6 ms·

Usage Stalls for Twitter; Shares Drop

32 points by constantinum 12y ago

tacoman 12y ago
“The lack of growth there comes from Twitter’s relative lack of innovation,” said Nate Elliott, an analyst at Forrester who studies social media. “The experience on Twitter today is the same experience people have always had on Twitter.” I don't need innovation, I just want it to work sensibly. I stopped using twitter on my phone because I found it distracting. I decided to try and use it on the web only, but there are two really big problems I see. 1. Each and every time I login, it doesn't remember where I left off, so I have to scroll down to about where I think I was and go from there. 2. Once in a while, I'll leave it open, then see the notification "xx new tweets." I then click on that and it takes me to the most recent tweet, not where I was in the timeline before I loaded all the new tweets. I can't figure out if these are really big oversights or I'm not using it as it was intended. As it is, it certainly isn't a consistent experience with the mobile client.
- jameskilton 12y ago
  Tweetbot[1] solves these problems nicely. Were it not for this app I wouldn't use Twitter near as often as I do today. [1] http://tapbots.com/software/tweetbot/ http://tapbots.com/software/tweetbot/
  - baddox 12y ago
    Sadly, it has some major issues. There's no iPad version, which for me means that its feed location syncing is useless. The mentions feed doesn't include people following you or favoriting your tweets (even though they send push notifications for those events), which is major missing functionality. I've also encountered several UI bugs, but they're inconsistent and minor.
    - kenthorvath 12y ago
      There is an iPad version. http://tapbots.com/software/tweetbot/ipad/ http://tapbots.com/software/tweetbot/ipad/
      - baddox 12y ago
        Indeed. I should have clarified that Tweetbot 3 does not have an iPad version, although I believe they have indicated that they are working on it.
- lkesteloot 12y ago
  I don't think you're using it as intended. I also want to use it the way you do, but I think most people don't mind missing tweets. They're just dipping their toes in the stream. Facebook works the same way. I get FOMO.
  - rrradical 12y ago
    I think it really depends on how many people you follow. Less than 50? You wouldn't want to miss anything. More than 500? There's no way you could read them all. As I followed more people I transitioned from FOMO into 'dip my toes' mentality, and I still enjoy it, and much prefer it to Facebook's over curation. I like that every time I check Twitter I see new things, which isn't the case on FB.
- x0x0 12y ago
  Their mobile website breaks about 30% of the time for me on my android 4.4.x phone. It just redirects to an error page from my bookmark. Turning on request desktop site works. And to echo parent's complaint, god forbid you accidentally click a link; you lose your place in the tweetstream and have to hit back then scroll again. I can't imagine anyone at twitter actually uses the mobile site; problem #1 is particularly frustrating.
- tedunangst 12y ago
  3. Every time I click an image, it shows up in an overlay. Ok, great. I press esc to hide it, and the page rescrolls all the way to the top. What jackass thought this up?
  - spullara 12y ago
    Sounds like you have a browser that isn't a major one? Doesn't happen on Safari/Chrome/Firefox.
    - hippiehippo 12y ago
      That annoying scroll-to-top happens to me too and I use the latest Firefox version on Ubuntu. I first noticed it several months ago. Also, some time ago, when you clicked a message to view it's context, Twitter would expand the message list inline. Now it takes you to a new page and when you return you're back to top.
    - tedunangst 12y ago
      Firefox. I could also trivially avoid it if they used real links, such that I could middle click to open in a new tab, but since everything is just a div with an onclick handler, that's nigh impossible.
- Spooky23 12y ago
  You won't get much sense from them... Their main push for revenue seems to be engaging with the shrinking population of people who both watch TV shows live and care to post inane messages about them while watching!
- bradleyjg 12y ago
  For me the biggest annoyance is the utter lack of any sort of conversation tools. There's no nesting and the 140 char limit prevents quoting. So you just get a confusing flat view.
beartime 12y ago
