Twitter set out to build a virtual town square bustling with billions of people. But it's starting to look more like a novelty stand as the masses flock to other services that strike a more personal chord.
The San Francisco company showed no user growth at all in a fourth-quarter report released Thursday, the clearest signal yet that the one-time trendsetter is struggling to remain relevant. That leaves it with 320 million monthly users — roughly one-fifth the size of Facebook.
CEO Jack Dorsey is working hard to reconfigure the decade-old service. That's trickier than it sounds, since he also needs to avoid alienating a core of devoted users who depend on it to tweet their thoughts and track issues that matter to them.
Dorsey took a step in that direction Wednesday, announcing plans to tweak Twitter's timeline to highlight tweets that the service will appeal the most to each user, instead of only presenting them in reverse chronological order. He also has hinted that Twitter may lift its long-standing 140-character limit on the length of each tweet.