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"Twitter's modern-day utility seems very low outside of news/sports/politics"

Twitter has tremendous utility for the medical community. I am final year medical student and through twitter can follow worldwide leaders in emergency medicine (my field of interest). These doctors post clinical factoids, cases reports, unique ekgs, and other learning points live from the wards (all de-identified to protect patients of course). They also post opinions on the latest research publications. Twitter has become my best way to stay current in medicine.

Other apps targeted for doctors have attempted this. Doximity and Figure1 are examples. But twitter has done the best job.

It sounds like Twitter is the new RSS reader.

...sounds about right. At least this is how I use it.

That's great but it's fair to say that's niche - both in terms of the number of people I'm guessing who are producing that type of content and the amount of monetization that can occur from that community.

As a public company, Twitter has to focus on the mainstream, big numbers.

I would also suggest that Twitter refocusing to sports and news would give the specialist apps you mention (and others) a better chance at super-serving your community. Is Twitter's ephemeral nature, mixed in with non-medical updates, really the best way for you to spot trends and identify useful links? If you don't fire up the app every few hours do you risk missing a crucial link or update?

It is niche but works surprisingly well for any field with practitioners who are on twitter. So lots and lots of niches. And you're right that it's awful as a receiving interface. Nor do I have any idea how you turn this into money, or growth or what have you. But it is a thing.

Maybe research tools for long tail targeting content creators?

I could see paying for a tool that helped collect, filter and organize what the top people are saying and pain points in general.

"But it is a thing"

If you can't turn it into money or growth (which Twitter is failing at right now) it won't be a thing for much longer. Twitter exists primarily as a public company to make money not to provide a service to niche communities.

Twitter exists primarily as a public company to make money

Thanks for explaining that to me.

That's called the "Long Tail"... individual users/customers have a niche interest, but together they form a center of gravity approximately as large as the largest use cases.

http://www.thelongtail.com/conceptual.jpg

You have to think a little differently to design for the long tail. You can't just design one consistent experience, you have to design tools that can be used in many scenarios.

Yes, I'm familiar with the long tail ;) The problem is that Twitter has proven that it's incredibly hard to monetize this kind of content at a level that the public markets demand.

The reality is Twitter has failed as a business more than anything and this is about repositioning Twitter as a business that can be monetized.

> That's great but it's fair to say that's niche - both in terms of the number of people I'm guessing who are producing that type of content and the amount of monetization that can occur from that community.

Although it's niche, you could substitute almost anything else for 'medical' and have it work. There's an equally good and thriving literary Twitter, arts Twitter, gay Twitter, black Twitter, politics Twitter, dev Twitter.

Turns out that people like their news and sports mixed in with other ephemera anyway - it's a secret that TV networks have known for decades with late night TV and 'and finally' segments on network news.

For me the point where Twitter really lost its way is when it decided to focus on being a 'media company' and drawing attention to tweets from 'public figuresrather than finding better ways to enable people to tap into and contribute to communities that matter to them.

I think this is kind of my point, actually...

The monetization Twitter has been able to achieve from this niche content hasn't met expectations and that niche content has also seen stalled growth.

Ephemera is what makes a sport/news/politics-aligned Twitter a much more interest proposition that routes around the negatives of the product and the value proposition on that front.

> If you don't fire up the app every few hours do you risk missing a crucial link or update?

One thing that's always bugged me about twitter - its so transient. when you log on you only get a snapshot of what's happening at that moment - scrolling back through the days or weeks traffic is next to impossible because of the sheer volume of content.

But in this way, the OP of this thread is correct - Live is most definitely where twitter is king.

Yes, it's a niche but how many niches in a similar vein exist on Twitter?

What I heard davycro describe above sounds a lot like the K-12 mathematics community on Twitter dubbed the MathTwitterBlogosphere #MTBoS. It connects everyone from kindergarten teachers in France to university professors and has been a source of tremendous professional development for me over the past four years.

Are there enough other communities like us out there to be material to Twitter's business? I don't know, but the #MTBoS derives great value from having Twitter as a gathering place.

The long tail arises from niches in aggregate.

That was the original use case: "micro blogging". There is a case to be made for improving that interface and expanding the way people interact with Twitter for that. Curated follower lists for example.

You have just described "news".

Twitter also has incredible utility in terms of the InfoSec and Quant communities. All the latest papers and exploits are posted regularly, something that exists nowhere else. It also extends across borders, I follow numerous Chinese, Italian, and Middle Eastern hackers who post code and associating write-ups regularly.

The same goes for stock traders, the network offers incredible insights.

You might want to check out Figure1 which is a social network for medical professionals and very twitter like but has a user base that's full of very people.

https://figure1.com/

I have. Figure1 feels too noisey and not specific to my interests. Twitter is more personal with better quality.

