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The tension is that Twitter wants to be both a place for both news in the moment and for actual conversations. It's fine for the former but terrible at the latt
by andrewfong 10y ago
The tension is that Twitter wants to be both a place for both news in the moment and for actual conversations. It's fine for the former but terrible at the latter. That itself isn't terrible -- they could just drop or de-emphasize conversation functions and call it a day. But Twitter is a public company that, rightly or wrongly, feels the need to boost engagement and you don't get great numbers if your users only log in when something big and important is happening.
- digi_owl 10y agoThey could have gotten the conversation right when they introduced the quote system (put a link to the tweet you are responding to and the client/site will embed the tweet body inside yours), but instead managed to break the existing system they had where a client could include a tweet id number to indicate what tweet someone was replying to when using @username. End result is that rather than have the potential to build a conversation chain, readers have to manually drill the "tree". Never mind that they never implemented support for merged SMS (introduced all the way back in the 90s!), so you are constantly stuck at 140 characters. All in all it is a quintessential US company with the classic US mobile network blinders firmly fitted.