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What Twitter Can Be

244 points by coloneltcb 11y ago

jbob2000 11y ago
Twitter will never "be" because I don't want what I say to be on the record forever. It's too personal and too unpredictable. Make a corny joke and you lose your job. Be a pretty girl and get harassed. Say something against common opinion and get harassed. It's not that this happens all the time, but the risk far outweighs the benefits. Like anything, it's nice when it's a small tight-knit group of people using it, but when it's open to the masses, it loses any value it once had.
moxyb 11y ago
I think he's describing the perfect digital news platform that I would think of.
- lucianmarin 11y ago
  Did you try https://sublevel.net https://sublevel.net? It’s very close to perfect.
- therein 11y ago
  That's what I was thinking by the end of the article as well. He definitely described a platform that I would be excited to use. And I am among the 1 billion that tried Twitter and didn't stick around. His idea reminds me of a hackathon project I worked on a few years ago with some friends. We built an app that communicates its location to the backend. Our backend runs k-means clustering and decision forests to cluster tweets coming in realtime through the Firehose API to associate them to an event that's happening nearby. The app then uses the incoming stream of tweets to provide realtime coverage on an event that was algorithmically detected.
- austenallred 11y ago
  I think what you're imagining is pretty much what we've been building for a year or so, but I could be wrong. It seems obvious - a lot of "news reports" nowadays are pretty much a couple lines of text with a bunch of tweets dropped down beneath them. But making that scalable is actually pretty difficult. The first difficulty (and we've confirmed this and talked about the problem multiple times with directors of product at Twitter) is finding what the "best" stuff is. We tried some time ago doing that for news - can we just algorithmically find the best tweets with regard to topic x? Even given full API access, the answer is either "not really" or "yes, but austenallred and his team aren't good enough programmers to figure it out." There simply aren't enough inputs - it's the same reason Google has always struggled at real-time news. There are favorites and retweets, but those are largely a function of how big someone's following is. Some guy walking on the street taking amazing photos will never have as many retweets as CNN, even if you try to control for the number of followers, or measure retweets as a function of the number of followers somehow. Then even if you could get that, the tweets aren't always analyzed in the right context. Run that type of analysis and the top tweet is likely to be a joke tweet or something like "OMG I'm praying for Boston." The best solution that we can come up with is crowdsourcing the finding and curation of tweets. It's working OK, but there's a long way to go. Basically we let everyone find and submit tweets, tag them with specific topics, and then upvote/downvote and fact-check for accuracy. (for details on how it works, see https://grasswire.com/about https://grasswire.com/about) Once you add a couple lines of text, you can turn the raw firehose of Twitter into something that can be consumed by somebody like my mom. That, I think, it a really big deal. It's working fairly well for news right now, and as more people join and submit it gets better. Our hopes are that we can expand into different verticals, and create daily digests of the best stuff with regard to topic x that you can consume in 30 seconds.
  - tomrod 11y ago
    Where can I find what you're building?
    - austenallred 11y ago
      https://grasswire.com https://grasswire.com We basically see this as the back-end that could power some really cool stuff (apps, partnerships with publishers)
      - har777 11y ago
        I'm nitpicking but the lack of a scrollbar makes me feel strangely out of control. Any specific reason for the removal ?
  - waterlesscloud 11y ago
    One thing the article writer comes back to several times is the idea of human editors. He's right. The insistence of tech companies on algorithms is understandable, but it's also incredibly limiting. I think of it as the "Google mindset" (it hurts them too). In the end, you need live people involved. You can do SO much more with even just a few live curators. Looking from the outside, insisting that they aren't needed is deeply weird.
- covercash 11y ago
  Yeah, I got that as well. And it just so happens, Sacca is an investor in http://nuzzel.com http://nuzzel.com Edit: unsure of the downvotes - I feel like this is relevant info to the parent comment.
  - vonklaus 11y ago
    At one point Sacca was the biggest investor in twitter from his own personal investments, raising funds, and buying early employees out. He tried this at Uber too. Kalinick shut that down super quick, and I think he is banned from the premises.
- personlurking 11y ago
  IMHO, Twitter should only act as a digital news platform. I usually search for (the same) specific terms and look at nothing else. If Twitter knew this, they could make the whole experience way more seamless and pleasant for me (saved searches and following is a pretty long work-around). The problem with such a platform would be how to know if someone in a riot (for ex.) is posting 'news' or not. This seems to be where channels would go a long way to sorting through the hay to find the needle.
marssaxman 11y ago
Nothing in there about turning it into a decentralized open network instead of a proprietary service, so I will continue not to care about Twitter.
- themagician 11y ago
  We tried that. It didn't stick. You have to remember that in the early days Twitter and a log of competition. Jaiku, Pownce, Google Buzz, FriendFeed, etc.. Then you had the open source versions: Laconi.ca, Status.net, Friendi.ca, GNU Social, Twister, etc.. Say what you will about Twitter, but it's the only thing that ever got traction or had any sticking power.
  - marssaxman 11y ago
    Sure, I observe that it has succeeded. I'm just not willing to invest any time or attention in it, since I've learned my lesson with proprietary communication platforms!
  - brador 11y ago
    How did Twitter get traction and sticking power where the others failed? What was it doing differently?
    - eclipxe 11y ago
      Celebrities, media, "normals".
    - pkamb 11y ago
      "tweet" became a verb and noun.
    - Torgo 11y ago
      I think it's because they iterated really fast on new features, and presumably stayed with what was popular. Original Twitter isn't even all that close to what Twitter is today. gnusocial is playing catchup featurewise, moves much slower, and frankly the default theme is really ugly.
austenallred 11y ago
Twitter’s biggest problem is that Twitter increases or decreases in value along with user’s willingness to curate their feed. Many will never do that. So Twitter tries to do the work for you, but guessing exactly who/what you’d be interested in without tons of info is virtually impossible. The closest they can get is the current logged-out homepage: “Here are a bunch of random categories. You like the NBA? Maybe celebrity chefs? Cute animals? Country artists?” (Those are literal examples.) Total shot in the dark.
- declan 11y ago
  >"guessing exactly who/what you’d be interested in without tons of info is virtually impossible." That was my intuition as well. But it turns out that you can generate good recommendations without tons of info -- as long as you are selective about what signals you use. We learned this firsthand when building https://recent.io/ https://recent.io/ for news recommendations -- the backend is able to generate relevant suggestions that appear in the app after users have read an average of 5 articles. That's based on real-world user testing. If Twitter recognizes repeat visits by people who don't (yet) have accounts, it should be able to try a similar approach. On the other hand it took a while for us to get it right.
- azazo 11y ago
  I see this as the biggest problem with Twitter also. Twitter is my favorite app, but it's because I have spent five plus years curating my feed. There is a fundamental problem with the way they onboard new users and this is why so many people don't stick around. The onboarding process asks you to select interests and then recommends people to follow based on those interests. However, they often recommend celebrities and 'popular' accounts. These people are often terrible at Twitter, so new users see a bunch of boring, self-promotional content in their feed and don't come back.
  - minthd 11y ago
    That's true. Most of the recommendations are crap. Got any recommendations to finding high signal/noise users or lists ?
ThePhysicist 11y ago
For me, the biggest problem with Twitter are their Draconian rules concerning third-party apps. I had several ideas for cool apps built on top of the Twitter API (e.g. a Twitter-based news aggregator, an online volunteering app, ...), but each time I gave up on the idea after reading the terms of their developer program: No showing of tweets with content from other social networks, no altering in the presentation of tweets, very severe rate limits, .... I think if Twitter wad a little less paranoid about protecting their content they could actually become a viable and useful communication tool for a large part of the Internet (even more than today).
- state 11y ago
  But how exactly do they make money on developers using their API?
