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Yea, I know it's a really tired subject, but twitter really needs a major overhaul from a usability perspective. I think they should keep the 140 characters as a limit for what is shown in peoples feeds, but the character limit should be much higher. This is particularly important when you get into a conversation with many people, and the handles start taking up most of your 140 characters (as Marc Andreessen recently pointed out). It's also really hard to follow conversations, and they get separated somewhat arbitrarily. You might scoff and say that this would basically facebook-ize twitter, but honestly I don't think that's a bad thing. Facebook is moving into twitter's space, so twitter shouldn't be be so slow to act or it will get eaten, IMHO.

Also, I use twitter to keep up to date on some of the industries I'm interested in, and while it's a great tool it's still frustrating sometimes, since there is a flood of info throughout the day. TweetDeck makes it better since I can group things by interest and triage depending on how much time I have. I guess you can do that with the web interface but I have never found it as natural as with Tweetdeck.

In similar lines here are my observations as a heavy business and personal user:

1. 140chars limit had a goal and philosophy which conflicts now with image attachment flood. Most "interesting" content is typed or pictured in the attachment and the 140char limit is simply worked around

2. Twitter UI is too clunky for what it does. No progress since 7 years I'm using it.

3. Twitter mobile apps don't work properly when mobile. You can't favorite, retweet or comment properly while in an unreachable zone. My 2008 hobby Android 1.1 app has a local queue to cope with remote updates, inserts and Twitter can't implement this?

4. Families aren't on Twitter. Friends to a certain degree. Colleagues to a certain degree. Celebrities/followers yes. Gamers no. Protestors yes.

5. Facebook, LinkedIn implemented the "follow" feature quite successfully.

6. Notifications work, Discover not much.

> Twitter UI is too clunky for what it does. No progress since 7 years I'm using it.

This. A million times this. I don't understand Twitter. I don't get what the hell they're thinking of, when they release (for example) the horrific design that is the Twitter desktop and Mobile apps. An incredibly common use case is to have more than one twitter account and switch between them. Go try it.

A bunch of people brought out superior apps, and Twitter just killed them.

If this is representative of the thinking going on at Twitter, they are (deservedly) doomed.

Tweetbot has a good implementation of multiple accounts. Both on the Mac and iPhone.

I use Tweetbot on both platforms, but I don't think its implementation is good. Good to me would be a merged feed with tweets and mentions from all accounts, analogous to what I can do with email, IRC, instant messaging, etc.; maybe not the best for opsec, but more convenient for casual purposes than having to constantly switch between accounts.

Ah, different use cases. The way it works at the moment is what I was looking for, but I can see when it isn't suitable.

TweetDeck, which is owned by Twitter, handles it very well, too.

Twitter has what can be described as the organizational version of ADHD. They've had several changes of leadership and have had leaders who were primarily focused on other companies while guiding twitter. Jack Dorsey is an impressive person but do you think he could really give his full attention to Twitter while running Square?

The churn at the top is the best explanation I can find for some of the policy reversals we've seen (3rd party clients in, out, in again maybe sort of) and the somewhat random approach to business strategy. Twitter's core audience is a very desirable demographic but not one that's really going to react to in-stream adds at all positively. But twitter doesn't do some of the clever things it could with the firehose; and certainly doesn't use it to create secondary products that would be useful enough that businesses would pay for them.

> 140chars limit had a goal and philosophy which conflicts now with image attachment flood.

Sidenote, I always thought the goal and philosophy was invented after of the the technical limitation, which was that a tweet needed to fit into an SMS.

Agreed. I'm not a heavy Twitter user, but I'm not sure it's a good philosophy to force users to revise and revise until they get something unnaturally terse enough, after sacrificing precious space to ancillary items (at-mentions, or even hashtags) they can't necessarily control the length of.

I can see value in brevity, but when it's forced, it may actually impede communication. It gets hacked around anyways, with multi-part tweets, even by Twitter's own developer account[0]. At the least, there are tweet clusters, where each individual tweet may be a complete sentence but doesn't effectively convey the entirety of what the author meant, without reading the surrounding tweets (in reverse order, of course.) At those points, it would be saner to abandon the limit. Or maybe treat it as a one-way linkblog to other places for discussion.

[0] https://twitter.com/TwitterDev/status/530545195633618945

> Celebrities/followers yes.

