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Comment by pi-err | Hacker News Reader

Twitter has an incredibly powerful brand and appeal. How many companies can say they triggered revolutions?

Yet it's puzzling how much it fails to improve its basic product, 1 year in Dorsey's comeback. On mobile, the search/explore screens are mostly irrelevant. On desktop, they could position themselves as quasi TV channels with live content update.

Yes, they lost the social wars and that's fine. They won the media war: Twitter's mindshare vs its actual engagement rates makes it an amazing opportunity.

Really hope it doesn't fade into a glorified RSS feed and manages to build on the intensity of its content.

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> Yet it's puzzling how much it fails to improve its basic product.

What's there to improve? As someone else said here on HN "Twitter should have been an RFC."

The only thing that's broken here is not Twitter, it's the economic system that can't just let a useful invention be, but instead forces it into a fight-or-die, conquer-the-world-or-disappear nuclear arm's race.

Facebook was just fine as a place to keep in touch with friends and invite them to events, Uber is just fine as a Taxi service, Candy Crush was just fine as a silly iPhone game...

I wonder what we'll think of it all in a century, because there's no way this insanity can go on for much longer.

140 Character limit that includes url and hash tags which is finally going to get released. Look at increasing the limit later on?

> How many companies can say they triggered revolutions?

United Fruit Company, British Petroleum?

> > How many companies can say they triggered revolutions?

> British Petroleum?

For those not familiar with Iranian history: the first revolution that happened on Twitter was the Green Revolution in Iran (2009)[0][1].

If you trace British Petroleum (BP) all the way back to its roots, it began as the Anglo-Persian Oil Company in 1908. That company's formation was the basis for the series of political upheavals and revolutions that resulted in the current political leadership in Iran today[2], which in turn was the basis for the 2009 Green Revolution.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_Iranian_presidential_elec...

[1] Named the 'Green Revolution' in the long Persian tradition of naming their revolutions after colors ('white', 'red', 'green', 'black')

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anglo-Persian_Oil_Company#Nati...

To me, the most interesting and fun thing about Twitter is its "Trending Hashtags". Always good for a laugh.

Yet, in the last year, it's become more and more difficult to find the damn list of trending hashtags. Currently, one has to click on the magnifying glass to find it. It should be front and center, and have a top-level tab of its own (next to Home and Moments). Personally, I'd prefer it if every time I opened Twitter, the first thing it showed me was the trending hashtags.

Really hope it doesn't fade into a glorified RSS feed

I don't know, that sounds kind of good to me. RSS is a largely unrealised technology. And it's what Twitter was trying to key into at the beginning, back when they really had a vision for what the app would be.

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