Twitter Inc. has clearly been going through some tough times but that may be about to change. After a three month long search for a CEO they brought back Jack Dorsey the original founder and CEO. Jack was interim CEO since Dick Costello stepped down in July and was the front runner the whole time.

Whether you think Jack is Twitter’s savior or not, he’s already made bold moves to right the struggling company. These moves hint to the future of Twitter: he launched Moments — a new feature that organizes tweets around given subjects into a story-like experience. He also announced that they are working on a feature to introduce tweets longer than 140 characters. He laid off 336 employees — 8 percent of total company workforce. And he appointed Omid Kordestani to the board as Executive Chairman.

So what does this all mean?

Let’s start with the layoffs. Layoffs are usually considered a sign of weakness and indicate contraction rather than growth. Twitter is an engineering-heavy company and many of those laid off where from product and engineering divisions. While this may mean less raw power to innovate, it may also indicate more focus as a company, and perhaps focus is exactly what Twitter needs.

Enter Kordestani. He is a highly experienced tech executive — previously Chief Business Officer at Google. He has a wealth of experience in online advertising and relationships to leverage.

Yet interestingly it appears that Kordestani doesn’t tweet.

Before the announcement Kordestani tweeted only nine times in five years — and two other board members barely tweet. Kurt Wagner writing for Re/code concludes that it doesn’t matter — Kordestani is exactly the type of person Twitter is trying to reach and get to use the product. While this may be true, it isn’t the whole picture.

Is Twitter in the business of communications or publishing?

Whether it matters or not depends on whether Twitter chooses to grow as a communications or publishing platform. It has been a mix of both — micro publishing and messaging all wrapped up in 140 character bursts. But Twitter generates revenue like a publisher — through its advertising products. And as a publisher, it really doesn’t matter if board members tweet.

The problem is that Twitter’s advertising products haven’t done a good job at driving clicks, and when ad sales teams and the brand using the advertising products rely on metrics like engagement they are at best indicative of progress, and at worst outright misleading.

True story. While I was advising a Fortune 500 client we launched a $500,000 social advertising blitz. A good chunk of this went to Twitter advertising. When it came time to present the progress to company executives, the Twitter account reps who were helping with the effort revealed charts that largely relied on engagement as the leading indicator of how well the campaign was doing. These engagement metrics included mentions, replies, retweets, and clicks.

The problem is that there was no accounting for positive or negative engagement — everything was lumped together as *engagement* and a large portion of this engagement was Twitter users cursing at the brand for aggressively advertising to them. Further, all engagement events are not created equal, yet every engagement event is weighted equally, and they are easily gamed.

It was clear to me that Twitter needed to change the way advertisers can reach and engage with users and the way that success is measured. Now it seems that Twitter may be poised to do just that.

So what could Twitter as a publisher platform look like?

If Twitter chooses to evolve as a publishing platform, it will likely have to transcend the constraints of 140 character tweets and it may do this by introducing additional products that make longer form content — whether it be Moments or something else — more discoverable by users. Perhaps in forms that can populate the web outside of Twitter itself, like an embedded tweet.

Moments is Twitter’s first step. With Moments, Twitter is actively curating tweets around a given subject into a unified experience. Sounds like a publisher. And there is one thing that Twitter has that other publishers don’t. That is a real-time commenting — and conversation — system with established social graphs for each Twitter user built right in.

Imagine what it would look like if you could highlight any phrase in a native article that your favorite journalist published on Twitter, and comment with a tweet that links to the phrase and starts a comment thread that is easily discoverable by those in your social graph.

Imagine if you could easily see, ranked in order of popularity, what articles any cohort of Twitter users are sharing and commenting on — whether it be any subset of people you follow or Robert Scoble’s list of Tech Pundits.

And as a publisher, what if you could publish your articles directly on Twitter and they were syndicated to a Twitter interest-based magazine that users subscribe to, and products like “Moments” made the discovery of that article much more likely by your target audience?

Now I am not saying that any of this will happen or that it will be enough to reinvigorate Twitter. But things are changing fast — look for more, better and richer publishing on Twitter that leverages real time experiences and events.

Whatever shape this takes, Twitter will have to keep it all simple. In the past, Twitter has not been very successful making the product accessible and easy to understand. It has been speculated that his has curbed growth. If Twitter is to evolve as a publishing platform, the experience must be straight forward, easy understand, navigate and use. This may be Twitter’s biggest challenge.

feature image by joelaz via photopin cc