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I find Twitter and it's user base incredibly interesting. On the one hand it's portrayed as an "Everyone" product. There's no reason you or your friend Bill or

by ilghiro 12y ago

I find Twitter and it's user base incredibly interesting. On the one hand it's portrayed as an "Everyone" product. There's no reason you or your friend Bill or your boss or your Grandma couldn't use it. Because of that people have historically signed up in droves and it's valuation has increased. In reality though (and this is entirely anecdotal), Twitter isn't something that everyone can use. A lot of people find it difficult to figure out what they should say, how to keep track of who they follow and simply how to engage with it. It isn't that everyone product. You do still have an enormous community of people though that use it frequently and keenly and recently their monetization offering (advertising platform) has become far more impressive. I would guess then that the valuation and share price has to come down a bit (which this is a signal of) to reflect the change from an "Everyone" (Facebook, Google, Amazon) offering to "Quite a Lot of People" (Pinterest, Tumblr etc) product.

cpach 12y ago
Interesting. I had not thought about that aspect before. When I think of it, Facebook’s UI is probably a lot more easy to use for most people. And even then some still struggle :)
stingraycharles 12y ago
This is an insightful comment, and the takeaway discussion is: is Twitter a product for just "quite a lot of people", or can they bend it to a product for everyone? I think what investors are looking for is a move towards a product that is for everyone. But given that Twitter's core business / USP is precisely that it is not like "everything everyone else is using", could the conclusion thus be that investors had too high an expectation of what Twitter has to offer the world?
nhstanley 12y ago
Yea, I know it's a really tired subject, but twitter really needs a major overhaul from a usability perspective. I think they should keep the 140 characters as a limit for what is shown in peoples feeds, but the character limit should be much higher. This is particularly important when you get into a conversation with many people, and the handles start taking up most of your 140 characters (as Marc Andreessen recently pointed out). It's also really hard to follow conversations, and they get separated somewhat arbitrarily. You might scoff and say that this would basically facebook-ize twitter, but honestly I don't think that's a bad thing. Facebook is moving into twitter's space, so twitter shouldn't be be so slow to act or it will get eaten, IMHO. Also, I use twitter to keep up to date on some of the industries I'm interested in, and while it's a great tool it's still frustrating sometimes, since there is a flood of info throughout the day. TweetDeck makes it better since I can group things by interest and triage depending on how much time I have. I guess you can do that with the web interface but I have never found it as natural as with Tweetdeck.
- diminish 12y ago
  In similar lines here are my observations as a heavy business and personal user: 1. 140chars limit had a goal and philosophy which conflicts now with image attachment flood. Most "interesting" content is typed or pictured in the attachment and the 140char limit is simply worked around 2. Twitter UI is too clunky for what it does. No progress since 7 years I'm using it. 3. Twitter mobile apps don't work properly when mobile. You can't favorite, retweet or comment properly while in an unreachable zone. My 2008 hobby Android 1.1 app has a local queue to cope with remote updates, inserts and Twitter can't implement this? 4. Families aren't on Twitter. Friends to a certain degree. Colleagues to a certain degree. Celebrities/followers yes. Gamers no. Protestors yes. 5. Facebook, LinkedIn implemented the "follow" feature quite successfully. 6. Notifications work, Discover not much.
  - randomsearch 12y ago
    > Twitter UI is too clunky for what it does. No progress since 7 years I'm using it. This. A million times this. I don't understand Twitter. I don't get what the hell they're thinking of, when they release (for example) the horrific design that is the Twitter desktop and Mobile apps. An incredibly common use case is to have more than one twitter account and switch between them. Go try it. A bunch of people brought out superior apps, and Twitter just killed them. If this is representative of the thinking going on at Twitter, they are (deservedly) doomed.
    - bjelkeman-again 12y ago
      Tweetbot has a good implementation of multiple accounts. Both on the Mac and iPhone.
      - comex 12y ago
        I use Tweetbot on both platforms, but I don't think its implementation is good. Good to me would be a merged feed with tweets and mentions from all accounts, analogous to what I can do with email, IRC, instant messaging, etc.; maybe not the best for opsec, but more convenient for casual purposes than having to constantly switch between accounts.
logicallee 12y ago
Well, take the wired telephone (please!) Of course, "everyone can use it" but I bet since its invention, a few power users have made 100x as many calls per week as the average person has. They're the real benefactors. The only difference is that on Twitter you get to see who is doing this.
unclebucknasty 12y ago
