Twitter recently fundamentally changed both their web app client and iPhone app UIs. Many people, including me, don't like the new iPhone app at all. Commentary says they did it to carry Twitter to a new, less tech savvy audience in order to monetize. On first reading it's odd that they so casually swept aside the interests of long standing power users, but I've since concluded that they knowlingly did so as an implicit invitation (implicit in the sense of being just one half of a notch away from explicit) to their third party developer community to build power apps to satisfy the hard core.

Like a product management leap of faith which on the surface looks crazy and ill considered (not to mention impolite), but is actually quite smart. As Steve Jobs said, it's all about focus - choosing what leave out is often just as important as what build in.

I wouldn't regard myself as a power user but I thought the old Twitter iPhone app was perfect and the new one is shit. However, I'm also in the category of user that doesn't follow hashtags or respond to Promoted Tweets and so it's fair to assume that Twitter makes zero dollars from me. In spite of the fact I'd probably pay to have Tweetie back (Tweetie was the iPhone app purchased by Twitter a couple of years ago), but that's just impractical in Twitter's business model and I'm therefore unmonetizable.

Bonus (and totally unconnected) Observation

Some CEOs employ agents to tweet on their behalf to give the impression they're down with the kids. It stands to reason therefore, that the inverse must also be true and that some CEOs are really Twitter agents who employ other people to do their day jobs for them. Different sides of the same coin.