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The bigger problem with Twitter is how damn hard it is to use the service well. Twitter's value increases or decreases along with one's ability to curate his or

The bigger problem with Twitter is how damn hard it is to use the service well. Twitter's value increases or decreases along with one's ability to curate his or her feed. It seriously took me years of careful tweaking to get my feed (and lists) where I want them. Now Twitter is absolutely incredible; Twitter lets you be in a room with anybody in the world you want to. That's really, really cool. For me, that's startup legends and tech geniuses. I not only get to see what they're saying, but often what they're reading and thinking about. Because of that I wanted to see the feeds of some of the top tech investors look like, so I created them in lists. They're fascinating to watch (lists are here http://theireyes.austenallred.com/pages/viewlist http://theireyes.austenallred.com/pages/viewlist) But I look at so many of my friends who don't use it, or who have an account and don't log in, and it's almost always because they haven't taken the time to follow the right people. That's hard to do. Facebook is easy - my grandma knows me so she'll accept my friend request. Twitter, by its nature, forces you to be proactive in creating and culling that list. That's an action that most people don't take. So Twitter is trying something new - what if we put together lists of what people want and had those available as the logged-out homepage, letting people quickly get involved? It's an admirable effort, but look at the categories available: It recommends I search for stuff like #NationalDayOfPrayer or #BadBloodMusicVideo. The top categories right now are literally politicians, high-end fashion designers, nascar drivers, and hotels/travel agents. I get that they're trying to show you variety, but talk about shots in the dark. I don't know what the solution is. But I think Twitter's biggest problem is that it simply takes too much work before anyone gains value from Twitter. There are a lot of people on this planet who will never put that much work in before expecting something of value back out of a service.

newsreader 12y ago
Personally I find Facebook much more complicated to use than Twitter. Ever since I started using Twitter I use it all the time and I can go days without checking my Facebook account. Having said that, I do agree with your statement regarding friends having accounts that don't use them. I have a hard time convincing people to create a Twitter account.
josefresco 12y ago
Anecdotal but related... My dad (60+) and my sister (30+) both recently signed up for Twitter, and despite following less than 10 people each immediately found value. Their first follows were someone they knew, or wanted to follow for a specific reason. Not sure how many sign up without any intent - but I thought I'd share this counterpoint.
ihnorton 12y ago
It boggles my mind that Twitter still does not provide a built-in way to follow a hashtag.
- apetresc 12y ago
  The day they implement that is the day that hashtags stop being useful. "JOIN OUR SWEEPSTAKES TWEET US FOR A FREE IPHONE #apple #gameofthrones #facebook #mylittlepony #android #sex" That already happens now when the only incentive is to hit some random searcher. When you're guaranteed millions of eyeballs instantly? Twitter's spam-detection services are not up to the task, and that's not even counting the non-spam but over-eager users.
- leonroy 12y ago
  Considering the problems Twitter had in its earlier days just trying the basics performing well (which is a very hard problem, so not making a dig here) I'd imagine live hashtag filters for everyone would really slow down the service. It seems too much of a no-brainer feature to have so there has to be a technical reason why they haven't.
ErikAugust 12y ago
I agree with you completely, I wrote this almost a year ago: http://erikaugust.com/thoughts/twitter/ http://erikaugust.com/thoughts/twitter/ Twitter really is what you make it. A self-curated news/information source. That being said, Twitter just needs to make that user experience as easy as possible - during the on-boarding process. It could be as simple as figuring out your actual interests and recommending lists. Instead, Twitter asks me to follow Taylor Swift. They also do some geolocation stuff - asking me to follow the City of Colorado Springs. That is slightly better. But, what if, the "quickstart" prompted me to enter my interests? I would just type "#coding" - and @DHH, Carmack, and some others came up available as a list of Code Giants? I would be ensnared, instantly.
danudey 12y ago
Twitter actually recognizes this as a problem, and is working to ensure that people who haven't done this get more value from their feed, and people who have get less. I recently created a new twitter account (in addition to the one I've had since 2007), and the onboarding process is over-the-top frustrating. It almost forces you to choose celebrities, etc. that you're interested in, it nags you constantly to add more people, it even e-mails you about it. If I didn't know what Twitter was or why I wanted it, it would drive me away within the hour. Plus, they're showing favourites in your feed now, as if they were retweets, which means that your feed is getting cluttered with things that people didn't mean to share to you, that you may not want to see, whether you like it or not. Then if you visit someone's page on Twitter, it's no longer a simple list of tweets. There are older tweets that Twitter's algorithm likes more, then their more recent tweets, and they're all different sizes to draw your attention to the tweet Twitter thinks you should read, rather than whatever you might want to read. All in all, it reminds me of Facebook's non-chronological timeline. I look at my feed on FB, and I see a post from last week, then yesterday, then an hour ago, then two weeks ago, then last Tuesday, etc. It's a mess. I once refreshed my feed and saw two posts, back-to-back, from the same company. One talking about their livestream 'tomorrow' from the day before (i.e. the livestream was today), and one talking about how their hour-long livestream was starting in 'ten minutes' (from two hours ago). These were two items that were highly relevant and time-sensitive, and which didn't show up in my feed until after it was too late to do anything about them. On top of that, it often fails to show me content from people I care about (e.g. my wife) but shows me lots of 'someone-you-know commented on someone you've-never-heard-of's selfie'. It shows me three things that someone, whose posts I've never interacted with, posted today, but nothing my wife, whose posts I comment on, like, share, etc. all the time, posted today. Then, out of the blue, it 'surfaces' content from last week back to the top of my feed again. And this is what Twitter seems to be trying to do: figure out what we 'should' be looking at to 'drive engagement'. Because they can't create a sane onboarding procedure that accomplishes any of this, they're just going to start doing it to everyone, even non-logged-in users, in the hopes that the users they attract will be of higher value than the users they drive away.
- jen729w 12y ago
  Meanwhile the almost-banned 3rd party app I use on my phone - Tweetbot - shows me a clean, linear timeline. Exactly what I want. Exactly what keeps me coming back. They're driving their own service in to the ground. It's really sad.