>recently their monetization offering (advertising platform) has become far more impressive. I wonder whether a saturation point will be reached with regard to our willingness to view ads in general. More specifically, might this happen in a way that impacts the viability of ad-supported models that rely on the "build an audience, then ad them to death" approach? Google Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, and others all command a great share of our attention and rely largely on the model. Youtube also seems to be showing more ads. I have also noticed that some sites which feature, say 1 minute or less news clip videos, show 15-30 second ads before each one. Personally, I have stopped using these because I find it obnoxious. I get that they need to make money, but at some point, they crossed my personal threshold. The net is that we are more and more inundated with ads, and I wonder if the effectiveness of those ads will wane to a point where their value can no longer deliver the massive value upon which so many companies rely.
- brador 12y ago
  I recently reinstalled adblock after seeing my first 30 second ad on youtube. I had happily used the web for 3 years without it.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
- VLM 12y ago
  There is an interesting stickyness argument that the only reason I follow @melpa_emacs on twitter is because they won't send the data via a zillion other technically superior technologies. Why not email, RSS feed, facebook, nntp, finger protocol, status.net, IRC bot, ... When the only reason your platform gets traffic is legacy/laziness, network effects, and random selection, you're in very big long term trouble... You need your users to be worried, saying things like "OMG if they closed I'd have no idea how to work around" not "OMG I wish they'd shut down sooner rather than later so I'd have one less app to check"
rmsaksida 12y ago
I think the reason why Twitter is not an "everyone" product (even though it's marketed as such) is not the interface, but something way more essential: most people simply have no use for it. Twitter is good for people who are not only interested in constantly sharing their thoughts, but also have something interesting to say, otherwise they'd find no audience. In addition, they must be good at doing it in 140 characters. Even the ones who are strictly consumers on Twitter fit a niche - they're usually interested in some subject X which is tweeted about by certain people of note. My grandma doesn't have witty things to say all day, and any interest she might have on what other people say is supplied by Facebook. There is no way she'd ever do anything on Twitter besides signing up and immediately forgetting about it. The best UX in the world couldn't save Twitter for her. Twitter was able to find an active userbase because even if only 1% of people find it useful, that's plenty of people if you consider the human population. But it should never be seen as something that is useful for people in general. Regular people sign up because of marketing, but they never stay.
- jonnathanson 12y ago
  I think you've hit the nail on the head. Twitter's UX is painful, but that's really only the half of it. The real issue is that Twitter, regardless of how easy it can be made to use, is inherently useful to a very small proportion of people. I call it an "extrovert" product. I'm sure I'll catch some flak from bringing up the introvert/extrovert axis on HN (as if we don't get that topic often enough here!). But hear me out. Twitter is for people who like conferences. Twitter is for people who like stages. Twitter is for people who want to have conversations with each other, and also want the world to overhear those conversations. To me, at the other end of the spectrum, that behavior strikes me as weird. It seems painfully and willfully fake and artificial. It seems like so much peacocking, forced smiling, and posturing. It seems like "networking," in the most brutally painful sense of that word. I don't get it. I mean, I grok it, but it holds no interest for me. As an occasional journalist, I'm often told I "have" to use Twitter. It's "part of the job" to be a "public figure" these days. I'm not interested in being a public figure. I don't begrudge people who are. If anything, I envy and admire their ability to navigate the cognitive dissonance that the Twitter private-in-public dynamic forces. But I just can't do it. It drains me. I find using Twitter to be like doing homework, or eating my vegetables. It's not fun. It's a chore. When a consumer tech product feels like a chore, I don't bother; life's too short. Twitter is in an unfortunate situation, in that the company was forced to scale massively and go public at around the same time its true user base and use cases were emerging from the noise. Now it's in the unenviable position of having to make billions of dollars in revenue, and of having to compete with the likes of Facebook for a putative billion-something number of users (which it'll never get), when at its essence, Twitter is a restricted product. A substantial portion of the human population will never get any personal utility from using Twitter. Twitter isn't a bad product; it's just not everyone's cup of tea. I don't think there's anything Twitter can do to make me want to use it, and I don't think I'm alone in that sentiment. It's not you, Twitter. It's me.
rsync 12y ago
"A lot of people find it difficult to figure out what they should say, how to keep track of who they follow and simply how to engage with it." I have been using online messaging and chat since ... 1991 ? BBS forums, irc, unix talk, MUD/MOO, ICQ, classic mailing lists and thousands of web forums. I still find it hard to view a conversation thread on twitter. If I see a comment that is interesting, and is obviously part of a thread or conversation, it's still non-obvious how to view that entire conversation or respond to specific parts of it in any way that resembles a thread.

