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That's part of it. Another is a lack of good curation features, as Chris Sacca has written about (http://lowercasecapital.com/2015/06/03/what-twitter-can-be-2/
by digisth 11y ago
That's part of it. Another is a lack of good curation features, as Chris Sacca has written about (http://lowercasecapital.com/2015/06/03/what-twitter-can-be-2/ http://lowercasecapital.com/2015/06/03/what-twitter-can-be-2...)
I also thought about this when I started building Testimote. A lot of interesting things are being said (positive things about companies in my case), and are drowning out there in the great torrent coming from the firehose. I think there's room for both Twitter and outside companies to continue to build out curation ideas around this, as the data set is quite rich (and Twitter - at least recently - has been fairly generous with their basic APIs with things like rate limits [though I think lower cost plans would be fantastic for higher rate limits, rather than big money for the full hose].)
A combination of better curation and rebuilt developer relations could really help - maybe not user growth, per se, but certainly with service usage. What about web sites and mobile apps giving people a way to give feedback to the company (something as simple as a Tweet box that says "give instant public feedback") that simply tweets out the message using their account? People would start using Twitter without doing anything more than filling in a form and supplying an email address (for first-time users.) There's a lot of untapped potential around this. I think it also helps to think of Twitter as a giant, sometimes overlapping set of IRC channels and DMs, but with the ability to tap into it all. Like with IRC bots that would catch stuff, and put it in a database. Interesting conversations happening, not much being done with it. Twitter could encourage people to do more with it from the outside, and help everyone, including themselves.
It still has tons of potential if cards are played right.
- walterbell 11y agoTwitter blocked Flattr from providing micropayments based on favoriting, then failed to fill that gap in the market. There are so many gaps which could have been filled by 3rd-party developers, but Twitter's API posture scared away investors from building on their API.
- digisth 11y agoHopefully, they'll reconsider some of those policies now. We know the data (including certain event data, like favoriting, like you say) is probably their most valuable asset, but opening the valve on it a bit more would be in everyone's interest, I think.
- hkmurakami 11y agoWhat can they do to regain the lost trust though, even if they do open the gates to the city again?
- digisth 11y agoSome ideas: make public commitments to better developer-related policies that they promise to not renege on, outreach, reopen formerly closed APIs, lower-cost API plans so that incentives with small and medium-sized developers/companies are better aligned (developers pay something so Twitter doesn't feel like all value is being sucked out of it for free, less likely to shut things down.)
- halcy 11y agoI sometimes wonder if there is a large disconnect between two types of twitter users - those that use it as a sort of "news-gathering" medium, and those that use it as a conversation medium. Twitter, as a company, seems to assume that the former is the default. I don't know if the majority of their users are actually like that. The vast majority of my tweets is replies to other people, and for most people I know it is the same, but of course, self-selection would do that. The analogy as twitter being unrolled IRC is, for me, definitely how I've been thinking of it for years.