as a marketer i notice a lot of developers on twitter that respond better to my ads than on facebook. i wonder, and maybe posing a question to the developer readers, do you use twitter more or less than before?
jostmey 12y ago
Social media websites to me are like TV series. They are entertaining for a few years and then a new series comes out. It is my guess that the most popular social media websites have the staying power of the longest running TV shows (~20 seasons).
city41 12y ago
I'm a pretty casual Twitter user, but over the years I have made several valiant attempts to make Twitter useful and I've never succeeded. Twitter is a nice real time pulse on what the entire internet is up to. Tweetdeck is a decent way to get a feel for how things you are interested in are trending. But "decent" is the keyword here, Tweetdeck really isn't great at this at all. I still have no really good way to aggregate large numbers of tweets, find out what the current buzz is from that, then drill into specifics as I see fit. After all these years I still think Twitter is just noisy and mostly a waste of time. I'd love for them to change my mind.
- keyle 12y ago
  I only use Twitter for indie game development. Because it's fun to watch certain tags and screenshots, keep up with news and what people are doing. Beyond that, I completely agree. I couldn't give a damn about someone being somewhere eating something. Or what the CEO of Oracle said this week.
curiousDog 12y ago
Any chance Twitter could be taken over by Facebook? Looks like they've figured out the monetization side of things and TWTR is now at a modest market cap.
- kondro 12y ago
  Facebook doesn't really gain anything by acquiring Twitter except a loss-making entity with a very large cross-over when it comes to userbase.
  - x0x0 12y ago
    twitter is profitable, depending on metric [1]; their rationale is [2]. it's also monetizing better: It generated $1.77 for every thousand timeline views in advertising revenue, up 83% form (sic) the prior year's rate [3] [1] http://www.theverge.com/2014/10/27/7079277/twitter-q3-2014-earnings http://www.theverge.com/2014/10/27/7079277/twitter-q3-2014-e... [2] https://investor.twitterinc.com/releasedetail.cfm?ReleaseID=878170 https://investor.twitterinc.com/releasedetail.cfm?ReleaseID=... [3] http://www.fool.com/investing/general/2014/10/27/twitter-inc-earnings-here-comes-the-sequential-squ.aspx http://www.fool.com/investing/general/2014/10/27/twitter-inc...
    - _almosnow 12y ago
      revenue != profit they've been operating w/ a net loss since (probably) forever
    - adventured 12y ago
      Twitter is extremely unprofitable, in every possible regard. Operating income: 2013: -$635m; 2012: -$77m; 2011: -$127m Net income: 2013: -$645m; 2012: -$79m; 2011: -$128m The same general result holds true for their most recent quarters. They're losing tons of money and vaporizing cash. Most likely they're going to get severely squeezed when the easy money party ends / the stock market falls. They better either be profitable at that point, or have a back-up plan. They certainly wouldn't be the first dotcom cash burner to get crunched when the easy money stopped flowing.
Mithaldu 12y ago
Given that they effectively killed off a number of useful and popular clients, like Tweetdeck, by changing their TOSes, or straight-up buying them and rereleasing different (neutered) software under the same name, i'm not surprised to see a drop in usage. When they did that twitter for me went from a thing i had running all day on a second screen to a thing i look at whenever it emails me that someone talked at me.
- mattupstate 12y ago
  Doesn't look killed off to me https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/tweetdeck-by-twitter/id485812721?mt=12 https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/tweetdeck-by-twitter/id48581...
  - Elepsis 12y ago
    TweetDeck falls into the "bought and released a totally redone but worse app under the same name" bucket.
  - radley 12y ago
    Check the star rating and count. Wasn't a 2-star app before they bought it. And only 1.4k reviews for a free Twitter app? It may not be dead, but it's barely got a heartbeat.
xngzng 12y ago
