I have been spending some quality time with Justin Paterno the last few months who is the head of product at Stocktwits who has been driving a lot of upgrades as well as the new Trade App launch coming soon.

Yesterday he revisited the ‘App Constellation Strategy‘ in a post and it is a great read.

As with every company and investment there are so many what if’s and I really like this part of the piece:

Successful network/platform constellations form around the core value unit

For platforms, the core value unit is what is produced and consumed. On Twitter it’s a tweet, on Youtube it’s a video, and on Facebook it’s a status update.

However, it wasn’t always a status update on Facebook, especially in the way we know it now we know it now. Early, it was a profile update, and most notably photo updates. It wasn’t until after News Feed launched that they enabled more free-form status updates, and even longer after that until it began to evolve into news, opinions, videos, etc. Facebook started as a way to upload photos and share with friends. It evolved into a platform with many value units shared — news, pages, chat, apps, activity, posts, etc. Instagram came onto mobile and took o Facebook’s initial core value unit, sharing photos and made it much better. Snapchat also came along and took another key value unit — private chat and did it better as well. They even began to threaten Facebook’s one to many sharing interaction with stories.

In turn, it’s easy to understand the moves that Facebook made over the years, executing on a brilliant acquisition-based constellation strategy around Instagram and WhatsApp coupled with smart investments in the story format and spinning out Messenger. It’s why Facebook, the company, has done so well. It’s also why Facebook, the product, feels so dead and strange these days—it’s core value units are now out on the constellation apps, and thus the participants of the platform. What’s left is Yahoo — a homepage without a solid anchor.

Twitter also seems to have screwed up what could have been potentially a strong constellation strategy that may have put them in a different place today. They acquired both Vine and Periscope, two platforms with very unique core value units than a tweet. Vine, which at the time, was Twitter’s answer for Instagram, had a very rabid user base and allowed people to share short looping videos — it’s own native gif. Periscope, which was competing with Meerkat at the time and gaining traction, allowed people to share live streaming video.

Twitter ended up killing Vine and rolling Periscope in to be a live sharing video feature for Twitter. Meanwhile Meerkat executed a brilliant pivot into Houseparty, which was recently acquired by Epic Games. Additionally the most popular new social app on earth right now, Tik tok, is pretty much a few product iterations of Vine. Twitter could have let both apps continue to iterate and innovate. If focus was a problem, they could have even combined their “video” apps into one, rolling Periscope into Vine and having an app with best in breed live video sharing and looped video sharing. The what if’s are pretty insane once you think about it.