  - Igglyboo 11y ago
    Charge for less rate limiting? As the app grows the usage grows and twitter makes more money.
  - krisdol 11y ago
    The way I see it, third party applications increase the value of using twitter, bringing more users to it. Twitter as a social sharing tool has very little value to me, personally, but as a chat tool, marketing tool, or customer support tool I think it has a lot of potential. Its presentation/UX is not very optimized for those experiences, though -- and that's why third party apps exist. If an open source project builds its chatroom on top of twitter, that's a huge value-add and would bring people to use twitter in order to efficiently communicate with the company, in the same way people use Slack because companies host their support on it. By the way, I think their rate limiting is fine for most third party apps. There is a lot that can be done with intermediate caching and the Streaming API.
    - lotso 11y ago
      Brings value is not the same as brings money.
josu 11y ago
The author of the article is Chris Sacca.
- mountaineer 11y ago
  Chris has said he's going to be more vocal and clarified his stake in Twitter[1]. [1] http://lowercasecapital.com/2015/05/21/i-bleed-aqua/ http://lowercasecapital.com/2015/05/21/i-bleed-aqua/
rrggrr 11y ago
"Tweet nearby" & "Encrypted tweet nearby" & "P2P Tweet": These three functions would blow the lid off active user growth. Across the globe Twitter remains a key means for promoting events, demonstrations and encouraging political action. Give users the means to reach by locale (Concert), and securely by locale (Flash mob), and P2P (Iran, Syria, China) -- and sit back and watch the audience skyrocket.
- aaron-lebo 11y ago
  Perhaps I'm misunderstanding your point on Iran, Syria, China, but you are talking about subverting authoritarian governments, right? Why wouldn't those same governments require Twitter to cut those off? I don't see how a centralized service like Twitter can ever provide that.
  - themeek 11y ago
    You are right to point this out. The United States has tried many times to use social media platforms to cause uprising in other nations. These very same nations (including the ones enumerated above) do cut off the services. Take the US installation of ZunZuneo in Cuba and the governments crackdown on personal phones in response - China's ban of Google for US influence and foreign surveillance - Russia's machinations against Facebook for influencing its audience - Kiev's ban of CSOs as Western organization through UNITER was revealed - North Korea's hacking of SONY in response to its partnership with the US State Department and CIA on The Interview - Israel's hatred over Jeremy Bird's participation in "OneVoice" political campaigning over Twitter - etc, etc. Continuing to use US private companies as soft weapons will increasingly harm the reputations and global standing of these corporations. The military-industrial complex gig is up. Other nations know what's happening. It's merely a matter of denying the company access to a population while making it look not so bad from the PR side.
lawl 11y ago
Twitter died to me when they closed down their API's.
- chippy 11y ago
  I remember hearing presentations from their devs about twitter annotations, metadata etc. Such enthusiasm at those times.
Animats 11y ago
"Shortcomings in the direct response advertising category have resulted in the company coming in below the financial community’s quarterly estimates." Well, yes. The problem with all social networks is that ads interfere with the "social". Ads are a big annoying guy getting in your face when you're trying to talk to someone. Or worse, they're your (soon to be former) "friends" who've been tricked into "sharing" (i.e. spamming) ads. Remember, Twitter's big period of growth was before they had ads. They only put in ads when they had users hooked. The first one is always free.
- notahacker 11y ago
  The direct effect of Twitter ads isn't that bad; by the standards of web advertising it's hardly intrusive. It's the probable side effects of optimising for that revenue stream that are the trouble. One of Twitter's virtues from an advertiser's perspective is that most recent Tweets are often barely more compelling than than whatever message or link they're trying to promote. Streams which efficiently filter out irrelevance mitigate against that[1]. Reverse chronological order with ads interspersed is probably a local optimum for ad discoverability, and I bet the marketing guys test that.... Same goes for the risks of allowing any old third party to build the next successful Twitter platform on their API when they know "filter out the ads" is going to be a much-requested feature. Being more controversial, I still can't help thinking that whilst Twitter has long made a virtue of brevity, 140 characters is just too restrictive for the average non-regular user. It's often not enough to convey the reason why people should go to an obfuscated link, never mind enough for a person not used to truncating their thoughts to express a view that doesn't involve an image or a third party site. I'm not interested in receiving Tweets by SMS, but would find Twitter streams a whole lot more engaging if they tended to be 250-400 characters. [1]of course this is what the portal promoters thought in the pre Google era. But since then Facebook and LinkedIn's heavily polluted streams have been highly successful, and Twitter has even less potential to become primarily a search tool rather than a way to stumble over moderately interesting content, some of it promoted.
moey 11y ago
Serious question people, out of the people here that USE Twitter, how much would you pay a month for Twitter, if anything? http://directpoll.com/v?XDVhEtRR2EAlaVw2sOrQkWlBcohF0N2Z http://directpoll.com/v?XDVhEtRR2EAlaVw2sOrQkWlBcohF0N2Z I value the service, and am wondering what other people value it at. I will post the results here after set number of people vote. UPDATE Initially I was going to wait a little longer, but after looking at the results from this sample, the trend is pretty be predictable. RESULTS LINK: (VIEW AFTER VOTING PLEASE) http://directpoll.com/r?XDVhEtRR2EAlaVw2sOrQkWlBcohFw9na8aNcxY0oMnk http://directpoll.com/r?XDVhEtRR2EAlaVw2sOrQkWlBcohFw9na8aNc... I think the results deserve a discussion on their own...
- arxpoetica 11y ago
  I can't imagine ever paying for Twitter—but then, I thought it was a joke when I first heard of it, and I was wrong. ;)
- lfowles 11y ago
  Your poll is blocked at work, but I would feel comfortable paying per outgoing tweet, somewhat like SMS. In fact, let's extend that with two plans: $20/mo unlimited tweets 1¢/tweet, top up your account a dollar at a time
- petercooper 11y ago
  That's a tricky question, because while I would pay, say, $5 per month for it, if every existing user had to pay $5 for it, the value would decrease significantly as most people probably wouldn't pay that much and it'd decrease my reach. If I were to pay merely for added benefits over what I have now, it entirely depends on what they would be..
- aaronbrethorst 11y ago
  http://blog.app.net/2014/05/06/app-net-state-of-the-union/ http://blog.app.net/2014/05/06/app-net-state-of-the-union/
  - moey 11y ago
kin 11y ago
At first Twitter was awesome because of their API but then that closed off so now I have to use their stuff only I feel as if they haven't done anything in the past few years but scale. I've tried being a user for years but they really need a better way to manage and view lists. The frequency of celebrity tweets vs. friend tweets vs. company tweets is all different. How I ingest that content is differs depending on my mood or what I want. Thus far, there's no easy way to sort through the content to quickly find what I'm looking for or interested in. It all requires endless scrolling and weeding out the noise.
- nicolewhite 11y ago
  What is it about Twitter's list manager that doesn't address this issue for you?
  - guelo 11y ago
    I've actually found it more usable to create different accounts for my different interests.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  - mountaineer 11y ago
    It sounds like the effort of keeping the lists updated and current to provide that separation. It is possible to consume Twitter in this way, but perhaps not worth the effort of keeping the lists updated, you've really got to work at it?
  - walterbell 11y ago
    It does not exist on mobile?
    - kaws 11y ago
      Personal Profile > Settings Cog > Lists
sirbetsalot 11y ago
of course the author misses the biggest reason twitter sucks. Abuse, fake accounts, and trolling cause more "authentic" real name users to leave every day. Twitter does nothing to punish people who can just grab a picture of you from the net, create and account and start ruining your reputation instantly. And we all know you can't win against a troll unless you out troll them with your own bots. Twitter is the stained toilet bowl of human interaction. Twitter would instantly better if it forced real names and banned people for abusive comments outright. Until then, Twitter is unusable.
- cmdrfred 11y ago
  https://twitter.com/REALsirbetsalot https://twitter.com/REALsirbetsalot
- walterbell 11y ago