Issues with Twitter for iOS: - Main timeline screen: you can swipe left/right for your time line, discover and activity. It is bad UX choice when you try to read your timeline with one hand scroll down the page. Many once in a while your swipe down gesture will trigger the swipe left/right and is utterly annoying. - It does not play well with Instagram the top social app as picture is displayed as link and not shown. - The load more tweets implementation is broken. After tapping "Load More Tweets", it brings you to any tweet in your timeline, and you are lost to where were before. - It does not support GIF natively. Other issues: - Follow named brands are a waste of time on Twitter as they repeatedly tweet the same news. - Twitter is major pain-in-ass email spammers. There are 7 email notifications type you receive from just Twitter for marketing. The options should be off by default. Why give users a chance to hate you? Irony is Twitter is pushing to be the mobile app platform of choice but they don't have the best mobile client.
- gsharma 12y ago
  >It does not play well with Instagram the top social app as picture is displayed as link and not shown. This is because of Instagram/Facebook and not Twitter. IG/FB chooses to drive the traffic back to their web property rather than embed the images in Tweets.
mqsiuser 12y ago
I am from Germany. Today I am perfectly fluent in english including idioms, puns (somewhat) and understanding american/english culture. To me Twitter feels like making sense to (native) english speakers (only). 140 characters and the english language go very well together, especially for expressing sth in an interesting way without putting yourself into too much responsibility (in case of doubt/trouble, you just say: "I mean 140 chars are just too short for being acurate"). I can clearly see there are (still) a lot of ppl from the UK (e.g. jumping into, when it comes to topics like "in Europe"), but imho Twitter has a language problem: Twitter is a native / highly fluent english speaker.
- eropple 12y ago
  It may be suboptimal for German, but in addition to English it seems to work very well for Spanish, French, and Arabic.
_almosnow 12y ago
I was never hooked into twitter, and could never understand what is up with some people wanting to advertise everything they do through there. However, for a lot of time I've used twitter for something that I felt it was really valuable and unique: news. Whenever I got stuck on some unusual traffic jam I could have just open twitter and immediately see what was happening and sometimes even get some piece of advice like 'take this other route instead' that was very valuable for me. I wouldn't had mind to see a few ads along there or even pay in exchange of that service that I was getting from them. The whole 'real-time updates from people around you' is really good. All in all really useful until a year or so, when they started 'filtering' their firehose of tweets. Now it's completely useless. I've found out that at major events (even when I click to see 'all' tweets) only a few tweets per second appear, which is completely implausible. The last few times that I tried to look something there I've found absolutely nothing but bs. Example: Looking for 'ambulance OR police car at NEIGHBORHOOD' (because I want to know what happened) Tweet results are: @ladygaga - DOWNLOAD THE NEW SINGLE AMBULANCE FROM LADY GAGA - 4,397 Retweets 5,322 Favorites @someguy - OMG AMBULANCE IS AMAZING! LADY GAGA ARMY! - 200 Retweets, 20 Favorites ... So long, twitter.
- nzealand 12y ago
  I for one am glad you are no longer using twitter to check traffic while driving...
adventured 12y ago
I predict in an act of desperation as usage goes from stalling out, to falling, Twitter will begin to relax their character limit. That's when you can be certain they're going the MySpace way. Twitter was supposed to be a messaging platform. They lost that war, big time. Twitter became a heavily one-sided broadcast platform instead. As the WhatsApp etc. world eats Twitter's usage, all they'll have left are heavy broadcasters, celebrities, and so on (and those people will abandon the increasingly unpopular platform). The reality is, Twitter doesn't serve enough of a stand-alone purpose any longer. Too many pieces of its value have been stolen away by competing products. Not to mention, nobody really cares about their social network on Twitter, there's minimal value to that (versus eg Facebook), so there's next to no barriers protecting them from erosion in that regard. Simply put: Twitter isn't the best social network; Twitter isn't the best at photos / images / media / video; Twitter isn't the best blog platform; Twitter isn't the best messaging platform. It's not the best at anything, and it will lose in part because of that.
bennettfeely 12y ago
