11 ms·

1. cut costs by a lot. they shouldn't be spending $2B per year 2. allow the apps to be used without a login - with the default view showing 'what is on now'. a

by nikcub 10y ago

1. cut costs by a lot. they shouldn't be spending $2B per year 2. allow the apps to be used without a login - with the default view showing 'what is on now'. almost every member of my family has attempted to use twitter at some point and just been confused. 3. reformat all the explore pages into ordinary twitter streams 4. acquire nuzzel. their view of 'whats on now' is better than twitter's view 5. drop the video passion-project nonsense. you don't need to own content to use twitter alongside it. strike deals with the content providers instead where tweets are shown alongside (this is already being done) and become a partner to content owners and distributors rather than a competitor 6. improve the core product for users. group messaging, longer tweets, only show replies from people who are authenticated or two degrees away from you by default, etc. etc. (and pro accounts, if you wish) 7. let people pay to get a checkmark, and then let users pay to flair tweets they like 8. better tools for businesses who provide support on twitter. let them pay to use it as a platform and properly authenticate their customers on twitter 9. ditto above but for marketing

lcnmrn 10y ago
I got all these things right with Sublevel. It‘s like someone read my mind. Including 7, people can donate any amount so I can verify their real identity. At 1, I cut costs down to $75/year.
artursapek 10y ago
> 2. allow the apps to be used without a login - with the default view showing 'what is on now'. almost every member of my family has attempted to use twitter at some point and just been confused. I never understood why their home page is so basic. Is it just to reduce load on their servers from lurkers?
- x0x0 10y ago
  A guess: to push people to register. For several reasons: (1) they are judged on that every quarter; (2) a hypothesis that this makes the experience better for users, and hence more likely to contribute to MAUs; (3) a hypothesis this improves ad targeting.
  - sfgeek 10y ago
    Agreed on 1 and 2, but how does that work for improving targeting.
    - will_hughes 10y ago
      They can start to profile you across devices more easily if you're signed up.
  - K0SM0S 10y ago
    > to push people to register Which is an admission of weakness in the first place. If the product is good enough, they wouldn't need to resort to anything special to enroll users beyond a sign up button up top.
mrb 10y ago
Let people pay $1/month to raise their limit to 280 characters per message. http://blog.zorinaq.com/revenue-idea-for-twitter-1-per-month-to-raise-the-limit-to-280-c/ http://blog.zorinaq.com/revenue-idea-for-twitter-1-per-month... Imagine a heated discussion on Twitter... how many would pay $1/month to be able to communicate their points more clearly? Preemptive reply: no, nobody reads Twitter over SMS anymore.
- danielhooper 10y ago
  > how many would pay $1/month to be able to communicate their points more clearly? My guess is less than 10,000.
  - silvestrov 10y ago
    50 countries with 200 persons each? I'd say more than 10.000 in just USA alone. Even if you up it to $5 a month. Twitter is used a lot by those who use twitter.
    - wapz 10y ago
      I'd say 10,000 from businesses in the USA alone. A lot of companies use twitter as their makeshift tech support and public image. $1/month for a company is completely irrelevant to their spending.
  - sfgeek 10y ago
    Me. If I still used Twitter. Heck, I tweet maybe 5 times a month and I'd pay that. $1 a month is so cheap I would notice.
    - smileysteve 10y ago
      You'd likely notice the first time it asks you for payment.
      - Sidetalker 10y ago
iamatworknow 10y ago
>7. let people pay to get a checkmark Isn't (or maybe "wasn't") the intention of the check mark to differentiate legitimate public figures from those who would attempt to create fake profiles and impersonate them? Lately it seems like anyone who has had any sort of notoriety has been getting one, but if you could just pay for it instead that would completely defeat the purpose.
- 0xCMP 10y ago
  For people maybe, but now that twitter is at scale it might not be for someone who cares about their brand
- jamestnz 10y ago
  I think both. Don't take away the need to be a public figure and to verify your identity. Just make them pay in addition to these things. If you're a big enough public figure to want/need the blue tick, you're arguably making commercial use of twitter already, so you probably have a marketing budget that can sink a thousand bucks a year into maintaining your verified status with Twitter (in addition to proving your identity in usual ways). If some famous person doesn't want to pay, that's fine: either quit using twitter's platform to market yourself, or continue but live without the tick.
  - iamatworknow 10y ago
    I'm not sure I agree with your assessment of the type of people verified on twitter. I mainly use twitter to follow comedians, and most of them don't make a ton of money (surely not enough to afford "a thousand bucks a year" -- one of my favorite comedians working today has said publicly that he made all of $16k in 2015). And a few have become the victims of imposters who attempt to disrupt their careers by taking on their identity and messaging comedy clubs or TV networks or whatever. I don't think they are an untapped revenue stream.
