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Jack in a Box: Can Twitter Be Saved?

35 points by donohoe 11y ago

zensavona 11y ago
I don't think Twitter is going to shut down anytime soon. I do think though that they've overscaled (employee and spending wise) hugely though. Remember kids, cashflow.
danielrakh 11y ago
"I like it, too, but, boy, does it need some rethinking—the visual dissonance between Moments and the Twitter Stream is deeply unsettling." I agree. That's exactly what I aimed to remedy with my redesign: https://medium.com/@danielrakh/redesigning-twitter-moments-f71658bbde68 https://medium.com/@danielrakh/redesigning-twitter-moments-f...
- smacktoward 11y ago
  > 2. Twitter Moments is trying to be everything but Twitter. This is true, and I think it speaks to a deeper problem: nobody at Twitter really seems to understand exactly why the core product was successful, so they're afraid to evolve it out of fear that they'll somehow break the magic spell. When ancillary products like Moments are developed, though, the designers and developers feel freer to be bold, because there's no spell there to break. So when those products get bolted on to the side of the main product, they feel exactly like that -- bolted on. Facebook has been much more fearless about changing their core product as their userbase has grown and changed -- remember when the News Feed was a controversial new thing? -- and as a result they can give their products a unified feeling that Twitter can't.
  - brk 11y ago
    nobody at Twitter really has a feel for exactly why the core product was successful My 2 cents... When twitter launched, Facebook was still closed to the general public, personal "blogs" were popular but somewhat out of reach of the general public (setup complexity), and a lot of people realized that while they had things to say, those things weren't enough to fill a blog. Twitter allowed people to converse publicly, put micro-blog style opinions out, and do it without needing to register any domains or customize a page (MySpace). IMO, twitter primarily filled a time-sensitive gap that has now mostly been overtaken by aspects of Facebook, Linkedin, etc. Much of Twitter is kind of paparazzi-like, and if a company came along that really leveraged the celebrity and sports icon base Twitter would fade away to a bunch of "SEO and Marketing Experts" all tweeting pre-scheduled thinly-veiled promos at each other.
    - danielrakh 11y ago
      That might have been the spark that lit the fire but I believe that people who are NOT celebrities that tweet actively, do it to reach a broader audience and engage in conversation with others in their vertical. This is in stark contrast to the network you would have in Facebook which is much more intimate. Twitter is the internets water-cooler conversation. Facebook is the conversation you have at home with your family and friends.
    - gaius 11y ago
      Remember Twitters original competition, or so they thought, was LiveJournal.
  - danielrakh 11y ago
    That's a great point. It's almost as if they're trying something new for the sake of trying something new rather than taking the risk to make the bold change where it could actually matter: their core product.
  - sparkzilla 11y ago
    Moments fails because is misunderstands that Twitter is a real-time network and that its users see little value in curation. Curation is much more than just throwing a title onto some semi-random tweets and calling it a product. My two cents: http://newslines.org/blog/a-momentary-lapse-of-reason/ http://newslines.org/blog/a-momentary-lapse-of-reason/ However, to say that Facebook is fearless about innovation is off base. They have bolted on so many parts to the core social network that it has become a Frankenstein's monster. Whatever new idea comes along every six months they bolt something new on, until the whole thing is just a big mess of competing ideas. What is needed is a rework of the social network at its core.
    - smacktoward 11y ago
      > to say that Facebook is fearless about innovation is off base I didn't say that they were fearless, only that they were more fearless than Twitter. Which I'll admit is not exactly a high bar to clear.
curiousjorge 11y ago
nope
outofcuriosity 11y ago
"...there have been multiple other apps that required me to use my Facebook credentials to log in. Facebook, it seems, is now core to the mobile Web experience." Most social networks provide very little that a blog and an email address don't, and for that modicum we pay with our privacy. Personally, I don't think the convenience of OAuth is worth what the networks earn from selling my data. I wonder what'll happen to their market share when smartphone OS developers start including authentication layers in their kernels.
- mmanfrin 11y ago
  Most social networks provide very little that a blog and an email address don't Except, of course, the core reason social networks are: the baked-in audience of all your friends and family who are pushed all of your updates.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
jph 11y ago
Twitter could make a lot of people happy by re-opening the API access (e.g. third party apps) and adding access control (e.g. teams and channels). Twitter has so much untapped potential, a bit of which you can see in the new Moments. For comparison, Facebook is doing a fantastic job IMHO at highlighting stories, groups, events, and friends that I want to see.
- lotso 11y ago
  > Twitter could make a lot of people happy by re-opening the API access (e.g. third party apps) and adding access control (e.g. teams and channels). Wouldn't this have a huge impact on their ability to monetize the twitter stream with ads and richer content? Of course this is developer friendly, but does it help them make real money?
  - icebraining 11y ago
    They can make showing their ads a condition for API access.
  - dasil003 11y ago