Whoever can shove in your face the most information the fastest wins the great social network race right now. People aren't tweeting enough? Twitter decides to include tweets that are favorited by people I follow. Twitter beat Facebook long ago at this race, Snapchat also competes, but YikYak sees new content faster than I can pull to refresh. People say that Facebook would survive against Twitter because it's such a different service (e.g. people are not capable of saying what they want to say in just 140 characters). However, In my experience, people are capable of adapting. People are quick to try new things. People go where their friends go and when a service loses it's shine and and starts doing things that are un-cool, people move on. Twitter is one of the few big websites and apps I use regularly which I can honestly say the design and UX has gotten far worse over the years. Search on Twitter has always been a horrible struggle. If I want to follow a friend I know personally, I have to carefully and exactly type their handle in. I could try to type in their name or username, but again I'm left doing the heavy work sorting through 90 John Smiths. Why can't Twitter order people search results taking in consideration the people I follow? Don't even get me started on Direct Messages. Insanely bad. More an more my Twitter feed resembles my current Facebook feed, full of advertisements, clickbait, and crap I just don't care about, stuff that isn't interesting. And it's not coming from exclusively the people I follow.
InclinedPlane 12y ago
I recently created a new twitter account for testing, the experience was horrid. I suggest they fix that as a first step.
DAddYE 12y ago
I was a fan of twitter damn in love with it but I agree that over the time is getting worse day by day. The UX is just meh. Apps at least on iPhone are kind of okay, however... the "timeline" today is now even worse then facebook. I don't complain about ads, I work with them and I understand somehow they need to make money, but WTF decided that I have to see in my timeline things totally unrelated like tweets (not retweets) of my friends's followings. Wut? I constantly press "dismiss this tweet" in the hope some kind of machine learning will understand that they must fire the guy who decided to go with this absurd direction. IMHO they did all the best to kill an awesome service.
jarcane 12y ago
Maybe users will stop leaving when Twitter starts putting some actual effort into policing it and dealing with the abuse and harassment that is rampant on the network, instead of actually making it even harder for people to do anything about it or even adequately report it.
- hippiehippo 12y ago
  The problem is that anything is "abuse" nowadays. When you have a cohort of people brought up with a daily dose of "you're perfect", "you're a winner", "all of you are the smartest kids in the world", a single tweet of disagreement with them is ABUUUSE!!! It reminds me of Atheism+'s Block Bot which had people's accounts blocked because, once some enlightened atheist plus added that account to their block list, then all the bots' subscribers added it to their's automatically, triggering Twitter's account blocking feature. To fight against trolls, maybe Twitter shouldn't have public messages anymore and, instead, only allow users to view messages published by people who they follow and people who these people follow, like Facebook's friends and friends-of-friends. This way, if a troll publishes crap about you, only the people who follow that troll and their followers will see them.
notastartup 12y ago
There will be a major market correction where business valuation purely on userbase will vanish.
guelo 12y ago
Too bad they killed their developer ecosystem which was creating lots of free innovation for their platform.
prawn 12y ago
I use Twitter (most) and Instagram, but not Facebook. I've noticed a few friends who were on Twitter previously have abandoned it but maintained activity on Instagram. I suspect this is because, in their case, Instagram is personal. You post pictures of what you're up to and you're always up to stuff. Twitter seems more for business, building a brand or talking about news. Those are things you might cull if busy, or if you change jobs or don't have the energy to promote. And because the community tools are so meagre (flat comments, for one), Twitter maintains minimal goodwill with its users. I feel like if I could take my Twitter ecosystem with me to another service, I would. I don't feel that way about Instagram - it works largely as I need it to work. FWIW, I use the official OSX and iOS apps but no longer touch the web version at all.

