Once upon a time, Twitter had a simple goal: to build the most useful social platform it could. It did so in large part by watching its users’ behavior and iterating around it, blessing their grassroots innovations with legitimacy. Now, Twitter has a different objective: to be the most used social platform…

Most useful vs. most used sounds like a subtle difference, but it’s not. Becoming the most used platform requires Twitter to be not just an engine for discovering content but a place for consuming that content. That means cutting deals like the one Twitter has with NBC Universal around the Olympics. And that, in turn, means balancing the interests of its users against those of its partners.

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