Could you recommend 5-10 leaders in emergency medicine to follow? (I'm trying to build up a good follow list outside of my usual domains, and I find recommendation graphs to be really useful)

Depends on what content you're looking for, but off the top of my head, here's a variety of type of EM-related people/accounts. The first two are teaching resources. The rest are active (both clinically and on Twitter) clinicians or EM-focused students.

@emcrit

@epmonthly

@MDaware

@precordialthump

@seth_kelly

@mcsassymd

anything tagged #FOAMed (Free Open Access Medical education – often has an EM focus)

I know Seth, he's awesome.

Would you mind taking a look at the question I asked your sibling poster?

My undergrad degree's in biomedical engineering, and I've been a self-taught coder since middle school. I'm currently pursing my PhD in engineering in addition to my medical degree, and working on using computational simulations and analytics to improve our understanding of how electrical abnormalities occur in the heart. I've always been interested in startups but haven't actively been involved in one. My goal is to work in a academic setting where I do both clinical medicine and research, and hopefully help translate research work to the clinic by working with startups that are my or other people's research findings.

@EMcardiac (Badass south african doc) @EMNerd_ (Great research commentaries) @M_Lin (Program director at UCSF, posts lots of clinical pearls)

My favorites though are docs I know from away rotations and the wards. They aren't famous, but their opinions especially matter to me.

Also follow @medicalaxioms

I am intrigued by people on HN who study bio, med, etc.

Are you involved with software development in an amateur or professional capacity? Are you interested in startups? How did you find HN?

Do you have CS/Math (or related) education in addition to being a student of medicine?

Hope I'm not too intrusive ;)

Not intrusive, thank you for the question. I'm a self-taught hacker/coder. Before medical school I made a Facebook application, when those were a thing, called Quiz Monster, which had about 3 million DAU for a few years. Thankfully earned enough through ad revenue to pay for my medical education. I see myself as a clinician first, but will always be a hacker and plan to return to software after residency.

I have seen WhatsApp being use that way in India. Closed doctor groups where lot of info (photos/info etc) gets shared/commented on.

Twitter's open communication channel might not be suited for such infoshare. Telegram/Whatsapp has potential in that area.

That's one of the reasons I built GroupTweet. To facilitate private group communication on Twitter with any number of participants that can persist through permanent Twitter accounts (instead of temporary Group DMs that are limited to 20 people).

Would love any feedback or suggestions on how it could be improved.

Happy to offer free use to anyone on this thread looking to test out the service.

Definitely agree with this. Figure1 is great for focused learning, but Twitter has allowed me to hear about random clinical pearls, interesting cases, the latest research, and the ensuing discussions between active clinicians.

I imagine one day I open Twitter to read my friends tweets and get greeted with message:

"Hello! Today, to make world more disrupted with innovation, we pivoted Twitter to become a sports TV channel! All your tweets are gone, instead open a bottle of beer and watch this great game! 20 well-fit males kick the leather sphere! Isn't it impressive?"

That will be day when I throw out my router to the window, flush smartphone into toilet, install MS-DOS and Fidonet software.

Foursquare managed to do this by migrating the original functionality to Swarm and pivoting the flagship product to something more monetizable.

Arguably it saved the company from going under while still enabling the original functionality for those who wanted to use it.

FWIW I'm not a sportsball fan either, but you can't argue that those of us with MS-DOS and Fidonet are in the minority. Sport is a super-majority content area that is very brand and advertiser friendly.

Did they actually manage that transition, though? I haven't heard anyone talk about Foursquare in years. My entire social circle effectively ran itself via Dodgeball when that was active; many of us remembered it fondly enough to give Foursquare a try, after Dodgeball's founders came back out of Google purgatory. It quickly became obvious that they really just wanted to become a cheap Yelp knockoff, though, and we all left. I don't remember hearing anyone propose a group migration to Swarm at the time, and I certainly haven't heard anyone talk about it since.

Checkin-based spontaneous social organization just... doesn't happen anymore, so far as I can see. Shame, because I really enjoyed it. If a new service came along which looked like it wasn't going to be evil, I might sign up and try to get my friends on board - but I wouldn't trust the foursquare people at this point.

I just looked at my cell phone and there's a notification of 9 friends checking in on Swarm - most of them early fellow-dodgeball users.

YMMV but most of my friends who were hardcore users switched over to Swarm upon the pivot. The migration was automatic btw - Foursquare told you in the app that checkins were no longer supported and offered easy install of Swarm with the same login credentials.

I think Ben Thompson's take on live-TV-on-Twitter is spot on:

"Twitter is still selling the exact same value the service offered back in 2006 — 'live commentary, live connections, live conversations' — and the only product ideas are to do what old media like television does, but worse: becoming the first screen for what is happening now means a screen that is smaller, more laggy, and, critically, in the way of seeing the actual tweets one might care about. It’s also an example of the worst sort of product thinking: simply doing what was done before, but digitally." [1]

Trying to replicate live TV - a market whose margins are currently contracting - is likely to mean preparing for a bloodbath.