32 points by constantinum 12y ago

“The lack of growth there comes from Twitter’s relative lack of innovation,” said Nate Elliott, an analyst at Forrester who studies social media. “The experience on Twitter today is the same experience people have always had on Twitter.” I don't need innovation, I just want it to work sensibly. I stopped using twitter on my phone because I found it distracting. I decided to try and use it on the web only, but there are two really big problems I see. 1. Each and every time I login, it doesn't remember where I left off, so I have to scroll down to about where I think I was and go from there. 2. Once in a while, I'll leave it open, then see the notification "xx new tweets." I then click on that and it takes me to the most recent tweet, not where I was in the timeline before I loaded all the new tweets. I can't figure out if these are really big oversights or I'm not using it as it was intended. As it is, it certainly isn't a consistent experience with the mobile client.

jameskilton 12y ago
Tweetbot[1] solves these problems nicely. Were it not for this app I wouldn't use Twitter near as often as I do today. [1] http://tapbots.com/software/tweetbot/ http://tapbots.com/software/tweetbot/
- baddox 12y ago
  Sadly, it has some major issues. There's no iPad version, which for me means that its feed location syncing is useless. The mentions feed doesn't include people following you or favoriting your tweets (even though they send push notifications for those events), which is major missing functionality. I've also encountered several UI bugs, but they're inconsistent and minor.
  - kenthorvath 12y ago
    There is an iPad version. http://tapbots.com/software/tweetbot/ipad/ http://tapbots.com/software/tweetbot/ipad/
    - baddox 12y ago
      Indeed. I should have clarified that Tweetbot 3 does not have an iPad version, although I believe they have indicated that they are working on it.
lkesteloot 12y ago
I don't think you're using it as intended. I also want to use it the way you do, but I think most people don't mind missing tweets. They're just dipping their toes in the stream. Facebook works the same way. I get FOMO.
- rrradical 12y ago
  I think it really depends on how many people you follow. Less than 50? You wouldn't want to miss anything. More than 500? There's no way you could read them all. As I followed more people I transitioned from FOMO into 'dip my toes' mentality, and I still enjoy it, and much prefer it to Facebook's over curation. I like that every time I check Twitter I see new things, which isn't the case on FB.
x0x0 12y ago
Their mobile website breaks about 30% of the time for me on my android 4.4.x phone. It just redirects to an error page from my bookmark. Turning on request desktop site works. And to echo parent's complaint, god forbid you accidentally click a link; you lose your place in the tweetstream and have to hit back then scroll again. I can't imagine anyone at twitter actually uses the mobile site; problem #1 is particularly frustrating.
tedunangst 12y ago
3. Every time I click an image, it shows up in an overlay. Ok, great. I press esc to hide it, and the page rescrolls all the way to the top. What jackass thought this up?
- spullara 12y ago
  Sounds like you have a browser that isn't a major one? Doesn't happen on Safari/Chrome/Firefox.
  - hippiehippo 12y ago
    That annoying scroll-to-top happens to me too and I use the latest Firefox version on Ubuntu. I first noticed it several months ago. Also, some time ago, when you clicked a message to view it's context, Twitter would expand the message list inline. Now it takes you to a new page and when you return you're back to top.
  - tedunangst 12y ago
    Firefox. I could also trivially avoid it if they used real links, such that I could middle click to open in a new tab, but since everything is just a div with an onclick handler, that's nigh impossible.
Spooky23 12y ago
You won't get much sense from them... Their main push for revenue seems to be engaging with the shrinking population of people who both watch TV shows live and care to post inane messages about them while watching!
bradleyjg 12y ago
For me the biggest annoyance is the utter lack of any sort of conversation tools. There's no nesting and the 140 char limit prevents quoting. So you just get a confusing flat view.

beartime 12y ago

as a marketer i notice a lot of developers on twitter that respond better to my ads than on facebook. i wonder, and maybe posing a question to the developer readers, do you use twitter more or less than before?

jostmey 12y ago

Social media websites to me are like TV series. They are entertaining for a few years and then a new series comes out. It is my guess that the most popular social media websites have the staying power of the longest running TV shows (~20 seasons).

city41 12y ago

I'm a pretty casual Twitter user, but over the years I have made several valiant attempts to make Twitter useful and I've never succeeded. Twitter is a nice real time pulse on what the entire internet is up to. Tweetdeck is a decent way to get a feel for how things you are interested in are trending. But "decent" is the keyword here, Tweetdeck really isn't great at this at all. I still have no really good way to aggregate large numbers of tweets, find out what the current buzz is from that, then drill into specifics as I see fit. After all these years I still think Twitter is just noisy and mostly a waste of time. I'd love for them to change my mind.

keyle 12y ago
I only use Twitter for indie game development. Because it's fun to watch certain tags and screenshots, keep up with news and what people are doing. Beyond that, I completely agree. I couldn't give a damn about someone being somewhere eating something. Or what the CEO of Oracle said this week.

curiousDog 12y ago

Any chance Twitter could be taken over by Facebook? Looks like they've figured out the monetization side of things and TWTR is now at a modest market cap.

kondro 12y ago
Facebook doesn't really gain anything by acquiring Twitter except a loss-making entity with a very large cross-over when it comes to userbase.
- x0x0 12y ago
  twitter is profitable, depending on metric [1]; their rationale is [2]. it's also monetizing better: It generated $1.77 for every thousand timeline views in advertising revenue, up 83% form (sic) the prior year's rate [3] [1] http://www.theverge.com/2014/10/27/7079277/twitter-q3-2014-earnings http://www.theverge.com/2014/10/27/7079277/twitter-q3-2014-e... [2] https://investor.twitterinc.com/releasedetail.cfm?ReleaseID=878170 https://investor.twitterinc.com/releasedetail.cfm?ReleaseID=... [3] http://www.fool.com/investing/general/2014/10/27/twitter-inc-earnings-here-comes-the-sequential-squ.aspx http://www.fool.com/investing/general/2014/10/27/twitter-inc...
  - _almosnow 12y ago
    revenue != profit they've been operating w/ a net loss since (probably) forever
  - adventured 12y ago
    Twitter is extremely unprofitable, in every possible regard. Operating income: 2013: -$635m; 2012: -$77m; 2011: -$127m Net income: 2013: -$645m; 2012: -$79m; 2011: -$128m The same general result holds true for their most recent quarters. They're losing tons of money and vaporizing cash. Most likely they're going to get severely squeezed when the easy money party ends / the stock market falls. They better either be profitable at that point, or have a back-up plan. They certainly wouldn't be the first dotcom cash burner to get crunched when the easy money stopped flowing.

