With Elon Musk joining the board of Twitter, now is a good time to consider all the things Twitter should be doing, that it has never done. There are lots of obvious features (edit tweets, longer form content, better user controls, better onboarding, better spam filtering, business account support and integrated CRM and CS, etc) that were being debated within Twitter even when I was a VP at Twitter 10 years ago!
So instead of focusing on all those things, I thought it would be interesting to think about moving Twitter from the web 2 into a web 2/3 hybrid. This could open up significant user benefit, as well as monetization potential for Twitter. If a Twitter buy-out were to ever occur, these might be interesting mechanisms to increase the value of the company substantially.
Potential parts of crypto Twitter [1]:
NFTs.
This is an obvious one - people on Twitter should be able to mint and distribute NFTs via Twitter. Imagine OpenSea as a deep Twitter integration. As you purchase an NFT on the platform you could be prompted to swap this in for your profile image.
Distribution of NFTs could occur via the platform with for example content creators providing priority access to their followers.
Tokens.
Twitter could do "Bitclout the right way". For example, each person could have tokens issues for them that could be purchased, distributed, and used for a variety of in app use cases including purchasing of NFTs (see above) or participating in some future on platform revenue generated by that individual.
Token or NFT ownership could be used to allow entry into specific entry or interest groups, a la Farcaster. This could be external token buys (e.g. buy UNI to get into a Uniswap specific group) or internal (buy Billie Eilish tokens or NFT to get into her special community or fan group).
Crypto Identity and Wallet.
Each user could have a wallet and related identity auto-generated as part of a Twitter account. This identity could be used in interesting cross platform ways ("cryptoauth with Twitter") around the web. The wallet could be used to hold crypto assets (including tokens from the platform and NFTs) as well as be used for payments using Twitter as a service.
Pseudonym bridges. See e.g this tweet. That might be an approach to blend identity/credibility with the ability to tweet and speak more freely.
DAO
Why not set up a DAO to control a Twitter board seat? The DAO could be part of fundraising to do a Twitter buy out, or just to add an interesting twist to governance. The DAO could be constrained in terms of who can be nominated for the board seat (e.g. would need specific experiences or credentials so a shiba inu isn't elected to the board). This experiment in governance could also have the option for Twitter (or another party) to buy out and retire the DAO, or the DAO can be redeemed, if this board mechanism creates too many issues in the long run.
Lots of Other Stuff
There are lots of deeper integrations of web3 and crypto that could occur including some gaming uses cases, eventually rebuilding the product on web3 rails etc. However, the above are some of the obvious/easiest ones to implement...
NOTES
[1] Dan Romero of Farcaster, of course, thought about this a while ago!
Thanks to Matt Huang for quick comments on this post.
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