Twitter has made two recent moves in the past week toward clarifying itself to the public:

• Twitter 101 for Business 
• New Twitter Home Page with Trending Topics 

Reading between the lines, these moves are on a macro level, and it’s confusing to me how they can be of practical benefit to Twitter currently.  They do address a fundamental complaint:  novice users don’t know how to use Twitter.  

However, Twitter management has grander plans to be the “pulse of the planet”, as we saw when TechCrunch released their internal strategy notes from this month’s hacking of internal Twitter management Gmail accounts.  

We don’t need Twitter to become the PerezHilton of news.  That would lead to a web business which is too shallow, and easily replicated.  To be the “pulse of the planet”, Twitter needs to go deeper.  $1b+ businesses are built on large customer bases, high value propositions and expert users.

Let’s look at the valuation that Twitter is trying to achieve.  Twitter is probably currently valuing itself at $1b-2b.  Based on the numbers from OpenTable’s recent IPO, this valuation implies a $100-200m revenue stream, approximately a 10x revenue market cap.   

It’s fine to help out the new Twitter users, great, but executing a strategy solely based around gathering new users, and giving them a 101 course, should not be the face they are putting on to the Twitterverse.  

In a commercial sense, Twitter management is acting counterintuitively to its ultimate bread and butter businesses which would certainly be pillared on the following:  Ads and Business Services.  

Catering to these markets can more directly bring them to their desired $200m revenue stream in a more timely fashion.  Time is of the essence, as the public may tire of Twitter in a year or two while they build these revenue channels, as could Google launch a successful service which sucks their content into an advertising-enabled platform.

Twitter’s recent moves play to two audiences:  Fortune 500 and  consumers.  They are missing the boat on growing the most opportunistic market: small to medium-sized businesses.  These are the businesses that benefit most from a Twitter presence.    This strategy more closely parallels tech companies that have been successful in CPC and SaaS markets and the customers that they enable.  Look at Google (web-based advertising), Apple (small/medium business hardware and consumer electronics), Microsoft (business software), SalesForce (business sales SaaS), and OpenTable (restaurant SaaS). 

Businesses need to have reach on Twitter.  They need to use marketing tools to grow large followings.  Otherwise, these potential advertisers and service marketers won’t care about Twitter as a market that generates customers.  Twitter’s blanket limiting of growth of streams and the continued inability to verify accounts for a fee make it extremely difficult for a business to use Twitter as a commercial marketing tool.   Twitter’s nonexistent staff for customer support for businesses (except Fortune 500 and celebrities) is hindering the growth in these less obvious, but vast markets.

The “trending topics” on it’s home page just dumbs down the content on Twitter to a few items that are in the news.  To succeed (e.g. get acquired or IPO with a $1b+ valuation), Twitter needs to be suggesting to users who land on it’s home page that it’s reach goes far beyond #iranelection and @aplusk.  

Google has primarily used a blank home page (well, until 5 minutes ago) — why?  this implies vastness, the ability to search for anything.   It implies the whole web.  But it’s search still misses the social real-time internet, a new vastness created from Twitter, Facebook, social networks and blogs.

Twitter’s home page needs to begin to imply its future — the whole real-time web.  That includes not just hot topics in the media.  It goes deep — what’s are doctors talking about in cancer research?  where are the sample sales in LA and New York today?  which schools are closed this morning due to Swine Flu in my zip code?  what is everyone saying about @fredwilson’s speech at the SXSW conference?   How can I find Giants tickets now?

It’s not an easy user experience/taxonomy/folksonomy to build, but the value that’s created from the deep real-time web will far outreach the mainstream media trending topics of latest news on Twitter’s home page.  The web of the Fortune 500 and celebridom is just one slice of the juicy real-time pie.   As for the rest of Twitter’s potential, tapping into Google, Apple, SalesForce sorts of customers is vital.  It’s the difference between a company worth $500m and $5b, perhaps even more.