All companies, when filing for an initial public offering, are required to detail potential pitfalls in their future as a warning for investors, and Twitter, which revealed it is going public on Thursday evening, is no different. So what is the company afraid of? And what does that tell users of the service about where the social network is heading?
More embedded media
The most important risk facing Twitter appears on page 23 of the prospectus. "If we are unable to compete effectively for users and advertiser spend," the company writes, "our business and operating results could be harmed."
As Twitter's revenue figures show, the company primarily makes its revenue through advertising. In the six months to June 30, 2013, the company took $221m in ad revenue, with revenue from data licensing, its other major income stream, trailing far behind at $32m.
Anything that harms Twitters ability to compete for advertisers harms its bottom line, and so the company expresses real fear over the possibility another partner might go the way of Instagram and pull its integration with the site:
Following Facebook’s acquisition of Instagram, Facebook disabled Instagram’s photo integration with Twitter such that Instagram photos are no longer viewable within Tweets and users are now re-directed to Instagram to view Instagram photos through a link within a Tweet.
Twitter is clear that the future lies in more integration, not less. What that means for users is a continued push to get companies to implement Twitter Cards, the chunks of code which allows Twitter to show short previews of sites being linked to.
More features
Twitter warns its potential investors that providing "our products and services to our users is costly ", particularly as "we develop and implement new features, products and services that require more infrastructure, such as our mobile video product, Vine".
"New features" isn't a hugely surprising thing for a technology company to promise in its IPO, but for Twitter it is worth making note of.
The site rose to success on a ruthlessly simple product: 140 characters of text delivered to your followers. As time went on, a few improvements were made, such as the introduction of official support for mentions (replies using the @ symbol) in 2008, or the "new style" retweets in 2009. Prior to that, retweeting was limited to manually copying a tweet and adding "RT" at the start.
But in recent years, Twitter has gone from introducing the occasional tweak to adding features which change the user experience on a more fundamental level. The aforementioned Twitter cards were introduced as a "media pane" in 2010 before being expanded to include previews of other websites in 2012. And that same year, apparently as a response to the purchase of Instagram by Facebook, Twitter introduced photo filters for its app.
The purchase of Vine in 2012, originally a standalone video sharing company, remains the biggest move Twitter has made so far into an area which it had previously left to third-parties: the creation of tools to add media to your timeline. The company, it seems, doesn't just want to own the timeline itself. It also intends to own the tools with which users add to their timeline.
More partnerships
But Twitter can't offer all of these features itself. "The availability and development of these applications and content," it writes, "depends on platform partners’ perceptions and analysis of the relative benefits of developing applications and content for our products and services." In other words, Twitter needs to stay at the top of the pile to encourage others to build things for its site.
"In addition, we generate revenue from licensing our historical and real-time data to third parties." It's only 14% of the company's revenue, but that's still not money which Twitter can afford to lose – particularly as it remains loss-making.
But there's one major area where it remains remarkably quiet. When it comes to the site's public API, the set of programming tools with which any developer can write software which works with Twitter, it has just one thing to say. Describing it as a product for "platform partners", Twitter writes:
The Twitter public API allows platform partners to integrate Twitter content and follower relationships into their applications. For example, a platform partner can connect to the Twitter public API in order to collect, filter and integrate real-time content from Twitter into a live television program or a third-party website to integrate Tweets into a sentiment monitoring application to help companies monitor and measure conversation on Twitter about their brand.
When Twitter's API was launched, it was used by developers to write apps which could be used to view the site on the move. In fact, Twitter didn't even have an official app until it bought Tweetie in 2010. But the writing has been on the wall for third-party developers for at least two years, and so their absence from the prospectus can't come as too much surprise.
• Twitter's chief executive Dick Costolo took a pay cut to $14,000 this year.