first large conference after SXSW to incorporate Twitter into our event experience. Our Flotzam app for integrating Twitter into conferences remains popular, as does our Twitter archival utility,The Archivist. We’ve all been active users of Twitter since the earliest days of the service.

However,after a good 3 years of explosive growth and ever-increasing hype, Twitter growth seems to have gone flat for the past 3 months including August. The majority of users have never tweeted. What gives?

In short, I think that Twitter can’t decide what it wants to be when it grows up, and has been churning a lot of different ideas lately. Any changes to a service are bound to alienate loyal users and create confusion among new users. And the recent spate of ideas, quite honestly, seem poorly thought- out. Here are the three big ones, in my opinion, which are taking Twitter in the wrong direction:

@replies

Twitter started out as a sort of exclusive coffee shop where Evan, Tantek, and their friends could share conversation and gossip. The rest of us picked up on this vibe, and used Twitter for casual conversation in our own communities. Conversation was an indispensible part of the vibe from the very beginning. It’s true that Twitter’s conversation mechanism left much to be desired, especially compared to Friendfeed and Facebook, but people just dealt with it. Third-party apps did their best to fill in the holes, and we all just hoped that Twitter would eventually fix things.

Unfortunately, the conversational utility of Twitter steadily degraded, since it was never really designed for this. Twitter lurched through a couple of bizarrely inexplicable changes to the @replies functionality, and pretty much crushed the spirits of anyone who was hoping for any real improvements. In their blog post attempting to explain the incident, the Twitter reps made it very clear that they considered conversation to be an irrelevant scenario.

Celebrities

Further betraying their bias towards using Twitter as a one-way broadcast mechanism, the Twitter folks saw opportunity in the forays of some early celebrity pioneers like Ashton Kutcher into Twitter. If Ashton could get a million "followers", they reasoned, even more celebrities on Twitter would attract orders of magnitude more users to the service. It wasn’t long before Oprah was pitching Twitter on her show, and the birth of the controversial "Suggested Users page".

Twitter’s design for "suggested users" emphasizes those users who have a very large number of followers, which completely inverts the original spirit of Twitter. Dave Winer has done a great job explaining why this fundamentally alters the nature of Twitter. If you don’t believe him, try having a conversation with @oprah. The @ convention seems pretty superfluous with a woman who has a million followers. Rather than taking advantage of computational segmentation and targeting to select people who are similar to me and my friends, the entire Twittersphere is reduced into one gigantic monoculture, where it is assumed that the same set of celebrities apply to everyone.

In my opinion, it’s no coincidence that usage of Twitter stalled right around the time that Oprah started telling people to "follow" her on Twitter. "Following" a celebrity is a hopelessly old-school media concept: not the sort of thing that energizes the narcissistic web generation.

Retweets

There is, however, no better example of this philosophy shift than the rise of "retweets". On Facebook and Friendfeed, the "likes" functionality occupies an unobtrusive portion of the user interface, like it should. But on Twitter, you can’t really have conversations with people or look at their photos and videos directly in the user interface, so why not use several inches of vertical space to show people retweeting the exact same thing?!

There is nothing wrong with retweeting, to be sure, since every social network needs a way to pass information along between clusters of friends. But the user experience of this feature on Twitter is exactly wrong (FriendFeed got it exactly right). FriendFeed’s design optimizes for unobtrusive information sharing, while Twitter’s design is like what one snarky article recently called the "town crier" beavior in social networks. Retweets on Twitter are like the muezzin sitting up in the minaret with an overpowered megaphone, calling out the adhan so loudly that it echoes and reverberates off all of the buildings until your head spins and you can’t focus on anything else (BTW, "Ramadan Mubarak" to all of our friends starting Ramadan tomorrow).

Rather than seeing this use of Retweets as a problem for the service, though, the folks at Twitter seem to have concluded that it is a competitive edge, and are doubling down. The recently-announced "retweet API" elevates Retweeting from convention to feature. And we are already starting to see the spread of TweetMeme’s "Retweet Button", which counts retweets and replaces the Digg button. I suppose that we’ll eventually use the Retweet button on our own sites in the future, if only for the fact that Jennifer Aniston has a Twitter account but not a Digg account (so how could she ever "digg" one of our stories?). But is that really what Twitter was meant to be? A version of Digg with more celebrities?

In conclusion, I must say that I’m rather disappointed with the recent changes of emphasis at Twitter. Twitter still has a ton of good things going for it, and a lot of potential, so I’m not giving up. But I hope Twitter goes back to their roots in microblogging, community, and revamp the conversation functionality.

Agree?  Disagree?  As always, feel free to share your thoughts in the comments below, or interact with us on twitter!