    Twitter has been ruined by the tech bull market. Their valuation went too high too fast, and now they are constrained by Wall Street's lack of imagination and being measured by Facebook's chosen KPI. Does a monthly active user of Facebook equal one on Twitter? Public conversation happens on Twitter—it is where celebrities and intellectuals put ideas into the public sphere. When you watch television news you constantly see tweets mentioned, when have you ever once seen a Facebook post? Twitter is like the Beat Generation, and Facebook is like a scrapbooking club. Even if Facebook wanted to make themselves relevant for public discourse (which they don't because Wall Street doesn't have a metric for that), it is incompatible with their current rent-seeking post promotion model and feed tax. Meanwhile, no one, even within Twitter, can quite define what it is. Wall Street hates that, but what it really means is that there is still untapped potential there. Last I checked Twitter was 1/5th the size of Facebook. It's a bloody travesty that being 20% the size of the biggest social network ever is not considered viable, especially when it has so much unexplored potential. Twitter would have fared much better in a bear market where they managed costs, and let the API flourish. Who knows what apps could have come out in 2015, 2020, 2025 if the fucking bankers hadn't gotten their mitts all up in the oven before the baking was done.
TazeTSchnitzel 11y ago
Twitter isn't developer-friendly? Hmm, perhaps not to client developers. But the wide variety of (non-spam) Twitter bots suggests they are quite friendly.
- smacktoward 11y ago
  Twitter has no problems with developers who want to write data into their system. It's developers who want to read data out of it they needed to kill, because the only way to make an ad-based model work was to ensure that only they could determine where people see content from Twitter. In other words, they turned it into a Roach Motel: data checks in, but it doesn't check out. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jKhGHxO-woc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jKhGHxO-woc
  - TazeTSchnitzel 11y ago
    Ah yes, I'm familiar with that. Not sure why it didn't come to mind when I was thinking about it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lrfhf1Gv4Tw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lrfhf1Gv4Tw
lalos 11y ago
could Twitter theoretically be a public benefit corporation? I would argue that they provide enough value to society yet they are having issues with pressure from the market
- riffic 11y ago
  Twitter is not a public utility and you're mistaken if you believe a centralized service should function as one. I'd rather see a distributed model like SMTP, where organizations would run their own twitter-like service.
throwitupbirdie 11y ago
You know how people claim Bin Laden won the war on terror by making us give up civil liberties and get into multiple useless wars that cost trillions of dollars? Facebook won the war on Twitter by making ludicrously large offers through proxy bidders on all of the well-established twitter clients. Twitter reacted by squelching third-party clients. Twitter has never known how to innovate, but they used to be open enough to let "the crowd" do that for them. Now?
- dewitt 11y ago
  > Facebook won the war on Twitter by making ludicrously large offers through proxy bidders on all of the well-established twitter clients. Citation needed.
n0us 11y ago
I've never been able to understand whether twitter is a service for me to talk back and forth with other people or if I am supposed to just follow famous people. I also wish there was a way to see "whats going on in the world right now" that was more intuitive than trends where I feel as if you need pre-existing inside knowledge to understand why something is trending. Moments is perhaps a step in the right direction but I don't feel like it's exactly what I'm looking for. I would also be more inclined to use it if I could include a link without having to shorten the URL, aka, let users include a link or photo without counting against 140 characters and also don't make @mentions count against the count. Or retweet titles for that matter. So it would be link + mentions + retweet text + (insert your text here 140 characters or less) It's just too difficult to say anything real and by the time I've messed around with shortening sentences and deleting punctuation to make it fit I'm pissed off and don't end up sending the tweet. People have said all of these things before and they seem to have no interest in changing so I don't know, it might be too late for me to take a real interest in using Twitter seriously.
- sparkzilla 11y ago
  The 140 characters forces concise communication. It suits people who like to read and write witty one-liners and those who like to share URLs. It's fast to read. Change the limit and you will also change the site's core appeal to many.
  - onedev 11y ago
    I could use like 5 more characters though :)
    - smacktoward 11y ago
      I once suggested that they should just start charging for extra characters. Like, charge a penny per character, or sell a block of 100 to be used across as many tweets as you want for 90 cents. The marginal cost to them of shipping 141 characters instead of 140 is so small as to be practically nonexistent, so it'd be more or less pure profit. Would anyone actually buy them? I think maybe they would, as long as they were priced low enough to be impulse-buyable. For the power users who live on Twitter, it could easily be worth the time it would save them over constantly having to edit their posts to get them under the 140 character limit. It could be to Twitter what in-app purchases are to "free-to-play" games like Candy Crush -- a way to skip out of a grind.
hugh4 11y ago
Sure. Livejournal is still going strong somewhere, after all. Most people will eventually move on to the next thing, though, and the thing after that. Live by the network effect, die by the network effect.