  http://techcrunch.com/2012/07/29/surprisingly-good-evidence-that-real-name-policies-fail-to-improve-comments/ http://techcrunch.com/2012/07/29/surprisingly-good-evidence-... "In 2007, South Korea temporarily mandated that all websites with over 100,000 viewers require real names, but scrapped it after it was found to be ineffective at cleaning up abusive and malicious comments (the policy reduced unwanted comments by an estimated .09%)." http://www.wired.com/2014/08/forcing-commenters-to-use-real-names-wont-root-out-the-trolls/ http://www.wired.com/2014/08/forcing-commenters-to-use-real-... "The better thing to do is to verify what someone knows, not the name someone goes by. Our fear of anonymity is an extension of our fear of the unknown. Without a recognizable name, these commenters could be anyone! But if we could associate an internet history, even a brief one, to that handle, the human connection becomes instantly apparent. A great example of this is Disqus and its universal login, which creates a history of comments (and flags) across all sites."
- ohitsdom 11y ago
  Unusable? I'm sure there's a lot of noise for people that have a decent following, but I think most people don't have these problems. Certainly not to the extent that the entire platform is unusable.
shortstuffsushi 11y ago
This article at one point proposes splitting content into separate apps. I'm unsure of the end goal of this; I guess that it's trying to provide a clearer divide for users, allowing them to filter content in a sense. It seems like this would be better solved by filtering better within the app, separating apps is just going to lead to more confusion, imo.
walterbell 11y ago
Twitter lists (especially in combination with Flipboard) are useful for filtering/curation, but have seen few improvements and remain unavailable in the mobile app. Lists could exhibit business value comparable to Pinterest curation, if Twitter paid any attention to the feature. They are micro-social networks that amplify the value of Twitter's main accomplishment: a directory of pseudonymns for writers, marketers, subject-matter experts and other publishers of time-sensitive content.
- minthd 11y ago
  How do you combine twitter list with flipboard?
  - walterbell 11y ago
    Username (top left corner) -> Following -> Accounts -> Twitter -> Your Lists -> Follow
- DaveWalk 11y ago
  What ever happened to Flipboard? It seemed very cutting edge when it debuted years ago. Now I can never remember it's there to browse.
hagope 11y ago
One of the best use cases of twitter for me is customer service, a few complaints about @comcast is way more effective than calling and waiting on the phone for 20 minutes and fighting with the customer service agent... I was able to resolve my issue with a few back and forth DMs with @comcastcares ... I don't think many people have enjoyed this experience, it's like night and day.
- jeffmould 11y ago
  I couldn't agree more. Comcast is a great example of customer service handled perfectly via Twitter in my opinion. I can get Comcast issues resolved in minutes via Twitter compared to hours trying to explain it over the phone.
- GurnB 11y ago
  I admit that I have used @Amazon to make a Smart Alec comment about a missing/delayed delivery and was pleasently surprised that I was contacted within an hour to DM them the details so they could resolve the matter.
- babuskov 11y ago
  Yup. I also resolved my issue with Ubisoft UPlay much faster via Twitter message.
- bentcorner 11y ago
  Customer service via twitter just feels wrong to me. I'm a low-frequency twitter user so maybe I don't "get it", but it feels very much like shouting into the void. There's no feedback saying "yeah, we heard you". Whereas with a phone call you're actively navigating their support structure, or with a contact form, where you have a tracking id in your email box.
  - cauterize 11y ago
    Does it feel right to a part of the consensus customers should have regarding large companies? It does for me. The Comcast site has a form you can fill out to remove you from their snail mail list. As someone has been a customer for 4 years, getting advertisements in my mailbox made me irrationally angry. I filled out the form but saw no drop in volume. Taking my silly issue public via Twitter helped get the problem resolved. I had a sense of pride knowing I publicly shamed Comcast enough that they did something about their poor mailing practices. And it only took a few days and maybe 500 total characters.
normloman 11y ago
I used to be on twitter. Left because nobody talks with you, just at you. And when you do actually get a conversation going, it's hard to follow when it's thrown in the same chronological time line with other conversations. The hashtag doesn't do much to foster conversation either. Merely a way to label slogans. This dichotomy between being a public feed but also being a place for conversations is at the core of why twitter sucks.
- bduerst 11y ago
  I was in the same boat until I tried Periscope. I ended up questioning some news anchors for an hour yesterday on one of the feeds, and the thought hit me about how much better this was than just the news.
- mahouse 11y ago
  That depends on whether you carry your friends there with you or not, I guess. I don't see why it should be different to Facebook in that regard. (I have probably sent thousands of DMs over the years.)
- untog 11y ago
  it's hard to follow when it's thrown in the same chronological time line with other conversations That, at least, shouldn't be the case. Your conversations live in the Notifications tab.
  - sp332 11y ago
    Twitter's conversation handling has improved a lot lately.
    - frik 11y ago
      Can you give an example?
      - sp332 11y ago
        These lines for conversations are new. If you follow the original poster and one of the people replying, it will pull out their responses and put them right in the timeline with a blue line. It sorts in your timeline according to the latest reply from someone you follow. Below that, you can see someone replying to themselves in a longer series of tweets, and Twitter folds them up so they don't clutter your timeline too bad.
antidaily 11y ago
Exactly why everyone moved over to App.net, right? Right, guys??
smhg 11y ago
This might sound very weird in this day and age, but in my professional life (web developer), Twitter and G+ compete content-wise. And G+ wins easily. Disclaimer: I'm a very light Twitter user. I'm almost surely missing out on features I never bothered to discover. The main advantage G+ has in my eyes is its signal to noise ratio. It seems far better than Twitter's. Again, specifically in my professional world, quite a lot of relevant people post on G+. I guess they either don't post personal stuff or efficiently use Circles. Many, but definitely not all, are of course close to Google. Some other advantages for me: the fact that you can read the whole story (not just sentence-per-sentence) and the -theoretical- ability to drag in non-professional relationships (yes, I like Circles). I realize no one takes G+ serious anymore and that it's a graveyard for most. But it seems to work well for some (professionally). In a way it can make Twitter lose (one of) its edge(s): follow tech-people. This isn't meant as a G+ promotion. I just wanted to make clear why Twitter might not be a good fit for some.
- theVirginian 11y ago
  Whereas some people I know have twitter and very few use it regularly, I have never even met someone who has a G+ and very few people I know would even recognize it as a social network over a simple rebranding of their gmail account.
  - darklajid 11y ago
    G+ is what you have to use for YouTube insults and to rate the applications on your Android phone, ignoring that they might be free, cost a couple bucks or be > 10 $currency. If you want to give feedback, join the 'social network'. (That's especially fun if applications, even 'paid' applications, try to 'encourage' you to rate in the Play Store. "Look, Yatse. I love what you are doing. But I CANNOT rate you. Firefox? You guys are my heroes. But I CANNOT rate you.".) G+ is not a failed social network, it's no network and certainly not social. It's a constant slap in the face.
    - soylentcola 11y ago
      So...it's your Google profile that they use across their services. That's like saying you can't rate an iOS app because it requires an iTunes account. The social stuff can be used or ignored as you see fit.
derekmasters 11y ago
Perhaps he should have included this, "we stopped talking about arab spring once we realized how it was a bad job that pushed people into depeer shit, perhaps now is the time to lift the carpet again and start talking about how we can build better tools that are powerful enough to put these fucked up countries back together"
jusben1369 11y ago
The thing about Twitter is that it should have been TV vs trying to be channels. I don't know why they were never comfortable enough in their skin to let third parties extend the living heck out of their platform. Using Twitter and getting a Gen 1.0 iPhone were very similar experiences. Pretty much wow and thinking the sky was the limit (vs what they actually were initially). Apple harnessed an app developer community and made their product 10x more valuable. Twitter locked everyone out. I always thought the Twitter competitor launched by Dalton (App.net) totally missed the boat. We didn't need a paid service to save us from ads we needed an open free platform that drew in millions and millions of users to draw in app developers etc. That would have crushed Twitter.
- akrymski 11y ago
  Except that TVs are commodities compared to channels. They didn't want to commoditise their own business.
  - jusben1369 11y ago
    hah well all analogies break down if you peck at them long enough. Twitter should have enabled developers to create great things on their medium vs trying to be both the platform and the app creator.
