“Twitter’s bad news is a bad business”

The dominant narrative of Twitter is the rise of Twitter, the latest force to displace the mainstream media and roil the world’s information economy. Too bad the real story of the company is one of top-to-bottom incompetence.

I’ll go ahead and say it: I’m going to miss Valleywag.

It was a feature invented at another forgotten startup, spun off into its own venture. The programmer who came up with the idea for Twitter, Jack Dorsey, was named CEO, while Twitter’s better-known backer, Ev Williams, a Webhead who struck it rich by selling Blogger to Google five years ago, dithered about how much he wanted to be involved. […]

With no real hope of making money on its own, Twitter’s best hope is a buyout. But its executives have handled that poorly, too. Dorsey botched talks with Yahoo and then Facebook; he didn’t even tell his own board of directors he was talking to Facebook about a proposed $500 million acquisition. After that, he was fired as CEO and replaced by Williams, but stayed on as chairman, a nominal job which doesn’t require his presence at the Twitter office. One prominent Silicon Valley investor is fuming that Dorsey is still on the payroll at all.

Ooh, that makes sense.