"Twitter boasts 200 million users and 350 billion tweets per day, and it's a ubiquitous reference on mainstream TV. Visit Twitter today, and it's a hive of frenetic activity. Millions of people rely on the service for news, commentary, blog updates and social interaction. Twitter is about to close an $800 million funding round, which values the company at about $8 billion.

Suddenly, however, the service has been rendered obsolete by Google's new Google+ service, and also by the company's failure to capitalize on its five-year window of opportunity to innovate its way to indispensability.

It's only a matter of time before Twitter becomes a ghost town. Here's why."