I agree with Ben Thompson's previous sentiment about Twitter although I take it perhaps slightly further than he would which in my own words is this:

At one point years ago, perhaps for the first time in history, a single company (Twitter) had the opportunity for it's privately owned HTTP API to become a ubiquitous defacto Internet Protocol for a particular type of global communication (the notification message) potentially replacing email. (tweet + privmsg could have threatened email)

If they would have stepped into this integrative role, by keeping the API access open and available as a building block for third party developers then I think this may be precipitated quite naturally.

Just as a small example of what I mean by procotol.. the entire "Internet of things" could likely be running on top of Twitter with the twitter @name serving as the defacto way for your refrigerator to claim it's unique global identity and to route messages to your toaster.

In addition to kitchen appliances Twitter could largely be serving as the messaging backbone for hundreds of the most popular apps and games if it had opted to embrace the Open Web. Sure serving as a messaging backbone for the whole world would have put additional burden on their server infrastructure, and it would have allowed third parties to monetize tweets, but it also widens Twitter's on-boarding funnel dramatically because it locks myriad diverse products, games, and services into their API.

More importantly I think Twitter would have become the defacto Internet Protocol for both notifications and Identity / Reputation. It would have meant that new systems wouldn't have been able to afford to not integrate with Twitter which contrasts greatly with today's situation where none of them can integrate with because of the onerous legal restrictions outlined in the terms.

Instead Twitter chose to lock down their API and focus instead on monetizing what traffic they had already captured. They turned it into an content discovery portal when it could have been a content discovery portal *and* the defacto Internet architecture primitive powering diverse social communities and integrated into just about every network-enabled device on Earth. After all even the TV news networks were embracing both the @name and the #hashtag. But then the executives at Twitter somehow decided to dig a moat around the platform, and then a swamp, and then fill it with alligators I mean lawyers, and now in 2015 Twitter has of all things a growth problem.

I believe that the true hidden potential of the platform lies in Twitter's potential role as the world's ubiquitous identity and reputation broker.. In other words the @name was more valuable than the tweet.

I think that if somehow the iron fist is relaxed so that the tweets flow open and free then the world at large would learn to embrace the @name as their preferred way to establish digital identity & reputation in place of the fragmented email+linkedin+website that people use today.

I believe that in order to achieve this Twitter should optimize for SCALE rather than revenue. Restrictive terms are massive friction for scale because they dramatically limit the number of vectors through which any individual can discover the product and engage with it.