35 points by donohoe 11y ago

I don't think Twitter is going to shut down anytime soon. I do think though that they've overscaled (employee and spending wise) hugely though. Remember kids, cashflow.

danielrakh 11y ago

"I like it, too, but, boy, does it need some rethinking—the visual dissonance between Moments and the Twitter Stream is deeply unsettling." I agree. That's exactly what I aimed to remedy with my redesign: https://medium.com/@danielrakh/redesigning-twitter-moments-f71658bbde68 https://medium.com/@danielrakh/redesigning-twitter-moments-f...

smacktoward 11y ago
> 2. Twitter Moments is trying to be everything but Twitter. This is true, and I think it speaks to a deeper problem: nobody at Twitter really seems to understand exactly why the core product was successful, so they're afraid to evolve it out of fear that they'll somehow break the magic spell. When ancillary products like Moments are developed, though, the designers and developers feel freer to be bold, because there's no spell there to break. So when those products get bolted on to the side of the main product, they feel exactly like that -- bolted on. Facebook has been much more fearless about changing their core product as their userbase has grown and changed -- remember when the News Feed was a controversial new thing? -- and as a result they can give their products a unified feeling that Twitter can't.
- brk 11y ago
  nobody at Twitter really has a feel for exactly why the core product was successful My 2 cents... When twitter launched, Facebook was still closed to the general public, personal "blogs" were popular but somewhat out of reach of the general public (setup complexity), and a lot of people realized that while they had things to say, those things weren't enough to fill a blog. Twitter allowed people to converse publicly, put micro-blog style opinions out, and do it without needing to register any domains or customize a page (MySpace). IMO, twitter primarily filled a time-sensitive gap that has now mostly been overtaken by aspects of Facebook, Linkedin, etc. Much of Twitter is kind of paparazzi-like, and if a company came along that really leveraged the celebrity and sports icon base Twitter would fade away to a bunch of "SEO and Marketing Experts" all tweeting pre-scheduled thinly-veiled promos at each other.
  - danielrakh 11y ago
    That might have been the spark that lit the fire but I believe that people who are NOT celebrities that tweet actively, do it to reach a broader audience and engage in conversation with others in their vertical. This is in stark contrast to the network you would have in Facebook which is much more intimate. Twitter is the internets water-cooler conversation. Facebook is the conversation you have at home with your family and friends.
  - gaius 11y ago
    Remember Twitters original competition, or so they thought, was LiveJournal.
- danielrakh 11y ago
  That's a great point. It's almost as if they're trying something new for the sake of trying something new rather than taking the risk to make the bold change where it could actually matter: their core product.
- sparkzilla 11y ago
  Moments fails because is misunderstands that Twitter is a real-time network and that its users see little value in curation. Curation is much more than just throwing a title onto some semi-random tweets and calling it a product. My two cents: http://newslines.org/blog/a-momentary-lapse-of-reason/ http://newslines.org/blog/a-momentary-lapse-of-reason/ However, to say that Facebook is fearless about innovation is off base. They have bolted on so many parts to the core social network that it has become a Frankenstein's monster. Whatever new idea comes along every six months they bolt something new on, until the whole thing is just a big mess of competing ideas. What is needed is a rework of the social network at its core.
  - smacktoward 11y ago
    > to say that Facebook is fearless about innovation is off base I didn't say that they were fearless, only that they were more fearless than Twitter. Which I'll admit is not exactly a high bar to clear.

curiousjorge 11y ago

nope

outofcuriosity 11y ago

"...there have been multiple other apps that required me to use my Facebook credentials to log in. Facebook, it seems, is now core to the mobile Web experience." Most social networks provide very little that a blog and an email address don't, and for that modicum we pay with our privacy. Personally, I don't think the convenience of OAuth is worth what the networks earn from selling my data. I wonder what'll happen to their market share when smartphone OS developers start including authentication layers in their kernels.

mmanfrin 11y ago
Most social networks provide very little that a blog and an email address don't Except, of course, the core reason social networks are: the baked-in audience of all your friends and family who are pushed all of your updates.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]

jph 11y ago

Twitter could make a lot of people happy by re-opening the API access (e.g. third party apps) and adding access control (e.g. teams and channels). Twitter has so much untapped potential, a bit of which you can see in the new Moments. For comparison, Facebook is doing a fantastic job IMHO at highlighting stories, groups, events, and friends that I want to see.