[1] https://stratechery.com/2017/twitter-live-and-luck/

I totally agree with this.

I've seen other posts mentioning timeline changes, protocol changes, and opening up the API ecosystem, but I don't see any of these changes actually affecting Twitters bottom line.

Twitter is a great place to discuss what's going on right now. Whether it be sports, a natural disaster, political debate, news, etc. Twitter needs to be the place to go when you want social commentary / news on what's happening RIGHT NOW.

Twitter is very useful for professional announcements in a very informal setting. I use Twitter to follow colleagues and artists, not friends nor celebrities.

I think there's something TV-ish that's possible, but Netflix level? That seems difficult both in licensing and execution. However, I will agree what you propose now appears to be their end game. #hattip

They already have licensing deals with NFL and MLB, and built out the streaming infrastructure. I'd argue the licensing and execution is already proved out - it's time to focus on those, cut out the fat and double down on what's working.

You're so right. Twitter is all about NOW, about Live events, about the moment. Another way to exploit this would be to create a "news" space, a collection of journalist and press accounts which could be harnessed to provide live news feeds on trending stories. Maybe they do this already, but if not, they should

This is literally the only time I ever use twitter: to see, in real time, what people are saying about a certain event. (The Oscars, Presidential Debates, the Superbowl, the début of Stranger Things, etc).

But the app brings in so much clutter, and the interface is poor for quickly incoming tweets...

> Twitter's modern-day utility seems very low outside of news/sports/politics

What's the evidence for this claim? In academia, Twitter is super important, much more than Facebook or any other social platform. Academics are addicted to Twitter and I think you could charge them, e.g., for tweets longer than 140 characters.

I'm academic. I'm not addicted to twitter, nor is anyone of my coworkers.

Well, you should consider the possibility that you and your coworkers are not representative of academics more generally. In my research field Twitter is quite matter of factly really big. Also note that this was just an example showing that there are more areas where Twitter is doing really well than those that OP listed.

Shouldn't you consider the same, that your group is a set of outliers? Comparing anecdotes will get us nowhere.

I'm talking about tens of thousands of people not individual cases. Pretty much every university, non-university research institution, and funding agency have active Twitter accounts. In my experience, most departments, and labs also have twitter accounts, not to speak of individual researchers. Jobs are found on Twitter, careers are made, new collaborations start there. I'm talking about tens of thousands of people who are highly active on a daily basis, whereas /u/kleiba was referring to himself and some unspecified coworkers which I interpret to be his lab mates.

"Refocus the company to be the Netflix of live TV, focusing on the delivery of live sports and news broadcasts while enabling fans/viewers to discuss in real time." I didn't feel like their experiments in live broadcasting NFL games drew a large audience last year. I think twitter offers sports fans a solid mobile experience(checking real-time reactions from other athletes and sports fans) while watching the game on a big screen HDTV. The biggest sports and political events are also social in nature, most of the time you're watching in a group of people. How do you get a group of people to watch a sports/political event on twitter and discuss in real-time? I agree that Twitter's modern day utility lies here but the switching costs for the user have to be reduced.

"How do you get a group of people to watch a sports/political event on twitter and discuss in real-time?" Via friend lists. If all your friends are watching the game and tweeting at the same time then you are discussing the game with them

"the switching costs for the user have to be reduced" The rise of smart TVs with apps will lead to ever easier delivery of streamed programming to traditional mediums such as TV, while also opening new viewing experiences on mobile, tablet and computer.

Live sports rights are expensive. ESPN has been feeling the pain of having to pay the high prices while losing subscribers. Twitter wouldn't do any better with their ad-based monetization.

Live sports are likely soon to become cheaper when it is no longer viable to have millions of people who don't watch them paying for them anyway.

Could be an interesting case. reddit is already doing this for 'real time' conversations (via F5 refresh) in respective subreddits during games, speeches, conferences, etc.

I'm jumping on it I just don't have the kind of money, time or user base. Anybody want to get involved?

I'd like to get involved, but a lack of capital is going to make it very difficult.

Third Party Live TV content is significantly more expensive, competitive & complicated than the third party content Netflix pays for. To say it is a "greenfield space no one else is really jumping upon yet" is really naive, try to do little research on the market, live content is fragmented for a reason. Therefore we will need billions in cash to create a Netflix of Live TV, there are only a handful of companies(Apple, Microsoft) that can actually outbid the current players. Moreover the winning bidder is likely overpaying for the content making it less likely to see a direct financial return. To make it work it will require near perfect execution and cash Twitter does not have.

They've managed to already for it for NFL and MLB rights, and there's plenty of cheaper rights out there and up for grabs. Netflix didn't start producing original content to begin with, but Twitter could ramp their way up to obtaining a lot of the crown jewels of sport.

Their live streaming was all about content negotiation and marketing which I think they did a poor job of. The actual streaming was handled by MLB Advanced Media which is far and away the leader in this space. Twitter should just acquire them if they want to get into this space.