    - SandersAK 11y ago
      But the analogy doesn't break down. The value is in owning the medium. This is exactly why entities like comcast don't want to become dumb pipes. yes it is better for everyone if they do, but in their shorter term interest, it's much better to own the high value stuff.
      - jusben1369 11y ago
        It does breakdown. Twitter done right is a marketplace with network effects. ISP is an easily replaceable service. If I'm CNN I can't just pick up and leave Twitter for another Twitter at a lower cost. Same thing all the way down to a tech company with 10 people who use it to communicate outrages. People are already there. They expect you to be there too.
throw_it_away 11y ago
Honest question: I've tried Twitter a bunch of times, tried to engage with it for a couple weeks, then given up when I felt that either the tweets were not curated enough for me or that nobody was listening to me. Is there some guide for technically literate people to start using Twitter effectively? Right now I use Feedly and blogs to serve this purpose, but the appeal of real time news a la Twitter seems quite sweet, if only I could tap into it.
- Tevin 11y ago
  I didn't get much out of twitter until I had a community I became involved in and had a product I wanted to promote. Though I don't have a ton of followers I mostly use it to track what other people are talking about and start conversations when possible. So to answer your question, I think users get the most out of it who have a need or want for actively engaging in <em>something</em>. My followers who I do interact with most are either other creators or heavily-invested fan.
- janfoeh 11y ago
  Yes, please! From other peoples' descriptions, I can rationally understand what benefit Twitter brings them, but I have never been able to replicate that for myself. I have always walked away, convinced that it's a real-time medium that requires constant attention, because I find it to be nigh impossible to read up on any discussion ex post facto. That is especially true for any discussion with more than two participants — those are tree-ish in nature to me, and for the life of me I cannot figure out how anybody makes sense of them in Twitters one-dimensional chronological organisation. Help please?
  - binxbolling 11y ago
    To steal someone else's metaphor, try thinking of Twitter as a river. If you try to bottle it up or consume it all you'll drown. If, on the other hand, you dip in for a swim as you please, you might find it all bit more manageable. As the rush of tweets flows by you, just check out some, then turn your phone off and carry on. When you load it again, don't feel you have to go back and "catch up" or give it the constant attention you mentioned. YMMV, but I also think the emphasis on "conversations" is a bit misleading. Lots of people do have conversations on there, but I personally love it for breaking news, link-sharing, jokes, and photos. If your frame of reference is a forum with posts, or an article's comments, or a real-life conversation... you're going to have a bad time.
firasd 11y ago
This is a great essay (and shows that even if it’s predictable, it’s always good to balance criticism with praise, support, and a sense of a positive path forward.) As for Sacca’s suggestions, I have mixed feelings on the specific features he suggests for encouraging people to Tweet more (“Tweeting Shouldn’t Be So Scary”) and increasing engagement (“Using Twitter Doesn’t Need To Feel As Lonely”) but I like his suggestions about improving the timeline: “Live Is The Biggest Opportunity Yet.” This is the section he describes most lucidly and is the simplest to implement on top of the existing product. It’s currently done in a ham-fisted way—where I am in India it prods me with modal dialogs about cricket matches!—but there will need to be less prodding if it’s built as a standard set of pages where you can follow the best tweets for a sporting event, TV show or news topic while the situation is ongoing even if you’re logged out. It’s a bit like following a hashtag, with some curation and highlighting of popular tweets on the topic thrown in. “Channels Will Make Twitter Easy, Easy, Easy.” I sort of lost the thread in the middle of reading this in terms of figuring out exactly how this is different from Live or other category based curated tweets but I kinda get it. These are his examples: “Want to know what are the most popular articles linked to on Twitter? That should be a channel. What are the most popular sites linked among the people we follow or people that our friends follow? Great channel. Which books are people Tweeting about? Channel. Which videos are garnering the most attention? Channel. Any particular .gifs blowing up? Channel.” “Twitter’s Save Button Would Let You Keep All The Good Stuff.” This is a relatively complex concept and would be difficult to implement in a clear way but I like the idea. “We could keep every product we saw mentioned, every book that looked interesting, every destination we wanted to visit someday, every concert we wanted to go see, and every ad that piqued our curiosity. All of this could be saved to a Vault within Twitter with just one button in line with the RT and Fav buttons in each Tweet.”
yueq 11y ago
Don't pump. You might consider $WB stock which is way undervalued comparing to $TWTR.
lukasm 11y ago
> For most people, Twitter is too hard to use. I don't know how to use twitter and I don't care. Why? Cognitive overhead. I use facebook messenger, whatsapp, HN, stackoverflow, github, Linkedin.
codingdave 11y ago
The scariest statistic in that article is that one billion users tried twitter, then walked away. I'm sure some of those are novelty accounts that just never took off, not truly unique users, but that is still a ton of people who already wrote twitter off as irrelevant to their life. That is a large hurdle to overcome. Where are you going to grow your userbase if that many people already made their decision against you? I can assure you, that is not a tech question, it is a marketing issue.
joshyg 11y ago
I think their time has passed. Social media is not like tv. With t.v., People want good new shows, they don't care if they're from nbc or hbo or someone new. With social media people actually want a new medium every few years. I don't think there is any feature Twitter could add that will overcome this fact.
adventured 11y ago
"Though you wouldn’t know it by looking at the stock price or by reading the headlines, Twitter is owed recognition for ramping up their product development" Sacca is incorrect when it comes to Twitter's stock price. They're being given an epic benefit of the doubt on their valuation. Few companies get that sort of charity; ask Groupon, Angie's List, Etsy, etc. about that. They're substantially overvalued by any normal market standards. A $24b market cap for a company that has never - in nearly a decade of existence - earned a profit; worse, they've bled a billion in red ink over that time. It's also trading at a rich sales multiple of about 16.
soheil 11y ago
If I were still at Twitter I'd do anything to get Chris on the team.
aswanson 11y ago
Maybe its just me, im too old and not famous enough...but Twitter just seems to me to be a celebrity (that includes fame of any kind) circle jerk...and if you're not famous, you dont exist. Its weird. I hated fb towards the end of my usage of it...but at least like the old sitcom 'Cheers', at least sometimes you could go 'where everybody knows your name...'
ColinWright 11y ago
I got frustrated trying to follow various conversations on Twitter, so I wrote a tool to do this: http://www.solipsys.co.uk/TwitterConversations/HeliumBalloonOnTheMoon.png http://www.solipsys.co.uk/TwitterConversations/HeliumBalloon... http://www.solipsys.co.uk/TwitterConversations/ListContainingFirstElement.png http://www.solipsys.co.uk/TwitterConversations/ListContainin... http://www.solipsys.co.uk/TwitterConversations/Assessment_20150325.png http://www.solipsys.co.uk/TwitterConversations/Assessment_20...
- frik 11y ago
  Have you created a web service or app around it? Or is it on Github? A visual conversion graph would indeed help, the Twitter UX isn't really useable to follow up any longer conversation. I assume the Twitter UX has been even slightly degraded a bit over time for A) scalability reasons B) so that users stay longer on Twitter (good for advertisement statistics)
  - ColinWright 11y ago
    Currently it's a complete dog's breakfast of scripts and hacks. People seem to like it, so I might look to package it properly, unless someone else wants to do it.
    - cpayne624 11y ago
      What are you using to draw the hierarchy?
      - ColinWright 11y ago
        dot/GraphViz I curl the tweet, look for references to other tweets, curl them, lather/rinse/repeat until there are no more. Then I build a dot file and call GraphViz on it. Trivial stuff - people seem to like it, and I've found it very useful. I should learn how to use GitHub and throw it up on that.
- edent 11y ago
Grue3 11y ago
Interestingly, Tumblr already implemented some of these suggestions. With such features like "explore" or new search, The discovery of content is unmatched by other social networks. It is also way easier to get likes and reblogs than on Twitter (if you're a regular person, not a celebrity). Having your post go viral (into 1000s of notes) is quite satisfying and would never happen on Twitter if you're not already popular.