newsreader 12y ago

Personally I find Facebook much more complicated to use than Twitter. Ever since I started using Twitter I use it all the time and I can go days without checking my Facebook account. Having said that, I do agree with your statement regarding friends having accounts that don't use them. I have a hard time convincing people to create a Twitter account.

josefresco 12y ago

Anecdotal but related... My dad (60+) and my sister (30+) both recently signed up for Twitter, and despite following less than 10 people each immediately found value. Their first follows were someone they knew, or wanted to follow for a specific reason. Not sure how many sign up without any intent - but I thought I'd share this counterpoint.

ihnorton 12y ago

It boggles my mind that Twitter still does not provide a built-in way to follow a hashtag.

apetresc 12y ago
The day they implement that is the day that hashtags stop being useful. "JOIN OUR SWEEPSTAKES TWEET US FOR A FREE IPHONE #apple #gameofthrones #facebook #mylittlepony #android #sex" That already happens now when the only incentive is to hit some random searcher. When you're guaranteed millions of eyeballs instantly? Twitter's spam-detection services are not up to the task, and that's not even counting the non-spam but over-eager users.
leonroy 12y ago
Considering the problems Twitter had in its earlier days just trying the basics performing well (which is a very hard problem, so not making a dig here) I'd imagine live hashtag filters for everyone would really slow down the service. It seems too much of a no-brainer feature to have so there has to be a technical reason why they haven't.

ErikAugust 12y ago

I agree with you completely, I wrote this almost a year ago: http://erikaugust.com/thoughts/twitter/ http://erikaugust.com/thoughts/twitter/ Twitter really is what you make it. A self-curated news/information source. That being said, Twitter just needs to make that user experience as easy as possible - during the on-boarding process. It could be as simple as figuring out your actual interests and recommending lists. Instead, Twitter asks me to follow Taylor Swift. They also do some geolocation stuff - asking me to follow the City of Colorado Springs. That is slightly better. But, what if, the "quickstart" prompted me to enter my interests? I would just type "#coding" - and @DHH, Carmack, and some others came up available as a list of Code Giants? I would be ensnared, instantly.

danudey 12y ago

Twitter actually recognizes this as a problem, and is working to ensure that people who haven't done this get more value from their feed, and people who have get less. I recently created a new twitter account (in addition to the one I've had since 2007), and the onboarding process is over-the-top frustrating. It almost forces you to choose celebrities, etc. that you're interested in, it nags you constantly to add more people, it even e-mails you about it. If I didn't know what Twitter was or why I wanted it, it would drive me away within the hour. Plus, they're showing favourites in your feed now, as if they were retweets, which means that your feed is getting cluttered with things that people didn't mean to share to you, that you may not want to see, whether you like it or not. Then if you visit someone's page on Twitter, it's no longer a simple list of tweets. There are older tweets that Twitter's algorithm likes more, then their more recent tweets, and they're all different sizes to draw your attention to the tweet Twitter thinks you should read, rather than whatever you might want to read. All in all, it reminds me of Facebook's non-chronological timeline. I look at my feed on FB, and I see a post from last week, then yesterday, then an hour ago, then two weeks ago, then last Tuesday, etc. It's a mess. I once refreshed my feed and saw two posts, back-to-back, from the same company. One talking about their livestream 'tomorrow' from the day before (i.e. the livestream was today), and one talking about how their hour-long livestream was starting in 'ten minutes' (from two hours ago). These were two items that were highly relevant and time-sensitive, and which didn't show up in my feed until after it was too late to do anything about them. On top of that, it often fails to show me content from people I care about (e.g. my wife) but shows me lots of 'someone-you-know commented on someone you've-never-heard-of's selfie'. It shows me three things that someone, whose posts I've never interacted with, posted today, but nothing my wife, whose posts I comment on, like, share, etc. all the time, posted today. Then, out of the blue, it 'surfaces' content from last week back to the top of my feed again. And this is what Twitter seems to be trying to do: figure out what we 'should' be looking at to 'drive engagement'. Because they can't create a sane onboarding procedure that accomplishes any of this, they're just going to start doing it to everyone, even non-logged-in users, in the hopes that the users they attract will be of higher value than the users they drive away.

jen729w 12y ago
Meanwhile the almost-banned 3rd party app I use on my phone - Tweetbot - shows me a clean, linear timeline. Exactly what I want. Exactly what keeps me coming back. They're driving their own service in to the ground. It's really sad.