    - neotek 10y ago
      >one of my favorite comedians working today has said publicly that he made all of $16k in 2015). Who's that?
tyingq 10y ago
>8. better tools for businesses who provide support on twitter That's a great one. The current process is very clunky from the user end. I can't imagine how clunky it is from the business side. Probably like a ticket system with no priorities, dates, state [open/closed/etc].
- softawre 10y ago
  I think a lot of companies use software that wraps twitter. My company makes contact center software, and "twitter" is just another media type like calls or email.
hellcow 10y ago
I love #7. A lot of people would pay a monthly fee to maintain a checkmark on their profile as a part of a "Twitter Pro" account. That fee could cover the manual verification of the user via scanned photo-ID and become a profit center for the company. Think of it like Twitter's version of an EV SSL cert.
- ClassyJacket 10y ago
  They've had verified accounts for ages.
  - scott_s 10y ago
    Yes, but you basically have to pass a notability test to get it (https://support.twitter.com/articles/20174631 https://support.twitter.com/articles/20174631). hellcow and nikcub are suggesting to just open it up to anyone who is willing to pay for it.
ww520 10y ago
Do they really spend $2B per year? That's just mind boggling.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
thisnotmyacc 10y ago
FTFY > 1. cut costs by a lot. they shouldn't be spending $2B per year Really, is Twitter doing poorly? $2.52 billion in 2016 is more than enough revenue, I'd wager, to maintain a solid company. Twitter seem to me to have an explosive-growth mentality - spend like crazy and grow our way to success - in a post-explosive-growth reality. Fix the cost structures, and make ~$1 billion in profit, and you have a solid company. With continued YoY growth of say 5%, and a valuation of $20 billion in the near future, about double their current $11.33B, is not out of the realm of possibility. Sure, it isn't Google or FaceBook sized, but is a $20B company in anyway failing?
- spo81rty 10y ago
  I share your sentiment. They can grow slowly like most normal companies and have an amazing business.
epoch1970 10y ago
I don't know if it's still like this, but when I last tried to create a Twitter account it required a phone number and some kind of verification by phone. That's something I refuse to do. I can sort of understand requiring that to try to combat the creation of spam accounts, for instance. But it made the service pretty much unusable for me. Unless it's as easy to create an account there as it is to create one here or at reddit, I'll never bother with Twitter.
- aanm1988 10y ago
  You don't have to give them a phone number. They will let you sign up without it. Then flag immediately as a bot and refuse to let you do anything without a phone number. Lame Twitter. Lame.
  - wapz 10y ago
    Yup I made an account several years ago to tweet to a support staff because I couldn't login. The next day my account was "suspended" or banned for something like "being a bot." Never looked back.
- SeanBoocock 10y ago
  That feels like a vestige of Twitter's origins as a heavily SMS focused service. Even if that is true, though, odd to have such a high friction element to the registration flow for what is now a niche use case.
  - fragmede 10y ago
    It's intentional, in an attempt to reduce spammers and trolls. Gmail also includes receiving an SMS in the signup flow.
jsemrau 10y ago
>5. [...] become a partner to content owners and distributors rather than a competitor On a related note, we built a bot that recommends an event based on your tweet+profile. The amount of times we got banned what could be a useful service is off the charts. Twitter needs to engage more with devs rather than block them whenever they can.
zeteo 10y ago
> 2. allow the apps to be used without a login - with the default view showing 'what is on now' Twitter generally needs to get a lot better at predicting what you'll be interested in (think Pandora.) Just based on the IP they should be able to tell a lot. Tweets that have been recently favorited, retweeted etc. in just your area would make a very decent default view (band coming to town! metro closure! the mayor is a jerk! etc.). Once you create an account they should also be able to predict a lot based on your activity. Oh, and please give us a Hide Tweet button. There are talkative people I'd still like to follow - but maybe a little less.
nnash 10y ago
You forgot spending less time on favorite icon animations.
Nicholas_C 10y ago
>1. cut costs by a lot. they shouldn't be spending $2B per year Which costs would you cut?
qwertyuiopm 10y ago
I disagree with 7(longer tweets). The 140 character limit is what Twitter is most known for, and sets it apart from a typical social network. It's something like a body-mark of Twitter. It should stay.
- tragic 10y ago
  There are other things that set it apart from a "typical social network"; for instance, the fact that it's floundering as a commercial enterprise. Something has to change, and that something will necessarily not be held in common with Facebook.
blablabla123 10y ago
this is exactly what a VC would say :D