244 points by coloneltcb 11y ago

jbob2000 11y ago

Twitter will never "be" because I don't want what I say to be on the record forever. It's too personal and too unpredictable. Make a corny joke and you lose your job. Be a pretty girl and get harassed. Say something against common opinion and get harassed. It's not that this happens all the time, but the risk far outweighs the benefits. Like anything, it's nice when it's a small tight-knit group of people using it, but when it's open to the masses, it loses any value it once had.

moxyb 11y ago

I think he's describing the perfect digital news platform that I would think of.

lucianmarin 11y ago
Did you try https://sublevel.net https://sublevel.net? It’s very close to perfect.
therein 11y ago
That's what I was thinking by the end of the article as well. He definitely described a platform that I would be excited to use. And I am among the 1 billion that tried Twitter and didn't stick around. His idea reminds me of a hackathon project I worked on a few years ago with some friends. We built an app that communicates its location to the backend. Our backend runs k-means clustering and decision forests to cluster tweets coming in realtime through the Firehose API to associate them to an event that's happening nearby. The app then uses the incoming stream of tweets to provide realtime coverage on an event that was algorithmically detected.
austenallred 11y ago
I think what you're imagining is pretty much what we've been building for a year or so, but I could be wrong. It seems obvious - a lot of "news reports" nowadays are pretty much a couple lines of text with a bunch of tweets dropped down beneath them. But making that scalable is actually pretty difficult. The first difficulty (and we've confirmed this and talked about the problem multiple times with directors of product at Twitter) is finding what the "best" stuff is. We tried some time ago doing that for news - can we just algorithmically find the best tweets with regard to topic x? Even given full API access, the answer is either "not really" or "yes, but austenallred and his team aren't good enough programmers to figure it out." There simply aren't enough inputs - it's the same reason Google has always struggled at real-time news. There are favorites and retweets, but those are largely a function of how big someone's following is. Some guy walking on the street taking amazing photos will never have as many retweets as CNN, even if you try to control for the number of followers, or measure retweets as a function of the number of followers somehow. Then even if you could get that, the tweets aren't always analyzed in the right context. Run that type of analysis and the top tweet is likely to be a joke tweet or something like "OMG I'm praying for Boston." The best solution that we can come up with is crowdsourcing the finding and curation of tweets. It's working OK, but there's a long way to go. Basically we let everyone find and submit tweets, tag them with specific topics, and then upvote/downvote and fact-check for accuracy. (for details on how it works, see https://grasswire.com/about https://grasswire.com/about) Once you add a couple lines of text, you can turn the raw firehose of Twitter into something that can be consumed by somebody like my mom. That, I think, it a really big deal. It's working fairly well for news right now, and as more people join and submit it gets better. Our hopes are that we can expand into different verticals, and create daily digests of the best stuff with regard to topic x that you can consume in 30 seconds.
- tomrod 11y ago
  Where can I find what you're building?
  - austenallred 11y ago
    https://grasswire.com https://grasswire.com We basically see this as the back-end that could power some really cool stuff (apps, partnerships with publishers)
    - har777 11y ago
      I'm nitpicking but the lack of a scrollbar makes me feel strangely out of control. Any specific reason for the removal ?
- waterlesscloud 11y ago
  One thing the article writer comes back to several times is the idea of human editors. He's right. The insistence of tech companies on algorithms is understandable, but it's also incredibly limiting. I think of it as the "Google mindset" (it hurts them too). In the end, you need live people involved. You can do SO much more with even just a few live curators. Looking from the outside, insisting that they aren't needed is deeply weird.
covercash 11y ago
Yeah, I got that as well. And it just so happens, Sacca is an investor in http://nuzzel.com http://nuzzel.com Edit: unsure of the downvotes - I feel like this is relevant info to the parent comment.
- vonklaus 11y ago
  At one point Sacca was the biggest investor in twitter from his own personal investments, raising funds, and buying early employees out. He tried this at Uber too. Kalinick shut that down super quick, and I think he is banned from the premises.
personlurking 11y ago
IMHO, Twitter should only act as a digital news platform. I usually search for (the same) specific terms and look at nothing else. If Twitter knew this, they could make the whole experience way more seamless and pleasant for me (saved searches and following is a pretty long work-around). The problem with such a platform would be how to know if someone in a riot (for ex.) is posting 'news' or not. This seems to be where channels would go a long way to sorting through the hay to find the needle.

marssaxman 11y ago

Nothing in there about turning it into a decentralized open network instead of a proprietary service, so I will continue not to care about Twitter.

themagician 11y ago
We tried that. It didn't stick. You have to remember that in the early days Twitter and a log of competition. Jaiku, Pownce, Google Buzz, FriendFeed, etc.. Then you had the open source versions: Laconi.ca, Status.net, Friendi.ca, GNU Social, Twister, etc.. Say what you will about Twitter, but it's the only thing that ever got traction or had any sticking power.
- marssaxman 11y ago
  Sure, I observe that it has succeeded. I'm just not willing to invest any time or attention in it, since I've learned my lesson with proprietary communication platforms!
- brador 11y ago
  How did Twitter get traction and sticking power where the others failed? What was it doing differently?
  - eclipxe 11y ago
    Celebrities, media, "normals".
  - pkamb 11y ago
    "tweet" became a verb and noun.
  - Torgo 11y ago
    I think it's because they iterated really fast on new features, and presumably stayed with what was popular. Original Twitter isn't even all that close to what Twitter is today. gnusocial is playing catchup featurewise, moves much slower, and frankly the default theme is really ugly.

austenallred 11y ago

Twitter’s biggest problem is that Twitter increases or decreases in value along with user’s willingness to curate their feed. Many will never do that. So Twitter tries to do the work for you, but guessing exactly who/what you’d be interested in without tons of info is virtually impossible. The closest they can get is the current logged-out homepage: “Here are a bunch of random categories. You like the NBA? Maybe celebrity chefs? Cute animals? Country artists?” (Those are literal examples.) Total shot in the dark.

declan 11y ago
>"guessing exactly who/what you’d be interested in without tons of info is virtually impossible." That was my intuition as well. But it turns out that you can generate good recommendations without tons of info -- as long as you are selective about what signals you use. We learned this firsthand when building https://recent.io/ https://recent.io/ for news recommendations -- the backend is able to generate relevant suggestions that appear in the app after users have read an average of 5 articles. That's based on real-world user testing. If Twitter recognizes repeat visits by people who don't (yet) have accounts, it should be able to try a similar approach. On the other hand it took a while for us to get it right.
azazo 11y ago
I see this as the biggest problem with Twitter also. Twitter is my favorite app, but it's because I have spent five plus years curating my feed. There is a fundamental problem with the way they onboard new users and this is why so many people don't stick around. The onboarding process asks you to select interests and then recommends people to follow based on those interests. However, they often recommend celebrities and 'popular' accounts. These people are often terrible at Twitter, so new users see a bunch of boring, self-promotional content in their feed and don't come back.
- minthd 11y ago
  That's true. Most of the recommendations are crap. Got any recommendations to finding high signal/noise users or lists ?

