Medium is beautiful. I discover insightful, staggering, heartbreakingly beautiful pieces on Medium every single day. Medium announced today they're laying off a third of their staff. Why? The company was started by a founder of Twitter. It seems anything the Twitter founders build, or acquire, sparks a vibrant community almost overnight. This is so hard to do, and they pull it off without even trying. They make capturing lightning in a bottle look like something you do at grade school recess. But despite having communities in the nine-figures, Twitter has a pattern of sunsetting what should otherwise be major assets in the company's portfolio. Consider Twitpic. An incredible service started by fans of Twitter who wanted a better way to post pictures and videos in their tweets. Twitter acquired it and shut it down without incorporating most of Twitpic's functionality into Twitter's main platform. Next comes Vine. A platform that sparked a whole new world of celebrity, crammed into six-second videos. Now Vine is shutting down (or being substantially neutered), without any of its functionality being merged into the main Twitter platform. Periscope will be next, unfortunately. The Periscope situation underscores my point. Periscope felt like the future when it first launched. Live-streaming video from my mobile device to anywhere in the world. Amazing. Streams from Aleppo made me feel like I was there. Then Facebook Live ate it, and Twitter's, lunch. Why? Facebook does an incredible job of building functionality into their platform. This keeps their main platform sticky, increases its value, and gives advertisers access to new users in an already healthy monetization pipeline. Twitter builds new features as completely independent platforms with a tiny © Twitter Inc. in the footer. The only obvious relationship these platforms have with Twitter is that they require users to have a Twitter account to sign up. These platforms become a cost center for Twitter, regardless of how strong the communities are. The company can't point any of that user engagement back to what they do know how to monetize: Twitter. Communities cost money. So when the venture money runs dry, they're forced to shut down. UP--- date: It appears Twitter has incorporated Periscope into their main platform, but with a wonky "Powered by Periscope" notice. If I were Jack Dorsey, I would look at the strongest communities in Twitter's portfolio and work to get their functionality incorporated into the base Twitter platform. It would increase stickiness with Twitter (which is how the company is currently measuring "success" (MAUs)), increase its overall value, and expose millions of users to advertisers that were previously off-limits. I get the sense that there's a fear within the company that people won't share live videos on Twitter, but will on Periscope, simply because it's not Twitter. That moving Periscope's functionality to Twitter would just evaporate the community that was there. Facebook Live has proven that fear to be unfounded. And it's better than simply shutting the platform down. founders. It's no surprise then that the disease Twitter suffers from has also been caught by Medium. There's no doubt. These guys know how to make things that people care about. It's an incredibly rare talent, and it's being squandered. Medium is a strong community churning out valuable content every day. But Medium doesn't know what it needs to do to monetize itself. Is it possible to monetize a community without advertising? Maybe, but I think I have a better idea. ## The Cure Twitter, acquire Medium. You want to get into the longer-form content space. Acquire Medium and incorporate its functionality into the Twitter platform as the "long-form Tweet." You'll elevate Twitter's status into a media company of the future with a pulse on breaking news and longer-form feature pieces. Twitter's existing advertising functions will still be available to you, but with the better engagement times that long-form brings. A dude leaves Twitter to start Medium. Twitter flounders, as does Medium. Twitter acquires Medium. Twitter flourishes, as does Medium. There's an irony in there somewhere. Please do it soon. I don't want to have to move all my posts to WordPress.