by ilghiro 12y ago

cpach 12y ago

Interesting. I had not thought about that aspect before. When I think of it, Facebook’s UI is probably a lot more easy to use for most people. And even then some still struggle :)

stingraycharles 12y ago

This is an insightful comment, and the takeaway discussion is: is Twitter a product for just "quite a lot of people", or can they bend it to a product for everyone? I think what investors are looking for is a move towards a product that is for everyone. But given that Twitter's core business / USP is precisely that it is not like "everything everyone else is using", could the conclusion thus be that investors had too high an expectation of what Twitter has to offer the world?

nhstanley 12y ago

Yea, I know it's a really tired subject, but twitter really needs a major overhaul from a usability perspective. I think they should keep the 140 characters as a limit for what is shown in peoples feeds, but the character limit should be much higher. This is particularly important when you get into a conversation with many people, and the handles start taking up most of your 140 characters (as Marc Andreessen recently pointed out). It's also really hard to follow conversations, and they get separated somewhat arbitrarily. You might scoff and say that this would basically facebook-ize twitter, but honestly I don't think that's a bad thing. Facebook is moving into twitter's space, so twitter shouldn't be be so slow to act or it will get eaten, IMHO. Also, I use twitter to keep up to date on some of the industries I'm interested in, and while it's a great tool it's still frustrating sometimes, since there is a flood of info throughout the day. TweetDeck makes it better since I can group things by interest and triage depending on how much time I have. I guess you can do that with the web interface but I have never found it as natural as with Tweetdeck.

diminish 12y ago
In similar lines here are my observations as a heavy business and personal user: 1. 140chars limit had a goal and philosophy which conflicts now with image attachment flood. Most "interesting" content is typed or pictured in the attachment and the 140char limit is simply worked around 2. Twitter UI is too clunky for what it does. No progress since 7 years I'm using it. 3. Twitter mobile apps don't work properly when mobile. You can't favorite, retweet or comment properly while in an unreachable zone. My 2008 hobby Android 1.1 app has a local queue to cope with remote updates, inserts and Twitter can't implement this? 4. Families aren't on Twitter. Friends to a certain degree. Colleagues to a certain degree. Celebrities/followers yes. Gamers no. Protestors yes. 5. Facebook, LinkedIn implemented the "follow" feature quite successfully. 6. Notifications work, Discover not much.
- randomsearch 12y ago
  > Twitter UI is too clunky for what it does. No progress since 7 years I'm using it. This. A million times this. I don't understand Twitter. I don't get what the hell they're thinking of, when they release (for example) the horrific design that is the Twitter desktop and Mobile apps. An incredibly common use case is to have more than one twitter account and switch between them. Go try it. A bunch of people brought out superior apps, and Twitter just killed them. If this is representative of the thinking going on at Twitter, they are (deservedly) doomed.
  - bjelkeman-again 12y ago
    Tweetbot has a good implementation of multiple accounts. Both on the Mac and iPhone.
    - comex 12y ago
      I use Tweetbot on both platforms, but I don't think its implementation is good. Good to me would be a merged feed with tweets and mentions from all accounts, analogous to what I can do with email, IRC, instant messaging, etc.; maybe not the best for opsec, but more convenient for casual purposes than having to constantly switch between accounts.

logicallee 12y ago

Well, take the wired telephone (please!) Of course, "everyone can use it" but I bet since its invention, a few power users have made 100x as many calls per week as the average person has. They're the real benefactors. The only difference is that on Twitter you get to see who is doing this.

unclebucknasty 12y ago

>recently their monetization offering (advertising platform) has become far more impressive. I wonder whether a saturation point will be reached with regard to our willingness to view ads in general. More specifically, might this happen in a way that impacts the viability of ad-supported models that rely on the "build an audience, then ad them to death" approach? Google Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, and others all command a great share of our attention and rely largely on the model. Youtube also seems to be showing more ads. I have also noticed that some sites which feature, say 1 minute or less news clip videos, show 15-30 second ads before each one. Personally, I have stopped using these because I find it obnoxious. I get that they need to make money, but at some point, they crossed my personal threshold. The net is that we are more and more inundated with ads, and I wonder if the effectiveness of those ads will wane to a point where their value can no longer deliver the massive value upon which so many companies rely.

brador 12y ago
I recently reinstalled adblock after seeing my first 30 second ad on youtube. I had happily used the web for 3 years without it.