ThePhysicist 11y ago

For me, the biggest problem with Twitter are their Draconian rules concerning third-party apps. I had several ideas for cool apps built on top of the Twitter API (e.g. a Twitter-based news aggregator, an online volunteering app, ...), but each time I gave up on the idea after reading the terms of their developer program: No showing of tweets with content from other social networks, no altering in the presentation of tweets, very severe rate limits, .... I think if Twitter wad a little less paranoid about protecting their content they could actually become a viable and useful communication tool for a large part of the Internet (even more than today).

state 11y ago
But how exactly do they make money on developers using their API?
- Igglyboo 11y ago
  Charge for less rate limiting? As the app grows the usage grows and twitter makes more money.
- krisdol 11y ago
  The way I see it, third party applications increase the value of using twitter, bringing more users to it. Twitter as a social sharing tool has very little value to me, personally, but as a chat tool, marketing tool, or customer support tool I think it has a lot of potential. Its presentation/UX is not very optimized for those experiences, though -- and that's why third party apps exist. If an open source project builds its chatroom on top of twitter, that's a huge value-add and would bring people to use twitter in order to efficiently communicate with the company, in the same way people use Slack because companies host their support on it. By the way, I think their rate limiting is fine for most third party apps. There is a lot that can be done with intermediate caching and the Streaming API.
  - lotso 11y ago
    Brings value is not the same as brings money.

josu 11y ago

The author of the article is Chris Sacca.

mountaineer 11y ago
Chris has said he's going to be more vocal and clarified his stake in Twitter[1]. [1] http://lowercasecapital.com/2015/05/21/i-bleed-aqua/ http://lowercasecapital.com/2015/05/21/i-bleed-aqua/

rrggrr 11y ago

"Tweet nearby" & "Encrypted tweet nearby" & "P2P Tweet": These three functions would blow the lid off active user growth. Across the globe Twitter remains a key means for promoting events, demonstrations and encouraging political action. Give users the means to reach by locale (Concert), and securely by locale (Flash mob), and P2P (Iran, Syria, China) -- and sit back and watch the audience skyrocket.

aaron-lebo 11y ago
Perhaps I'm misunderstanding your point on Iran, Syria, China, but you are talking about subverting authoritarian governments, right? Why wouldn't those same governments require Twitter to cut those off? I don't see how a centralized service like Twitter can ever provide that.
- themeek 11y ago
  You are right to point this out. The United States has tried many times to use social media platforms to cause uprising in other nations. These very same nations (including the ones enumerated above) do cut off the services. Take the US installation of ZunZuneo in Cuba and the governments crackdown on personal phones in response - China's ban of Google for US influence and foreign surveillance - Russia's machinations against Facebook for influencing its audience - Kiev's ban of CSOs as Western organization through UNITER was revealed - North Korea's hacking of SONY in response to its partnership with the US State Department and CIA on The Interview - Israel's hatred over Jeremy Bird's participation in "OneVoice" political campaigning over Twitter - etc, etc. Continuing to use US private companies as soft weapons will increasingly harm the reputations and global standing of these corporations. The military-industrial complex gig is up. Other nations know what's happening. It's merely a matter of denying the company access to a population while making it look not so bad from the PR side.

lawl 11y ago

Twitter died to me when they closed down their API's.

chippy 11y ago
I remember hearing presentations from their devs about twitter annotations, metadata etc. Such enthusiasm at those times.

Animats 11y ago

"Shortcomings in the direct response advertising category have resulted in the company coming in below the financial community’s quarterly estimates." Well, yes. The problem with all social networks is that ads interfere with the "social". Ads are a big annoying guy getting in your face when you're trying to talk to someone. Or worse, they're your (soon to be former) "friends" who've been tricked into "sharing" (i.e. spamming) ads. Remember, Twitter's big period of growth was before they had ads. They only put in ads when they had users hooked. The first one is always free.

notahacker 11y ago
The direct effect of Twitter ads isn't that bad; by the standards of web advertising it's hardly intrusive. It's the probable side effects of optimising for that revenue stream that are the trouble. One of Twitter's virtues from an advertiser's perspective is that most recent Tweets are often barely more compelling than than whatever message or link they're trying to promote. Streams which efficiently filter out irrelevance mitigate against that[1]. Reverse chronological order with ads interspersed is probably a local optimum for ad discoverability, and I bet the marketing guys test that.... Same goes for the risks of allowing any old third party to build the next successful Twitter platform on their API when they know "filter out the ads" is going to be a much-requested feature. Being more controversial, I still can't help thinking that whilst Twitter has long made a virtue of brevity, 140 characters is just too restrictive for the average non-regular user. It's often not enough to convey the reason why people should go to an obfuscated link, never mind enough for a person not used to truncating their thoughts to express a view that doesn't involve an image or a third party site. I'm not interested in receiving Tweets by SMS, but would find Twitter streams a whole lot more engaging if they tended to be 250-400 characters. [1]of course this is what the portal promoters thought in the pre Google era. But since then Facebook and LinkedIn's heavily polluted streams have been highly successful, and Twitter has even less potential to become primarily a search tool rather than a way to stumble over moderately interesting content, some of it promoted.

moey 11y ago

Serious question people, out of the people here that USE Twitter, how much would you pay a month for Twitter, if anything? http://directpoll.com/v?XDVhEtRR2EAlaVw2sOrQkWlBcohF0N2Z http://directpoll.com/v?XDVhEtRR2EAlaVw2sOrQkWlBcohF0N2Z I value the service, and am wondering what other people value it at. I will post the results here after set number of people vote. UPDATE Initially I was going to wait a little longer, but after looking at the results from this sample, the trend is pretty be predictable. RESULTS LINK: (VIEW AFTER VOTING PLEASE) http://directpoll.com/r?XDVhEtRR2EAlaVw2sOrQkWlBcohFw9na8aNcxY0oMnk http://directpoll.com/r?XDVhEtRR2EAlaVw2sOrQkWlBcohFw9na8aNc... I think the results deserve a discussion on their own...

arxpoetica 11y ago
I can't imagine ever paying for Twitter—but then, I thought it was a joke when I first heard of it, and I was wrong. ;)
lfowles 11y ago
Your poll is blocked at work, but I would feel comfortable paying per outgoing tweet, somewhat like SMS. In fact, let's extend that with two plans: $20/mo unlimited tweets 1¢/tweet, top up your account a dollar at a time
petercooper 11y ago
That's a tricky question, because while I would pay, say, $5 per month for it, if every existing user had to pay $5 for it, the value would decrease significantly as most people probably wouldn't pay that much and it'd decrease my reach. If I were to pay merely for added benefits over what I have now, it entirely depends on what they would be..
aaronbrethorst 11y ago
http://blog.app.net/2014/05/06/app-net-state-of-the-union/ http://blog.app.net/2014/05/06/app-net-state-of-the-union/
- moey 11y ago

kin 11y ago

At first Twitter was awesome because of their API but then that closed off so now I have to use their stuff only I feel as if they haven't done anything in the past few years but scale. I've tried being a user for years but they really need a better way to manage and view lists. The frequency of celebrity tweets vs. friend tweets vs. company tweets is all different. How I ingest that content is differs depending on my mood or what I want. Thus far, there's no easy way to sort through the content to quickly find what I'm looking for or interested in. It all requires endless scrolling and weeding out the noise.

nicolewhite 11y ago
What is it about Twitter's list manager that doesn't address this issue for you?
- guelo 11y ago
  I've actually found it more usable to create different accounts for my different interests.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- mountaineer 11y ago
  It sounds like the effort of keeping the lists updated and current to provide that separation. It is possible to consume Twitter in this way, but perhaps not worth the effort of keeping the lists updated, you've really got to work at it?
- walterbell 11y ago
  It does not exist on mobile?
  - kaws 11y ago
    Personal Profile > Settings Cog > Lists

sirbetsalot 11y ago

of course the author misses the biggest reason twitter sucks. Abuse, fake accounts, and trolling cause more "authentic" real name users to leave every day. Twitter does nothing to punish people who can just grab a picture of you from the net, create and account and start ruining your reputation instantly. And we all know you can't win against a troll unless you out troll them with your own bots. Twitter is the stained toilet bowl of human interaction. Twitter would instantly better if it forced real names and banned people for abusive comments outright. Until then, Twitter is unusable.

