As usual, Fred McClimans got me to thinking with this blog post in a tweet: It's my basic operating premise that most businesses don't know what business they're in. Theodore Levitt expressed this sentiment well in his iconic Harvard Business Review paper "Marketing Myopia." So, a while back I wrote that RIM's major challenge was in not understanding what business they were in. I think the same applies to Twitter. The recent blog post by Twitter about their API and the decision by LinkedIn to discontinue their cross-posting relationship show a conflict within how Twitter views how they've grown and how they will continue to grow and generate revenue. Let's also consider exactly who are Twitter's users. To a large extent I'm not a Twitter user. I have a Twitter account, but the bulk of my interactions with Twitter are through 3rd party applications like Hootsuite and Bufferapp. There is a healthy ecosystem of third party apps