Mithaldu 12y ago

Given that they effectively killed off a number of useful and popular clients, like Tweetdeck, by changing their TOSes, or straight-up buying them and rereleasing different (neutered) software under the same name, i'm not surprised to see a drop in usage. When they did that twitter for me went from a thing i had running all day on a second screen to a thing i look at whenever it emails me that someone talked at me.

mattupstate 12y ago
Doesn't look killed off to me https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/tweetdeck-by-twitter/id485812721?mt=12 https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/tweetdeck-by-twitter/id48581...
- Elepsis 12y ago
  TweetDeck falls into the "bought and released a totally redone but worse app under the same name" bucket.
- radley 12y ago
  Check the star rating and count. Wasn't a 2-star app before they bought it. And only 1.4k reviews for a free Twitter app? It may not be dead, but it's barely got a heartbeat.

xngzng 12y ago

Issues with Twitter for iOS: - Main timeline screen: you can swipe left/right for your time line, discover and activity. It is bad UX choice when you try to read your timeline with one hand scroll down the page. Many once in a while your swipe down gesture will trigger the swipe left/right and is utterly annoying. - It does not play well with Instagram the top social app as picture is displayed as link and not shown. - The load more tweets implementation is broken. After tapping "Load More Tweets", it brings you to any tweet in your timeline, and you are lost to where were before. - It does not support GIF natively. Other issues: - Follow named brands are a waste of time on Twitter as they repeatedly tweet the same news. - Twitter is major pain-in-ass email spammers. There are 7 email notifications type you receive from just Twitter for marketing. The options should be off by default. Why give users a chance to hate you? Irony is Twitter is pushing to be the mobile app platform of choice but they don't have the best mobile client.

gsharma 12y ago
>It does not play well with Instagram the top social app as picture is displayed as link and not shown. This is because of Instagram/Facebook and not Twitter. IG/FB chooses to drive the traffic back to their web property rather than embed the images in Tweets.

mqsiuser 12y ago

I am from Germany. Today I am perfectly fluent in english including idioms, puns (somewhat) and understanding american/english culture. To me Twitter feels like making sense to (native) english speakers (only). 140 characters and the english language go very well together, especially for expressing sth in an interesting way without putting yourself into too much responsibility (in case of doubt/trouble, you just say: "I mean 140 chars are just too short for being acurate"). I can clearly see there are (still) a lot of ppl from the UK (e.g. jumping into, when it comes to topics like "in Europe"), but imho Twitter has a language problem: Twitter is a native / highly fluent english speaker.

eropple 12y ago
It may be suboptimal for German, but in addition to English it seems to work very well for Spanish, French, and Arabic.

_almosnow 12y ago

I was never hooked into twitter, and could never understand what is up with some people wanting to advertise everything they do through there. However, for a lot of time I've used twitter for something that I felt it was really valuable and unique: news. Whenever I got stuck on some unusual traffic jam I could have just open twitter and immediately see what was happening and sometimes even get some piece of advice like 'take this other route instead' that was very valuable for me. I wouldn't had mind to see a few ads along there or even pay in exchange of that service that I was getting from them. The whole 'real-time updates from people around you' is really good. All in all really useful until a year or so, when they started 'filtering' their firehose of tweets. Now it's completely useless. I've found out that at major events (even when I click to see 'all' tweets) only a few tweets per second appear, which is completely implausible. The last few times that I tried to look something there I've found absolutely nothing but bs. Example: Looking for 'ambulance OR police car at NEIGHBORHOOD' (because I want to know what happened) Tweet results are: @ladygaga - DOWNLOAD THE NEW SINGLE AMBULANCE FROM LADY GAGA - 4,397 Retweets 5,322 Favorites @someguy - OMG AMBULANCE IS AMAZING! LADY GAGA ARMY! - 200 Retweets, 20 Favorites ... So long, twitter.

nzealand 12y ago
I for one am glad you are no longer using twitter to check traffic while driving...