cmdrfred 11y ago
https://twitter.com/REALsirbetsalot https://twitter.com/REALsirbetsalot
walterbell 11y ago
http://techcrunch.com/2012/07/29/surprisingly-good-evidence-that-real-name-policies-fail-to-improve-comments/ http://techcrunch.com/2012/07/29/surprisingly-good-evidence-... "In 2007, South Korea temporarily mandated that all websites with over 100,000 viewers require real names, but scrapped it after it was found to be ineffective at cleaning up abusive and malicious comments (the policy reduced unwanted comments by an estimated .09%)." http://www.wired.com/2014/08/forcing-commenters-to-use-real-names-wont-root-out-the-trolls/ http://www.wired.com/2014/08/forcing-commenters-to-use-real-... "The better thing to do is to verify what someone knows, not the name someone goes by. Our fear of anonymity is an extension of our fear of the unknown. Without a recognizable name, these commenters could be anyone! But if we could associate an internet history, even a brief one, to that handle, the human connection becomes instantly apparent. A great example of this is Disqus and its universal login, which creates a history of comments (and flags) across all sites."
ohitsdom 11y ago
Unusable? I'm sure there's a lot of noise for people that have a decent following, but I think most people don't have these problems. Certainly not to the extent that the entire platform is unusable.

shortstuffsushi 11y ago

This article at one point proposes splitting content into separate apps. I'm unsure of the end goal of this; I guess that it's trying to provide a clearer divide for users, allowing them to filter content in a sense. It seems like this would be better solved by filtering better within the app, separating apps is just going to lead to more confusion, imo.

walterbell 11y ago

Twitter lists (especially in combination with Flipboard) are useful for filtering/curation, but have seen few improvements and remain unavailable in the mobile app. Lists could exhibit business value comparable to Pinterest curation, if Twitter paid any attention to the feature. They are micro-social networks that amplify the value of Twitter's main accomplishment: a directory of pseudonymns for writers, marketers, subject-matter experts and other publishers of time-sensitive content.

minthd 11y ago
How do you combine twitter list with flipboard?
- walterbell 11y ago
  Username (top left corner) -> Following -> Accounts -> Twitter -> Your Lists -> Follow
DaveWalk 11y ago
What ever happened to Flipboard? It seemed very cutting edge when it debuted years ago. Now I can never remember it's there to browse.

hagope 11y ago

One of the best use cases of twitter for me is customer service, a few complaints about @comcast is way more effective than calling and waiting on the phone for 20 minutes and fighting with the customer service agent... I was able to resolve my issue with a few back and forth DMs with @comcastcares ... I don't think many people have enjoyed this experience, it's like night and day.

jeffmould 11y ago
I couldn't agree more. Comcast is a great example of customer service handled perfectly via Twitter in my opinion. I can get Comcast issues resolved in minutes via Twitter compared to hours trying to explain it over the phone.
GurnB 11y ago
I admit that I have used @Amazon to make a Smart Alec comment about a missing/delayed delivery and was pleasently surprised that I was contacted within an hour to DM them the details so they could resolve the matter.
babuskov 11y ago
Yup. I also resolved my issue with Ubisoft UPlay much faster via Twitter message.
bentcorner 11y ago
Customer service via twitter just feels wrong to me. I'm a low-frequency twitter user so maybe I don't "get it", but it feels very much like shouting into the void. There's no feedback saying "yeah, we heard you". Whereas with a phone call you're actively navigating their support structure, or with a contact form, where you have a tracking id in your email box.
- cauterize 11y ago
  Does it feel right to a part of the consensus customers should have regarding large companies? It does for me. The Comcast site has a form you can fill out to remove you from their snail mail list. As someone has been a customer for 4 years, getting advertisements in my mailbox made me irrationally angry. I filled out the form but saw no drop in volume. Taking my silly issue public via Twitter helped get the problem resolved. I had a sense of pride knowing I publicly shamed Comcast enough that they did something about their poor mailing practices. And it only took a few days and maybe 500 total characters.

normloman 11y ago

I used to be on twitter. Left because nobody talks with you, just at you. And when you do actually get a conversation going, it's hard to follow when it's thrown in the same chronological time line with other conversations. The hashtag doesn't do much to foster conversation either. Merely a way to label slogans. This dichotomy between being a public feed but also being a place for conversations is at the core of why twitter sucks.

bduerst 11y ago
I was in the same boat until I tried Periscope. I ended up questioning some news anchors for an hour yesterday on one of the feeds, and the thought hit me about how much better this was than just the news.
mahouse 11y ago
That depends on whether you carry your friends there with you or not, I guess. I don't see why it should be different to Facebook in that regard. (I have probably sent thousands of DMs over the years.)
untog 11y ago
it's hard to follow when it's thrown in the same chronological time line with other conversations That, at least, shouldn't be the case. Your conversations live in the Notifications tab.
- sp332 11y ago
  Twitter's conversation handling has improved a lot lately.
  - frik 11y ago
    Can you give an example?
    - sp332 11y ago
      These lines for conversations are new. If you follow the original poster and one of the people replying, it will pull out their responses and put them right in the timeline with a blue line. It sorts in your timeline according to the latest reply from someone you follow. Below that, you can see someone replying to themselves in a longer series of tweets, and Twitter folds them up so they don't clutter your timeline too bad.

antidaily 11y ago

Exactly why everyone moved over to App.net, right? Right, guys??

smhg 11y ago

This might sound very weird in this day and age, but in my professional life (web developer), Twitter and G+ compete content-wise. And G+ wins easily. Disclaimer: I'm a very light Twitter user. I'm almost surely missing out on features I never bothered to discover. The main advantage G+ has in my eyes is its signal to noise ratio. It seems far better than Twitter's. Again, specifically in my professional world, quite a lot of relevant people post on G+. I guess they either don't post personal stuff or efficiently use Circles. Many, but definitely not all, are of course close to Google. Some other advantages for me: the fact that you can read the whole story (not just sentence-per-sentence) and the -theoretical- ability to drag in non-professional relationships (yes, I like Circles). I realize no one takes G+ serious anymore and that it's a graveyard for most. But it seems to work well for some (professionally). In a way it can make Twitter lose (one of) its edge(s): follow tech-people. This isn't meant as a G+ promotion. I just wanted to make clear why Twitter might not be a good fit for some.

theVirginian 11y ago
Whereas some people I know have twitter and very few use it regularly, I have never even met someone who has a G+ and very few people I know would even recognize it as a social network over a simple rebranding of their gmail account.
- darklajid 11y ago
  G+ is what you have to use for YouTube insults and to rate the applications on your Android phone, ignoring that they might be free, cost a couple bucks or be > 10 $currency. If you want to give feedback, join the 'social network'. (That's especially fun if applications, even 'paid' applications, try to 'encourage' you to rate in the Play Store. "Look, Yatse. I love what you are doing. But I CANNOT rate you. Firefox? You guys are my heroes. But I CANNOT rate you.".) G+ is not a failed social network, it's no network and certainly not social. It's a constant slap in the face.
  - soylentcola 11y ago
    So...it's your Google profile that they use across their services. That's like saying you can't rate an iOS app because it requires an iTunes account. The social stuff can be used or ignored as you see fit.

derekmasters 11y ago

Perhaps he should have included this, "we stopped talking about arab spring once we realized how it was a bad job that pushed people into depeer shit, perhaps now is the time to lift the carpet again and start talking about how we can build better tools that are powerful enough to put these fucked up countries back together"

jusben1369 11y ago

The thing about Twitter is that it should have been TV vs trying to be channels. I don't know why they were never comfortable enough in their skin to let third parties extend the living heck out of their platform. Using Twitter and getting a Gen 1.0 iPhone were very similar experiences. Pretty much wow and thinking the sky was the limit (vs what they actually were initially). Apple harnessed an app developer community and made their product 10x more valuable. Twitter locked everyone out. I always thought the Twitter competitor launched by Dalton (App.net) totally missed the boat. We didn't need a paid service to save us from ads we needed an open free platform that drew in millions and millions of users to draw in app developers etc. That would have crushed Twitter.

akrymski 11y ago
Except that TVs are commodities compared to channels. They didn't want to commoditise their own business.
- jusben1369 11y ago
  hah well all analogies break down if you peck at them long enough. Twitter should have enabled developers to create great things on their medium vs trying to be both the platform and the app creator.
  - SandersAK 11y ago
    But the analogy doesn't break down. The value is in owning the medium. This is exactly why entities like comcast don't want to become dumb pipes. yes it is better for everyone if they do, but in their shorter term interest, it's much better to own the high value stuff.
    - jusben1369 11y ago
      It does breakdown. Twitter done right is a marketplace with network effects. ISP is an easily replaceable service. If I'm CNN I can't just pick up and leave Twitter for another Twitter at a lower cost. Same thing all the way down to a tech company with 10 people who use it to communicate outrages. People are already there. They expect you to be there too.

throw_it_away 11y ago

Honest question: I've tried Twitter a bunch of times, tried to engage with it for a couple weeks, then given up when I felt that either the tweets were not curated enough for me or that nobody was listening to me. Is there some guide for technically literate people to start using Twitter effectively? Right now I use Feedly and blogs to serve this purpose, but the appeal of real time news a la Twitter seems quite sweet, if only I could tap into it.