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

VLM 12y ago
There is an interesting stickyness argument that the only reason I follow @melpa_emacs on twitter is because they won't send the data via a zillion other technically superior technologies. Why not email, RSS feed, facebook, nntp, finger protocol, status.net, IRC bot, ... When the only reason your platform gets traffic is legacy/laziness, network effects, and random selection, you're in very big long term trouble... You need your users to be worried, saying things like "OMG if they closed I'd have no idea how to work around" not "OMG I wish they'd shut down sooner rather than later so I'd have one less app to check"

rmsaksida 12y ago

I think the reason why Twitter is not an "everyone" product (even though it's marketed as such) is not the interface, but something way more essential: most people simply have no use for it. Twitter is good for people who are not only interested in constantly sharing their thoughts, but also have something interesting to say, otherwise they'd find no audience. In addition, they must be good at doing it in 140 characters. Even the ones who are strictly consumers on Twitter fit a niche - they're usually interested in some subject X which is tweeted about by certain people of note. My grandma doesn't have witty things to say all day, and any interest she might have on what other people say is supplied by Facebook. There is no way she'd ever do anything on Twitter besides signing up and immediately forgetting about it. The best UX in the world couldn't save Twitter for her. Twitter was able to find an active userbase because even if only 1% of people find it useful, that's plenty of people if you consider the human population. But it should never be seen as something that is useful for people in general. Regular people sign up because of marketing, but they never stay.

jonnathanson 12y ago
I think you've hit the nail on the head. Twitter's UX is painful, but that's really only the half of it. The real issue is that Twitter, regardless of how easy it can be made to use, is inherently useful to a very small proportion of people. I call it an "extrovert" product. I'm sure I'll catch some flak from bringing up the introvert/extrovert axis on HN (as if we don't get that topic often enough here!). But hear me out. Twitter is for people who like conferences. Twitter is for people who like stages. Twitter is for people who want to have conversations with each other, and also want the world to overhear those conversations. To me, at the other end of the spectrum, that behavior strikes me as weird. It seems painfully and willfully fake and artificial. It seems like so much peacocking, forced smiling, and posturing. It seems like "networking," in the most brutally painful sense of that word. I don't get it. I mean, I grok it, but it holds no interest for me. As an occasional journalist, I'm often told I "have" to use Twitter. It's "part of the job" to be a "public figure" these days. I'm not interested in being a public figure. I don't begrudge people who are. If anything, I envy and admire their ability to navigate the cognitive dissonance that the Twitter private-in-public dynamic forces. But I just can't do it. It drains me. I find using Twitter to be like doing homework, or eating my vegetables. It's not fun. It's a chore. When a consumer tech product feels like a chore, I don't bother; life's too short. Twitter is in an unfortunate situation, in that the company was forced to scale massively and go public at around the same time its true user base and use cases were emerging from the noise. Now it's in the unenviable position of having to make billions of dollars in revenue, and of having to compete with the likes of Facebook for a putative billion-something number of users (which it'll never get), when at its essence, Twitter is a restricted product. A substantial portion of the human population will never get any personal utility from using Twitter. Twitter isn't a bad product; it's just not everyone's cup of tea. I don't think there's anything Twitter can do to make me want to use it, and I don't think I'm alone in that sentiment. It's not you, Twitter. It's me.

rsync 12y ago

"A lot of people find it difficult to figure out what they should say, how to keep track of who they follow and simply how to engage with it." I have been using online messaging and chat since ... 1991 ? BBS forums, irc, unix talk, MUD/MOO, ICQ, classic mailing lists and thousands of web forums. I still find it hard to view a conversation thread on twitter. If I see a comment that is interesting, and is obviously part of a thread or conversation, it's still non-obvious how to view that entire conversation or respond to specific parts of it in any way that resembles a thread.