Twitter is the new RSS, just less nerdy, basically.

That's a reasonable observation.

They could work on a conversation view, and to not count the @mentions in the character limit.

Counting @mentions in the limit also 'punishes' people with longer names.

But I guess if you didn't count @mentions in the limit you'd find people adding lots of people to a conversation in a spammy way. I'm not really sure how to fix that.

Perhaps there could be a meta-@mention that would include all previous recipients in a given conversation. But then how do you remove people from a conversation? Arggggh!

(Still, i've only thought about this for 2 minutes. I'm sure there's a way that makes sense if you spent more than 10 minutes working it through.)

You could treat the conversation as an endpoint that users have the option to subscribe to, and the @mentions as invitations.

From there you could also offer to exclude uninvited users from the conversation (maybe it is clearer to say, limit postings to the conversation view to people that have been @mentioned).

That's the whole point of hashtags. Just make a hashtag for your post, based on the date, originator, and serial number

>But I guess if you didn't count @mentions in the limit you'd find people adding lots of people to a conversation in a spammy way. I'm not really sure how to fix that.

Simple: cap the number of @mentions in a tweet at 5, or at 120 characters total.

Same for #tags — limit those to 5 or a total number of characters.

Yeah, that. Leading @mentions and trailing hashtags shouldn't count as part of the limit. If you still want to support SMS, just strip those, the reader doesn't need them.

I think the reason why Twitter is not an "everyone" product (even though it's marketed as such) is not the interface, but something way more essential: most people simply have no use for it.

Twitter is good for people who are not only interested in constantly sharing their thoughts, but also have something interesting to say, otherwise they'd find no audience. In addition, they must be good at doing it in 140 characters. Even the ones who are strictly consumers on Twitter fit a niche - they're usually interested in some subject X which is tweeted about by certain people of note.

My grandma doesn't have witty things to say all day, and any interest she might have on what other people say is supplied by Facebook. There is no way she'd ever do anything on Twitter besides signing up and immediately forgetting about it. The best UX in the world couldn't save Twitter for her.

Twitter was able to find an active userbase because even if only 1% of people find it useful, that's plenty of people if you consider the human population. But it should never be seen as something that is useful for people in general. Regular people sign up because of marketing, but they never stay.

I think you've hit the nail on the head. Twitter's UX is painful, but that's really only the half of it. The real issue is that Twitter, regardless of how easy it can be made to use, is inherently useful to a very small proportion of people.

I call it an "extrovert" product. I'm sure I'll catch some flak from bringing up the introvert/extrovert axis on HN (as if we don't get that topic often enough here!). But hear me out. Twitter is for people who like conferences. Twitter is for people who like stages. Twitter is for people who want to have conversations with each other, and also want the world to overhear those conversations. To me, at the other end of the spectrum, that behavior strikes me as weird. It seems painfully and willfully fake and artificial. It seems like so much peacocking, forced smiling, and posturing. It seems like "networking," in the most brutally painful sense of that word. I don't get it. I mean, I grok it, but it holds no interest for me.

As an occasional journalist, I'm often told I "have" to use Twitter. It's "part of the job" to be a "public figure" these days. I'm not interested in being a public figure. I don't begrudge people who are. If anything, I envy and admire their ability to navigate the cognitive dissonance that the Twitter private-in-public dynamic forces. But I just can't do it. It drains me. I find using Twitter to be like doing homework, or eating my vegetables. It's not fun. It's a chore. When a consumer tech product feels like a chore, I don't bother; life's too short.

Twitter is in an unfortunate situation, in that the company was forced to scale massively and go public at around the same time its true user base and use cases were emerging from the noise. Now it's in the unenviable position of having to make billions of dollars in revenue, and of having to compete with the likes of Facebook for a putative billion-something number of users (which it'll never get), when at its essence, Twitter is a restricted product. A substantial portion of the human population will never get any personal utility from using Twitter. Twitter isn't a bad product; it's just not everyone's cup of tea. I don't think there's anything Twitter can do to make me want to use it, and I don't think I'm alone in that sentiment.

It's not you, Twitter. It's me.

I think the biggest problem with Twitter's public perception is the belief you have to tweet to use it effectively. That's not the case at all. If I could only use Twitter in "read only" mode it would still be incredibly useful.