adventured 12y ago

I predict in an act of desperation as usage goes from stalling out, to falling, Twitter will begin to relax their character limit. That's when you can be certain they're going the MySpace way. Twitter was supposed to be a messaging platform. They lost that war, big time. Twitter became a heavily one-sided broadcast platform instead. As the WhatsApp etc. world eats Twitter's usage, all they'll have left are heavy broadcasters, celebrities, and so on (and those people will abandon the increasingly unpopular platform). The reality is, Twitter doesn't serve enough of a stand-alone purpose any longer. Too many pieces of its value have been stolen away by competing products. Not to mention, nobody really cares about their social network on Twitter, there's minimal value to that (versus eg Facebook), so there's next to no barriers protecting them from erosion in that regard. Simply put: Twitter isn't the best social network; Twitter isn't the best at photos / images / media / video; Twitter isn't the best blog platform; Twitter isn't the best messaging platform. It's not the best at anything, and it will lose in part because of that.

bennettfeely 12y ago

Whoever can shove in your face the most information the fastest wins the great social network race right now. People aren't tweeting enough? Twitter decides to include tweets that are favorited by people I follow. Twitter beat Facebook long ago at this race, Snapchat also competes, but YikYak sees new content faster than I can pull to refresh. People say that Facebook would survive against Twitter because it's such a different service (e.g. people are not capable of saying what they want to say in just 140 characters). However, In my experience, people are capable of adapting. People are quick to try new things. People go where their friends go and when a service loses it's shine and and starts doing things that are un-cool, people move on. Twitter is one of the few big websites and apps I use regularly which I can honestly say the design and UX has gotten far worse over the years. Search on Twitter has always been a horrible struggle. If I want to follow a friend I know personally, I have to carefully and exactly type their handle in. I could try to type in their name or username, but again I'm left doing the heavy work sorting through 90 John Smiths. Why can't Twitter order people search results taking in consideration the people I follow? Don't even get me started on Direct Messages. Insanely bad. More an more my Twitter feed resembles my current Facebook feed, full of advertisements, clickbait, and crap I just don't care about, stuff that isn't interesting. And it's not coming from exclusively the people I follow.

InclinedPlane 12y ago

I recently created a new twitter account for testing, the experience was horrid. I suggest they fix that as a first step.

DAddYE 12y ago

I was a fan of twitter damn in love with it but I agree that over the time is getting worse day by day. The UX is just meh. Apps at least on iPhone are kind of okay, however... the "timeline" today is now even worse then facebook. I don't complain about ads, I work with them and I understand somehow they need to make money, but WTF decided that I have to see in my timeline things totally unrelated like tweets (not retweets) of my friends's followings. Wut? I constantly press "dismiss this tweet" in the hope some kind of machine learning will understand that they must fire the guy who decided to go with this absurd direction. IMHO they did all the best to kill an awesome service.

jarcane 12y ago

Maybe users will stop leaving when Twitter starts putting some actual effort into policing it and dealing with the abuse and harassment that is rampant on the network, instead of actually making it even harder for people to do anything about it or even adequately report it.

hippiehippo 12y ago
The problem is that anything is "abuse" nowadays. When you have a cohort of people brought up with a daily dose of "you're perfect", "you're a winner", "all of you are the smartest kids in the world", a single tweet of disagreement with them is ABUUUSE!!! It reminds me of Atheism+'s Block Bot which had people's accounts blocked because, once some enlightened atheist plus added that account to their block list, then all the bots' subscribers added it to their's automatically, triggering Twitter's account blocking feature. To fight against trolls, maybe Twitter shouldn't have public messages anymore and, instead, only allow users to view messages published by people who they follow and people who these people follow, like Facebook's friends and friends-of-friends. This way, if a troll publishes crap about you, only the people who follow that troll and their followers will see them.

notastartup 12y ago

There will be a major market correction where business valuation purely on userbase will vanish.

guelo 12y ago

Too bad they killed their developer ecosystem which was creating lots of free innovation for their platform.

prawn 12y ago

I use Twitter (most) and Instagram, but not Facebook. I've noticed a few friends who were on Twitter previously have abandoned it but maintained activity on Instagram. I suspect this is because, in their case, Instagram is personal. You post pictures of what you're up to and you're always up to stuff. Twitter seems more for business, building a brand or talking about news. Those are things you might cull if busy, or if you change jobs or don't have the energy to promote. And because the community tools are so meagre (flat comments, for one), Twitter maintains minimal goodwill with its users. I feel like if I could take my Twitter ecosystem with me to another service, I would. I don't feel that way about Instagram - it works largely as I need it to work. FWIW, I use the official OSX and iOS apps but no longer touch the web version at all.