What Twitter needs to add next | Hacker News Reader

What Twitter needs to add next

mnmlist.com

51 pointsUncle_Sam22 comments

I completely agree, I think Twitter should focus on monetizing and improving the web experience (because it kinda sucks right now and if more people use it -> easier to monetize).

What's wrong with the web experience? I hear this all the time, but i like it's simplicity ...

At the beginning you should have focused app, that does one thing very well, 10 times better than anyone else. Then (if that sticks) you should gradually add features, but only if that makes user experience that much better. I've seen a lot of great apps do that and win big time. I think Twitter has a lot of problems with fail whale, so maybe they don't have the time (resources?) to expand their core product.

I might as well ask here: am I too stupid to use twitter? Whenever I visit it, I see somebody responding to somebody else ("@otherguy yeah I totally agree") - but I can't see the original post, which annoys me. Is this normal or am I too stupid to use twitter?

haha, I used to wonder exactly the same thing. I asked my friend who actually uses Twitter, and he basically said, "You're doing it wrong." He said that Twitter is all about the stream, and using it for historical conversations like that is awkward and difficult. Which makes me question the point, but there you go.

I use the Seesmic web and Android client, mainly because they do a great job of showing conversations (click 'in reply to' in the meta message).

That does require that the comments are public (or that the author has granted you access to view the comments if private).

Can't speak for the 8 zillion client apps out there, but in the web UI, if you click on the "in reply to @soandso" text below one of those responses, it'll bring you to the original tweet.

The better clients will expand to show the whole back & forth of the conversation, if it exists.

When you follow someone their updates appear on your home page and you never see @replies to other people.

Just because a service has a feature, doesn't mean a user has to use it. At its core, Twitter remains a 140-character-update service. (And no Leo Babauta, Twitter will never go beyond 140 characters because of the SMS-length limit.)

And I fail to see what decentralising Twitter has to do with keeping it simple.

It's already possible to send tweets which would overflow an SMS. Twitter limits tweets to 140 characters UTF-8 characters, which can be multibyte. SMS is 140 8-bit chars.

Not if you're using SMS to send tweets, like some of us still do.

I don't think removing the 140 character limit would be bad necessarily, as long as only 140 characters are displayed by until a "view full tweet" option is invoked. The problem is that people will complete a thought over multiple tweets, so the stream becomes polluted.

I disagree. Sure, Twitter needs to improve stability and speed. But I think the location and annotations are exciting and it makes sense for them to learn what works and adds value to the core experience.

No, they have value. The value is in the simplicity. They would be adding "noise" if they keep this up.

Twitter just needs to leave their sh.. alone.

I think...personally... if they want to improve the experience, they should do it through optional add-ons using their own API.

I would like to see this design-tweak, if not on Twitter, then on a 3rd-party client: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1445955

After I saw the headline I was all prepared to come here and say, "No what they need to do is make what they have stable and scalable." It turns out that's mostly what this little article says, too, despite the misleading linkbait-ish headline. Sigh.

The linkbaitish headline is how the article makes its point. Between seeing the link, clicking on it, and viewing the article, I guessed what the feature was going to be, and guessed wrong. Without that mechanism, the article wouldn't have affected me in the way it did.

Built in syncing of read tweets between all clients.

Who uses twitter anymore? Nearly everyone I know prefers Facebook status updates because you can comment on them and everyone's already running FB 24/7 anyway.

Well, I guess that really depends on who you know and how you use social media.

Most of my Facebook "friends" really are personal friends or at least acquaintances that I know for non-professional reasons. They are nice and often interesting people and I enjoy staying in touch. But I won't do business through FB and would consider it an incredible waste of time to follow status updates 24/7.

On Twitter, I follow several loosely connected circles of people. Some I consider friends, others I don't know and have never met. Shared professional or cultural interests is common. Keeping an eye on my stream through a good client gives me a narrow, personal and often useful heads-up about things that interest me.

Twitter, be being public by default means it doesn't have that intimacy that Facebook does. I'll follow someone if they're interesting, not because they're a friend.

But to answer your question, I find it fantastic for foreign language learning. Real, native speakers without travelling long distances.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com