by nikcub 10y ago

lcnmrn 10y ago

I got all these things right with Sublevel. It‘s like someone read my mind. Including 7, people can donate any amount so I can verify their real identity. At 1, I cut costs down to $75/year.

artursapek 10y ago

> 2. allow the apps to be used without a login - with the default view showing 'what is on now'. almost every member of my family has attempted to use twitter at some point and just been confused. I never understood why their home page is so basic. Is it just to reduce load on their servers from lurkers?

x0x0 10y ago
A guess: to push people to register. For several reasons: (1) they are judged on that every quarter; (2) a hypothesis that this makes the experience better for users, and hence more likely to contribute to MAUs; (3) a hypothesis this improves ad targeting.
- sfgeek 10y ago
  Agreed on 1 and 2, but how does that work for improving targeting.
  - will_hughes 10y ago
    They can start to profile you across devices more easily if you're signed up.
- K0SM0S 10y ago
  > to push people to register Which is an admission of weakness in the first place. If the product is good enough, they wouldn't need to resort to anything special to enroll users beyond a sign up button up top.

mrb 10y ago

Let people pay $1/month to raise their limit to 280 characters per message. http://blog.zorinaq.com/revenue-idea-for-twitter-1-per-month-to-raise-the-limit-to-280-c/ http://blog.zorinaq.com/revenue-idea-for-twitter-1-per-month... Imagine a heated discussion on Twitter... how many would pay $1/month to be able to communicate their points more clearly? Preemptive reply: no, nobody reads Twitter over SMS anymore.

danielhooper 10y ago
> how many would pay $1/month to be able to communicate their points more clearly? My guess is less than 10,000.
- silvestrov 10y ago
  50 countries with 200 persons each? I'd say more than 10.000 in just USA alone. Even if you up it to $5 a month. Twitter is used a lot by those who use twitter.
  - wapz 10y ago
    I'd say 10,000 from businesses in the USA alone. A lot of companies use twitter as their makeshift tech support and public image. $1/month for a company is completely irrelevant to their spending.
- sfgeek 10y ago
  Me. If I still used Twitter. Heck, I tweet maybe 5 times a month and I'd pay that. $1 a month is so cheap I would notice.
  - smileysteve 10y ago
    You'd likely notice the first time it asks you for payment.
    - Sidetalker 10y ago

iamatworknow 10y ago

>7. let people pay to get a checkmark Isn't (or maybe "wasn't") the intention of the check mark to differentiate legitimate public figures from those who would attempt to create fake profiles and impersonate them? Lately it seems like anyone who has had any sort of notoriety has been getting one, but if you could just pay for it instead that would completely defeat the purpose.

0xCMP 10y ago
For people maybe, but now that twitter is at scale it might not be for someone who cares about their brand
jamestnz 10y ago
I think both. Don't take away the need to be a public figure and to verify your identity. Just make them pay in addition to these things. If you're a big enough public figure to want/need the blue tick, you're arguably making commercial use of twitter already, so you probably have a marketing budget that can sink a thousand bucks a year into maintaining your verified status with Twitter (in addition to proving your identity in usual ways). If some famous person doesn't want to pay, that's fine: either quit using twitter's platform to market yourself, or continue but live without the tick.
- iamatworknow 10y ago
  I'm not sure I agree with your assessment of the type of people verified on twitter. I mainly use twitter to follow comedians, and most of them don't make a ton of money (surely not enough to afford "a thousand bucks a year" -- one of my favorite comedians working today has said publicly that he made all of $16k in 2015). And a few have become the victims of imposters who attempt to disrupt their careers by taking on their identity and messaging comedy clubs or TV networks or whatever. I don't think they are an untapped revenue stream.
  - neotek 10y ago
    >one of my favorite comedians working today has said publicly that he made all of $16k in 2015). Who's that?

