In reality closing-down their API, hindered a lot of innovation that could happen, they missed a lot of devs working for free to create a product on top of the

In reality closing-down their API, hindered a lot of innovation that could happen, they missed a lot of devs working for free to create a product on top of the raw data that twitter is in a sense. (which they could easily acquire) Imo you should keep the core stable until you construct an alternate route, so any new direction should be an extension and not replacement until established (see: not making a Digg v4 etc.). So I'm of the opinion that at the current product monetization is at the edge of starting to damage the product, ad aggression from users will become an issue if they start to hunt for profits that way. There needs to be monetization through another product. When talking about tweets and especially on a scrolling list of tweets that is quite minimal it's tricky. You have to expand it on another product-version. Personally I would attack the inefficiency and problem of scaling (following a lot of users fails exponentially), with some tools that will drive up the quality of experience and increase user activity. Secondly, I would try to embed a patron-like feature in a big way and take a cut from the earnings. As a dev, having a big product idea for twitter's case, their past and current behavior of hindering its API use through walls and dealbreaking rate-limits, will make it really hard to give it a try again.