Tevin 11y ago
I didn't get much out of twitter until I had a community I became involved in and had a product I wanted to promote. Though I don't have a ton of followers I mostly use it to track what other people are talking about and start conversations when possible. So to answer your question, I think users get the most out of it who have a need or want for actively engaging in <em>something</em>. My followers who I do interact with most are either other creators or heavily-invested fan.
janfoeh 11y ago
Yes, please! From other peoples' descriptions, I can rationally understand what benefit Twitter brings them, but I have never been able to replicate that for myself. I have always walked away, convinced that it's a real-time medium that requires constant attention, because I find it to be nigh impossible to read up on any discussion ex post facto. That is especially true for any discussion with more than two participants — those are tree-ish in nature to me, and for the life of me I cannot figure out how anybody makes sense of them in Twitters one-dimensional chronological organisation. Help please?
- binxbolling 11y ago
  To steal someone else's metaphor, try thinking of Twitter as a river. If you try to bottle it up or consume it all you'll drown. If, on the other hand, you dip in for a swim as you please, you might find it all bit more manageable. As the rush of tweets flows by you, just check out some, then turn your phone off and carry on. When you load it again, don't feel you have to go back and "catch up" or give it the constant attention you mentioned. YMMV, but I also think the emphasis on "conversations" is a bit misleading. Lots of people do have conversations on there, but I personally love it for breaking news, link-sharing, jokes, and photos. If your frame of reference is a forum with posts, or an article's comments, or a real-life conversation... you're going to have a bad time.

firasd 11y ago

This is a great essay (and shows that even if it’s predictable, it’s always good to balance criticism with praise, support, and a sense of a positive path forward.) As for Sacca’s suggestions, I have mixed feelings on the specific features he suggests for encouraging people to Tweet more (“Tweeting Shouldn’t Be So Scary”) and increasing engagement (“Using Twitter Doesn’t Need To Feel As Lonely”) but I like his suggestions about improving the timeline: “Live Is The Biggest Opportunity Yet.” This is the section he describes most lucidly and is the simplest to implement on top of the existing product. It’s currently done in a ham-fisted way—where I am in India it prods me with modal dialogs about cricket matches!—but there will need to be less prodding if it’s built as a standard set of pages where you can follow the best tweets for a sporting event, TV show or news topic while the situation is ongoing even if you’re logged out. It’s a bit like following a hashtag, with some curation and highlighting of popular tweets on the topic thrown in. “Channels Will Make Twitter Easy, Easy, Easy.” I sort of lost the thread in the middle of reading this in terms of figuring out exactly how this is different from Live or other category based curated tweets but I kinda get it. These are his examples: “Want to know what are the most popular articles linked to on Twitter? That should be a channel. What are the most popular sites linked among the people we follow or people that our friends follow? Great channel. Which books are people Tweeting about? Channel. Which videos are garnering the most attention? Channel. Any particular .gifs blowing up? Channel.” “Twitter’s Save Button Would Let You Keep All The Good Stuff.” This is a relatively complex concept and would be difficult to implement in a clear way but I like the idea. “We could keep every product we saw mentioned, every book that looked interesting, every destination we wanted to visit someday, every concert we wanted to go see, and every ad that piqued our curiosity. All of this could be saved to a Vault within Twitter with just one button in line with the RT and Fav buttons in each Tweet.”

yueq 11y ago

Don't pump. You might consider $WB stock which is way undervalued comparing to $TWTR.

lukasm 11y ago

> For most people, Twitter is too hard to use. I don't know how to use twitter and I don't care. Why? Cognitive overhead. I use facebook messenger, whatsapp, HN, stackoverflow, github, Linkedin.

codingdave 11y ago

The scariest statistic in that article is that one billion users tried twitter, then walked away. I'm sure some of those are novelty accounts that just never took off, not truly unique users, but that is still a ton of people who already wrote twitter off as irrelevant to their life. That is a large hurdle to overcome. Where are you going to grow your userbase if that many people already made their decision against you? I can assure you, that is not a tech question, it is a marketing issue.

joshyg 11y ago

I think their time has passed. Social media is not like tv. With t.v., People want good new shows, they don't care if they're from nbc or hbo or someone new. With social media people actually want a new medium every few years. I don't think there is any feature Twitter could add that will overcome this fact.

adventured 11y ago

"Though you wouldn’t know it by looking at the stock price or by reading the headlines, Twitter is owed recognition for ramping up their product development" Sacca is incorrect when it comes to Twitter's stock price. They're being given an epic benefit of the doubt on their valuation. Few companies get that sort of charity; ask Groupon, Angie's List, Etsy, etc. about that. They're substantially overvalued by any normal market standards. A $24b market cap for a company that has never - in nearly a decade of existence - earned a profit; worse, they've bled a billion in red ink over that time. It's also trading at a rich sales multiple of about 16.

soheil 11y ago

If I were still at Twitter I'd do anything to get Chris on the team.

aswanson 11y ago

Maybe its just me, im too old and not famous enough...but Twitter just seems to me to be a celebrity (that includes fame of any kind) circle jerk...and if you're not famous, you dont exist. Its weird. I hated fb towards the end of my usage of it...but at least like the old sitcom 'Cheers', at least sometimes you could go 'where everybody knows your name...'

ColinWright 11y ago

I got frustrated trying to follow various conversations on Twitter, so I wrote a tool to do this: http://www.solipsys.co.uk/TwitterConversations/HeliumBalloonOnTheMoon.png http://www.solipsys.co.uk/TwitterConversations/HeliumBalloon... http://www.solipsys.co.uk/TwitterConversations/ListContainingFirstElement.png http://www.solipsys.co.uk/TwitterConversations/ListContainin... http://www.solipsys.co.uk/TwitterConversations/Assessment_20150325.png http://www.solipsys.co.uk/TwitterConversations/Assessment_20...

frik 11y ago
Have you created a web service or app around it? Or is it on Github? A visual conversion graph would indeed help, the Twitter UX isn't really useable to follow up any longer conversation. I assume the Twitter UX has been even slightly degraded a bit over time for A) scalability reasons B) so that users stay longer on Twitter (good for advertisement statistics)
- ColinWright 11y ago
  Currently it's a complete dog's breakfast of scripts and hacks. People seem to like it, so I might look to package it properly, unless someone else wants to do it.
  - cpayne624 11y ago
    What are you using to draw the hierarchy?
    - ColinWright 11y ago
      dot/GraphViz I curl the tweet, look for references to other tweets, curl them, lather/rinse/repeat until there are no more. Then I build a dot file and call GraphViz on it. Trivial stuff - people seem to like it, and I've found it very useful. I should learn how to use GitHub and throw it up on that.
edent 11y ago

Grue3 11y ago

Interestingly, Tumblr already implemented some of these suggestions. With such features like "explore" or new search, The discovery of content is unmatched by other social networks. It is also way easier to get likes and reblogs than on Twitter (if you're a regular person, not a celebrity). Having your post go viral (into 1000s of notes) is quite satisfying and would never happen on Twitter if you're not already popular.