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Fourth reason: Twitters product, while useful to news junkies and journalists who report on it, is actually inferior to the average person who simply wants to i

by stirlo 11y ago

Fourth reason: Twitters product, while useful to news junkies and journalists who report on it, is actually inferior to the average person who simply wants to interact with their friends, aka Facebook.

BonsaiDen 11y ago
Most of my friends actually use it as a async, direct and realtime communications channel, pretty much like Whatsapp, just with more "social integration" (read: the whole internet). They don't use Facebook because its algorithmic "timeline" isn't realtime in any sense of the word and they consider themselves more than capable enough to decide on their own what's worth their time or not, they don't want to be fed things / advertisments somebody else wants them to see. They'll probably all switch to the next best thing available once Twitter's rumoured algorithmic timeline is to be introduced. Personally, I left the whole Twittersphere way back when the alienated their third party devs, for me that was more than enough indication of the way they were heading. Nowadays they have nobody left who could actually come up with the Next Big Thing (tm) for Twitter, because all of their engineers are mostlikely busy trying to figure out how to commercialize the platform in the shortest amount of time in order to satisfy their shareholders.
- varjag 11y ago
  > ..they don't want to be fed things / advertisments somebody else wants them to see. Good that they use AdBlock then, cause Twitter puts ads in your feed.
  - interpol_p 11y ago
    Not in most third party clients (e.g., Tweetbot for OS X). I've hardly used the web site for Twitter and don't really like it. I can't imagine the service without a good native client.
  - BonsaiDen 11y ago
    Yes, they use AdBlock, but there's still a difference here, right now they're seeing the tweets of their peers in-order, with ads intermixed - which makes the ads trivial to filter out (bad for twitter, good for my friends). In the future they might see whatever Twitter thinks is important to them, which might still be ads, but in the form of other peoples / companies tweets which just "happen" to end up in their "timelines". Now, of course they can start blocking just about every company/user they don't care / like on twitter, but the effort might not be worth the gains at some point. And who knows, maybe you won't event be able to block some things from their algorithmic timeline, because that might defeat their monetization goals. And yes, I realize that I might be reading a lot into Twitter's actions at the moment, but given how they treated their platform in the past year(s), all I'm seeing is that they want monetize it at all costs.
facepalm 11y ago
Who says that has to be the use case of Twitter? HN is not very useful for interacting with friends, but it seems to do fine.
hughw 11y ago
Twitter is not a great way to interact with your real friends. It's best at connecting perfect strangers with shared interests. You cultivate and refine your followees until, any time you look at your feed, it's bound to be filled with pithy and relevant observations, some of which may inspire you to tweet your own bons mots.
fernandotakai 11y ago
that's interesting -- most of my friends right now are people i met through twitter ~7 years ago. i even met my wife through it! i quite like twitter more than facebook because it's simple to use, it has really good desktop (even linux has corebird, which is quite good) and mobile clients and the asymmetric part of friendships.
adevine 11y ago
Exactly! When I see all the hand wringing around twitter, I'm surprised how rarely it's mentioned that the natural market size for twitter is just much smaller than Facebook's. My theory is that there is basically a personality divide, probably along the introvert/extravert divide, among those who like twitter, and those who don't. Thus, those who like and use twitter frequently blame all its problems on technical details, because they can't grasp that those who don't FUNDAMENTALLY have an aversion to the push model of 140 char limited thoughts. I look at twitter and think "Random short distractions are things I'm actively trying to remove from my life."
tomjen3 11y ago
Yes, because Twitter is not meant to be a friends only space. Its tapping into the neo-cortex of the hivemind, in real-time. Seriously I get so tired of people who don't use Twitter and can't understand why anyone else would: the product isn't meant for you.

by stirlo 11y ago

BonsaiDen 11y ago

Most of my friends actually use it as a async, direct and realtime communications channel, pretty much like Whatsapp, just with more "social integration" (read: the whole internet). They don't use Facebook because its algorithmic "timeline" isn't realtime in any sense of the word and they consider themselves more than capable enough to decide on their own what's worth their time or not, they don't want to be fed things / advertisments somebody else wants them to see. They'll probably all switch to the next best thing available once Twitter's rumoured algorithmic timeline is to be introduced. Personally, I left the whole Twittersphere way back when the alienated their third party devs, for me that was more than enough indication of the way they were heading. Nowadays they have nobody left who could actually come up with the Next Big Thing (tm) for Twitter, because all of their engineers are mostlikely busy trying to figure out how to commercialize the platform in the shortest amount of time in order to satisfy their shareholders.

varjag 11y ago
> ..they don't want to be fed things / advertisments somebody else wants them to see. Good that they use AdBlock then, cause Twitter puts ads in your feed.
- interpol_p 11y ago
  Not in most third party clients (e.g., Tweetbot for OS X). I've hardly used the web site for Twitter and don't really like it. I can't imagine the service without a good native client.
- BonsaiDen 11y ago
  Yes, they use AdBlock, but there's still a difference here, right now they're seeing the tweets of their peers in-order, with ads intermixed - which makes the ads trivial to filter out (bad for twitter, good for my friends). In the future they might see whatever Twitter thinks is important to them, which might still be ads, but in the form of other peoples / companies tweets which just "happen" to end up in their "timelines". Now, of course they can start blocking just about every company/user they don't care / like on twitter, but the effort might not be worth the gains at some point. And who knows, maybe you won't event be able to block some things from their algorithmic timeline, because that might defeat their monetization goals. And yes, I realize that I might be reading a lot into Twitter's actions at the moment, but given how they treated their platform in the past year(s), all I'm seeing is that they want monetize it at all costs.

facepalm 11y ago

Who says that has to be the use case of Twitter? HN is not very useful for interacting with friends, but it seems to do fine.

hughw 11y ago

Twitter is not a great way to interact with your real friends. It's best at connecting perfect strangers with shared interests. You cultivate and refine your followees until, any time you look at your feed, it's bound to be filled with pithy and relevant observations, some of which may inspire you to tweet your own bons mots.

fernandotakai 11y ago

that's interesting -- most of my friends right now are people i met through twitter ~7 years ago. i even met my wife through it! i quite like twitter more than facebook because it's simple to use, it has really good desktop (even linux has corebird, which is quite good) and mobile clients and the asymmetric part of friendships.

adevine 11y ago

Exactly! When I see all the hand wringing around twitter, I'm surprised how rarely it's mentioned that the natural market size for twitter is just much smaller than Facebook's. My theory is that there is basically a personality divide, probably along the introvert/extravert divide, among those who like twitter, and those who don't. Thus, those who like and use twitter frequently blame all its problems on technical details, because they can't grasp that those who don't FUNDAMENTALLY have an aversion to the push model of 140 char limited thoughts. I look at twitter and think "Random short distractions are things I'm actively trying to remove from my life."

tomjen3 11y ago

Yes, because Twitter is not meant to be a friends only space. Its tapping into the neo-cortex of the hivemind, in real-time. Seriously I get so tired of people who don't use Twitter and can't understand why anyone else would: the product isn't meant for you.