tyingq 10y ago

>8. better tools for businesses who provide support on twitter That's a great one. The current process is very clunky from the user end. I can't imagine how clunky it is from the business side. Probably like a ticket system with no priorities, dates, state [open/closed/etc].

softawre 10y ago
I think a lot of companies use software that wraps twitter. My company makes contact center software, and "twitter" is just another media type like calls or email.

hellcow 10y ago

I love #7. A lot of people would pay a monthly fee to maintain a checkmark on their profile as a part of a "Twitter Pro" account. That fee could cover the manual verification of the user via scanned photo-ID and become a profit center for the company. Think of it like Twitter's version of an EV SSL cert.

ClassyJacket 10y ago
They've had verified accounts for ages.
- scott_s 10y ago
  Yes, but you basically have to pass a notability test to get it (https://support.twitter.com/articles/20174631 https://support.twitter.com/articles/20174631). hellcow and nikcub are suggesting to just open it up to anyone who is willing to pay for it.

ww520 10y ago

Do they really spend $2B per year? That's just mind boggling.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

thisnotmyacc 10y ago

FTFY > 1. cut costs by a lot. they shouldn't be spending $2B per year Really, is Twitter doing poorly? $2.52 billion in 2016 is more than enough revenue, I'd wager, to maintain a solid company. Twitter seem to me to have an explosive-growth mentality - spend like crazy and grow our way to success - in a post-explosive-growth reality. Fix the cost structures, and make ~$1 billion in profit, and you have a solid company. With continued YoY growth of say 5%, and a valuation of $20 billion in the near future, about double their current $11.33B, is not out of the realm of possibility. Sure, it isn't Google or FaceBook sized, but is a $20B company in anyway failing?

spo81rty 10y ago
I share your sentiment. They can grow slowly like most normal companies and have an amazing business.

epoch1970 10y ago

I don't know if it's still like this, but when I last tried to create a Twitter account it required a phone number and some kind of verification by phone. That's something I refuse to do. I can sort of understand requiring that to try to combat the creation of spam accounts, for instance. But it made the service pretty much unusable for me. Unless it's as easy to create an account there as it is to create one here or at reddit, I'll never bother with Twitter.

aanm1988 10y ago
You don't have to give them a phone number. They will let you sign up without it. Then flag immediately as a bot and refuse to let you do anything without a phone number. Lame Twitter. Lame.
- wapz 10y ago
  Yup I made an account several years ago to tweet to a support staff because I couldn't login. The next day my account was "suspended" or banned for something like "being a bot." Never looked back.
SeanBoocock 10y ago
That feels like a vestige of Twitter's origins as a heavily SMS focused service. Even if that is true, though, odd to have such a high friction element to the registration flow for what is now a niche use case.
- fragmede 10y ago
  It's intentional, in an attempt to reduce spammers and trolls. Gmail also includes receiving an SMS in the signup flow.

jsemrau 10y ago

>5. [...] become a partner to content owners and distributors rather than a competitor On a related note, we built a bot that recommends an event based on your tweet+profile. The amount of times we got banned what could be a useful service is off the charts. Twitter needs to engage more with devs rather than block them whenever they can.

zeteo 10y ago

> 2. allow the apps to be used without a login - with the default view showing 'what is on now' Twitter generally needs to get a lot better at predicting what you'll be interested in (think Pandora.) Just based on the IP they should be able to tell a lot. Tweets that have been recently favorited, retweeted etc. in just your area would make a very decent default view (band coming to town! metro closure! the mayor is a jerk! etc.). Once you create an account they should also be able to predict a lot based on your activity. Oh, and please give us a Hide Tweet button. There are talkative people I'd still like to follow - but maybe a little less.

nnash 10y ago

You forgot spending less time on favorite icon animations.

Nicholas_C 10y ago

>1. cut costs by a lot. they shouldn't be spending $2B per year Which costs would you cut?

qwertyuiopm 10y ago

I disagree with 7(longer tweets). The 140 character limit is what Twitter is most known for, and sets it apart from a typical social network. It's something like a body-mark of Twitter. It should stay.

tragic 10y ago
There are other things that set it apart from a "typical social network"; for instance, the fact that it's floundering as a commercial enterprise. Something has to change, and that something will necessarily not be held in common with Facebook.

blablabla123 10y ago

this is exactly what a VC would say :D