Despite the odd subject, it actually makes sense. I’m a heavy-ish user of twitter. As an average number I tend to plough through about 50 tweets per day (mostly in the evening, too!). This doesn’t make me a power user, but it does put me in the upper percentile of users. As in, I actively use this service everyday to communicate with friends through varying mediums, on iPhone, Mac and via instagram mainly.

I originally joined in early 2008, and then got a new name and started fresh thereafter later in the year, where I started to properly use it and interact with a community of people who are now friends, acquaintances and colleagues.

What’s my point?

Outside of my circle of people I interact with, follow and who follow me, I tend to ignore the outside tworld (see what I did there?). But if you look at employee’s of Twitter, very few, or none, of them are power users. None of them compete with bloggers like Robert Scoble. Employees of other social networks attract more attention and provide more meaningful interactions then twitter employees. This is a problem when you have product development ongoing in the company.

Although, how much product development could there be? I can’t actually think of a new feature brought into twitter in the last year outside of lists, which was never touched afterwards. A new design there might be, but that’s not a new feature that my API-accessed account gets to use in a desktop client.

It feels like twitter grew really fast, which is really good for a company like twitter, but they hired anyone rather than put them through a vetting process. I recently finished a book called Delivering Happiness by Dan Hsuh (LinkExchange, Zappos). He said he turned away from his huge payoff from Microsoft when they bought LinkExchange because (aside from already being a millionaire) the company had a bad taste. There wasn’t an innovation-driven ethos anymore and they hired people to fill gaps in the roster rather then to fill needed roles that could drive change and innovation. This thinking is more important than filling a team of people just to fill those spots. Having programmers is great, but having programmers who can think of new ideas is much, much better… and they’re out there. Especially in the Valley!

So, what’s with the “Jacking off” bit in my subject? Jack Dorsey. He originally conceived of the idea inside a little incubator created with his then-blogger-creating chums Biz Stone and Evan Williams. He thought of what twitter was, why it should exist and justified the need for it enough for them to go and make it happen. He was then kind of removed from the project, which was a good thing in hindsight because he went off to create the mobile payments system Square. Now he’s back as CEO and needs to shake things up to make things happen at twitter.

What first? Heads have to roll, and that’s begun with Jack getting rid of four key product people, including the head of ads. MG Siegler wrote more about it on TC.

Second? Hire new people, move people around internally and drive a focused team to innovate and improve. I mentioned lists being left for dead, which is entirely accurate. Lists was a good idea and should have been expanded on. It was launched with much hoopla and then… well, nothing much after. If they had continuously developed the idea they would have been able to stop one of the main features of Google+, Circles. Keep driving these ideas forward, and then add new ideas. Listen to the community and actually engage and use your own service!

So, lots for twitter to do. And I would be very confident in Jack Dorsey’s abilities. Not only has he managed to do a lot in a short time with other projects, he’s also very good at picking partners. Square is called so and product development came because of conversations he had with people in Apple. Apple is also a key partner for Twitter. A huge boost will come when iOS 5 has twitter as a core communication function. The app is pre-installed to the system and login is a system-wide feature so Twitter could become a very important tool for mobiles – which was the original idea of Twitter.

The boost for Twitter is, even in the wake of Google+, Facebook’s rise & rise to fame and fortune and their changes affecting the community (e.g. locking down the API to avoid hundreds of clone apps as well as buying an official twitter client and tweetdeck) my stream has never slowed down. People still enjoy sharing content and discussing things with them. Addressing spam and cleaning up the trending topics are key items to keep that conversation flowing, but again, I have faith Twitter will grow from strong to huge very quickly.