For Twitter CEO, A Turnaround in a Cul-de-sac

Twitter stock is up to over $23 at the time of this writing — but that doesn’t mean the road ahead looks bright for the beleaguered social media giant, even under leadership from celebrated founder Jack Dorsey over the past year. Los Angeles iPhone developers tend to see the rising price as more indication of potential buyouts from the likes of Salesforce or Microsoft than a sign of potential user and revenue growth.

That said, the turnaround as it stands is certainly surprising, and good news for tech investors who feared the worse as the price zoomed towards the single digits last year. The question is: will 2017 be the year that it rebounds, or the year that it finally hits the ground? Either way, the decline of Twitter represents opportunity for iPhone app developers looking to fill the void that is already felt by the decay of the biggest fish in the social media sea.

Datasets release for the last quarter show that Twitter is still losing money at a pretty worrying rate, to the tune of $107 million in Q2 of 2016. (Compared to $137 million in the same quarter of last year, maybe it’s not so bad though.)

In the meantime, UX and UI changes spearheaded by Dorsey have had minimal effect on growth. From changes in the visual presentation of Tweets to character limits tweaks to an algorithmic feed, changes seemed more notable for the ire they rose among diehard users than the benefits they offered new users so far as ease-of-use. Overall, the UX is still a mess, and the road out isn’t clear even for the talented app development team Twitter has maintained throughout the mishaps.