5 ms·

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 att

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.
    - bjelkeman-again 12y ago
      Ah, different use cases. The way it works at the moment is what I was looking for, but I can see when it isn't suitable.
  - Andrex 12y ago
    TweetDeck, which is owned by Twitter, handles it very well, too.
- olefoo 12y ago
  Twitter has what can be described as the organizational version of ADHD. They've had several changes of leadership and have had leaders who were primarily focused on other companies while guiding twitter. Jack Dorsey is an impressive person but do you think he could really give his full attention to Twitter while running Square? The churn at the top is the best explanation I can find for some of the policy reversals we've seen (3rd party clients in, out, in again maybe sort of) and the somewhat random approach to business strategy. Twitter's core audience is a very desirable demographic but not one that's really going to react to in-stream adds at all positively. But twitter doesn't do some of the clever things it could with the firehose; and certainly doesn't use it to create secondary products that would be useful enough that businesses would pay for them.
makmanalp 12y ago
> 140chars limit had a goal and philosophy which conflicts now with image attachment flood. Sidenote, I always thought the goal and philosophy was invented after of the the technical limitation, which was that a tweet needed to fit into an SMS.
- scintill76 12y ago
  Agreed. I'm not a heavy Twitter user, but I'm not sure it's a good philosophy to force users to revise and revise until they get something unnaturally terse enough, after sacrificing precious space to ancillary items (at-mentions, or even hashtags) they can't necessarily control the length of. I can see value in brevity, but when it's forced, it may actually impede communication. It gets hacked around anyways, with multi-part tweets, even by Twitter's own developer account[0]. At the least, there are tweet clusters, where each individual tweet may be a complete sentence but doesn't effectively convey the entirety of what the author meant, without reading the surrounding tweets (in reverse order, of course.) At those points, it would be saner to abandon the limit. Or maybe treat it as a one-way linkblog to other places for discussion. [0] https://twitter.com/TwitterDev/status/530545195633618945 https://twitter.com/TwitterDev/status/530545195633618945
Florin_Andrei 12y ago
> Celebrities/followers yes. Twitter is the new RSS, just less nerdy, basically.
- jacquesm 12y ago
  That's a reasonable observation.

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.
  - bjelkeman-again 12y ago
    Ah, different use cases. The way it works at the moment is what I was looking for, but I can see when it isn't suitable.
- Andrex 12y ago
  TweetDeck, which is owned by Twitter, handles it very well, too.
olefoo 12y ago
Twitter has what can be described as the organizational version of ADHD. They've had several changes of leadership and have had leaders who were primarily focused on other companies while guiding twitter. Jack Dorsey is an impressive person but do you think he could really give his full attention to Twitter while running Square? The churn at the top is the best explanation I can find for some of the policy reversals we've seen (3rd party clients in, out, in again maybe sort of) and the somewhat random approach to business strategy. Twitter's core audience is a very desirable demographic but not one that's really going to react to in-stream adds at all positively. But twitter doesn't do some of the clever things it could with the firehose; and certainly doesn't use it to create secondary products that would be useful enough that businesses would pay for them.

makmanalp 12y ago

> 140chars limit had a goal and philosophy which conflicts now with image attachment flood. Sidenote, I always thought the goal and philosophy was invented after of the the technical limitation, which was that a tweet needed to fit into an SMS.

scintill76 12y ago
Agreed. I'm not a heavy Twitter user, but I'm not sure it's a good philosophy to force users to revise and revise until they get something unnaturally terse enough, after sacrificing precious space to ancillary items (at-mentions, or even hashtags) they can't necessarily control the length of. I can see value in brevity, but when it's forced, it may actually impede communication. It gets hacked around anyways, with multi-part tweets, even by Twitter's own developer account[0]. At the least, there are tweet clusters, where each individual tweet may be a complete sentence but doesn't effectively convey the entirety of what the author meant, without reading the surrounding tweets (in reverse order, of course.) At those points, it would be saner to abandon the limit. Or maybe treat it as a one-way linkblog to other places for discussion. [0] https://twitter.com/TwitterDev/status/530545195633618945 https://twitter.com/TwitterDev/status/530545195633618945

Florin_Andrei 12y ago

> Celebrities/followers yes. Twitter is the new RSS, just less nerdy, basically.

jacquesm 12y ago
That's a reasonable observation.