Twitter's Facebook fixation could be sending the company into crisis

Former Twitter executive says company's 'fatal posture' is futile obsession with matching competitor, as growth stalls and stock remains at bottom of a cliff

Twitter is in trouble. With user growth stalled, staff fleeing the company by the hundreds, and the company's stock still at the bottom of the cliff it fell from in April, sources say the company's futile obsession with matching its biggest competitor for scale is costing it dearly. And it still doesn't have a permanent CEO.

"Honestly, I think part of the fundamental issue is their relentless fixation on how they compare to Facebook, and I think that's in some ways a fatal posture," one former Twitter executive told the Guardian. "I mean, no one will say on the record 'We compare ourselves relentlessly to Facebook,' because that's a losing position, but of course they do."