lotso 11y ago
> Twitter could make a lot of people happy by re-opening the API access (e.g. third party apps) and adding access control (e.g. teams and channels). Wouldn't this have a huge impact on their ability to monetize the twitter stream with ads and richer content? Of course this is developer friendly, but does it help them make real money?
- icebraining 11y ago
  They can make showing their ads a condition for API access.
- dasil003 11y ago
  Twitter has been ruined by the tech bull market. Their valuation went too high too fast, and now they are constrained by Wall Street's lack of imagination and being measured by Facebook's chosen KPI. Does a monthly active user of Facebook equal one on Twitter? Public conversation happens on Twitter—it is where celebrities and intellectuals put ideas into the public sphere. When you watch television news you constantly see tweets mentioned, when have you ever once seen a Facebook post? Twitter is like the Beat Generation, and Facebook is like a scrapbooking club. Even if Facebook wanted to make themselves relevant for public discourse (which they don't because Wall Street doesn't have a metric for that), it is incompatible with their current rent-seeking post promotion model and feed tax. Meanwhile, no one, even within Twitter, can quite define what it is. Wall Street hates that, but what it really means is that there is still untapped potential there. Last I checked Twitter was 1/5th the size of Facebook. It's a bloody travesty that being 20% the size of the biggest social network ever is not considered viable, especially when it has so much unexplored potential. Twitter would have fared much better in a bear market where they managed costs, and let the API flourish. Who knows what apps could have come out in 2015, 2020, 2025 if the fucking bankers hadn't gotten their mitts all up in the oven before the baking was done.

TazeTSchnitzel 11y ago

Twitter isn't developer-friendly? Hmm, perhaps not to client developers. But the wide variety of (non-spam) Twitter bots suggests they are quite friendly.

smacktoward 11y ago
Twitter has no problems with developers who want to write data into their system. It's developers who want to read data out of it they needed to kill, because the only way to make an ad-based model work was to ensure that only they could determine where people see content from Twitter. In other words, they turned it into a Roach Motel: data checks in, but it doesn't check out. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jKhGHxO-woc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jKhGHxO-woc
- TazeTSchnitzel 11y ago
  Ah yes, I'm familiar with that. Not sure why it didn't come to mind when I was thinking about it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lrfhf1Gv4Tw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lrfhf1Gv4Tw

lalos 11y ago

could Twitter theoretically be a public benefit corporation? I would argue that they provide enough value to society yet they are having issues with pressure from the market

riffic 11y ago
Twitter is not a public utility and you're mistaken if you believe a centralized service should function as one. I'd rather see a distributed model like SMTP, where organizations would run their own twitter-like service.

throwitupbirdie 11y ago

You know how people claim Bin Laden won the war on terror by making us give up civil liberties and get into multiple useless wars that cost trillions of dollars? Facebook won the war on Twitter by making ludicrously large offers through proxy bidders on all of the well-established twitter clients. Twitter reacted by squelching third-party clients. Twitter has never known how to innovate, but they used to be open enough to let "the crowd" do that for them. Now?

dewitt 11y ago
> Facebook won the war on Twitter by making ludicrously large offers through proxy bidders on all of the well-established twitter clients. Citation needed.

n0us 11y ago

I've never been able to understand whether twitter is a service for me to talk back and forth with other people or if I am supposed to just follow famous people. I also wish there was a way to see "whats going on in the world right now" that was more intuitive than trends where I feel as if you need pre-existing inside knowledge to understand why something is trending. Moments is perhaps a step in the right direction but I don't feel like it's exactly what I'm looking for. I would also be more inclined to use it if I could include a link without having to shorten the URL, aka, let users include a link or photo without counting against 140 characters and also don't make @mentions count against the count. Or retweet titles for that matter. So it would be link + mentions + retweet text + (insert your text here 140 characters or less) It's just too difficult to say anything real and by the time I've messed around with shortening sentences and deleting punctuation to make it fit I'm pissed off and don't end up sending the tweet. People have said all of these things before and they seem to have no interest in changing so I don't know, it might be too late for me to take a real interest in using Twitter seriously.

sparkzilla 11y ago
The 140 characters forces concise communication. It suits people who like to read and write witty one-liners and those who like to share URLs. It's fast to read. Change the limit and you will also change the site's core appeal to many.
- onedev 11y ago
  I could use like 5 more characters though :)
  - smacktoward 11y ago
    I once suggested that they should just start charging for extra characters. Like, charge a penny per character, or sell a block of 100 to be used across as many tweets as you want for 90 cents. The marginal cost to them of shipping 141 characters instead of 140 is so small as to be practically nonexistent, so it'd be more or less pure profit. Would anyone actually buy them? I think maybe they would, as long as they were priced low enough to be impulse-buyable. For the power users who live on Twitter, it could easily be worth the time it would save them over constantly having to edit their posts to get them under the 140 character limit. It could be to Twitter what in-app purchases are to "free-to-play" games like Candy Crush -- a way to skip out of a grind.

hugh4 11y ago

Sure. Livejournal is still going strong somewhere, after all. Most people will eventually move on to the next thing, though, and the thing after that. Live by the network effect, die by the network effect.