The real trick is curating the right set of accounts to follow, which I think is the second biggest problem with Twitter's public perception: "Following" on Twitter is nothing like "Friending" on Facebook or "Linking" on LinkedIn. Users should feel no compunction about promiscuously following every account they think they might be interested in or for which they see a funny/clever/informative retweet, and guiltlessly unfollowing any account that is wasting space in their feed. But I suspect many novice Twitter users think their Twitter "social graph" should mirror their graphs in other social media, where connections are supposed to more strongly reflect real life bonds. That's a recipe for a boring feed.

Indeed it's the "read-only" customers that are the valuable ones. Advertisers don't want to reach people composing 140 character witticisms or bots spitting out links, they want to reach people who are searching for commentary on #subject, have an interest in @celebrity or @publication or are sufficiently bored/distracted to be spending time poring through semi-curated lists of links, observations and slogans that are probably lower in quality than decent branding collateral anyway.

When it comes to following, the issue which has always kept me away from Twitter is that entities and subject-oriented feeds I'd theoretically be interested in following still seem to spit out vastly more noise than signals, and enforced extreme brevity and URL shorteners don't exactly increase the efficiency of parsing the crap

Things Twitter is fantastic at:

* Real-time breaking news

* Event planning and announcements

* Trial balloons for events, products, projects

* Humor

* Broadcasting the location of food trucks, or specials at a restaurant, or sudden openings at Alinea, &c

* Staying connected to broad but specific peer groups, like "everyone who does software security"

* Announcing and promoting content; specific example: getting a specific group of people to read a blog post

Facebook is good at very few of these things. Twitter is like a more efficient, more far-reaching version of the Facebook news feed; Facebook is a more intimate and conversational version of Twitter.

There has always been a weird rap on Twitter's lack of use cases, despite the fact that lots of people seem to find ways to use it effectively. A couple years ago, the rap was that the only reason to join Twitter was to follow celebrities. Nobody says that anymore; now it's "the only reason to join Twitter is if you're an extravert". Well, celebrities are 0.00001% of humanity, and extraverts are about half of it, so I'd say Twitter is making progress.

> Real-time breakings news

Nope, they fucked up that too recently.

tptacek: Yeah, it still kind of works but not the way it used to. I've noticed that in the past year or so they started to heavily filter their "public firehose"; before I was used to see 100s of new tweets per second around a major event (which was fantastic), while now I only get a few of them. The thing is that when the event it's not that big (i.e. a local event in your neighborhood) that filter makes you lose some pretty valuable info.

Could've fooled me. I'm still getting crime-beat photojournalism from Chicago reporters that's 10x faster than the Trib, and world-wide coverage that's both faster and much better than CNN, in a format that I can actually keep up with.

What do you do to get world wide coverage?

I know a couple people who use Twitter as a personal "online diary"; like a microblog. Nobody knows who they are; they post anonymously and are not connected with no one that knows them. These people are also, frankly, not very technology literate, because, though they try to hide themselves, they don't realise their social media apps are linked to their phone number and emails and some phones send this info to other phones.

"A lot of people find it difficult to figure out what they should say, how to keep track of who they follow and simply how to engage with it."

I have been using online messaging and chat since ... 1991 ? BBS forums, irc, unix talk, MUD/MOO, ICQ, classic mailing lists and thousands of web forums.

I still find it hard to view a conversation thread on twitter.

If I see a comment that is interesting, and is obviously part of a thread or conversation, it's still non-obvious how to view that entire conversation or respond to specific parts of it in any way that resembles a thread.

Well, take the wired telephone (please!) Of course, "everyone can use it" but I bet since its invention, a few power users have made 100x as many calls per week as the average person has. They're the real benefactors. The only difference is that on Twitter you get to see who is doing this.

>recently their monetization offering (advertising platform) has become far more impressive.

I wonder whether a saturation point will be reached with regard to our willingness to view ads in general. More specifically, might this happen in a way that impacts the viability of ad-supported models that rely on the "build an audience, then ad them to death" approach?

Google Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, and others all command a great share of our attention and rely largely on the model. Youtube also seems to be showing more ads. I have also noticed that some sites which feature, say 1 minute or less news clip videos, show 15-30 second ads before each one. Personally, I have stopped using these because I find it obnoxious. I get that they need to make money, but at some point, they crossed my personal threshold.

The net is that we are more and more inundated with ads, and I wonder if the effectiveness of those ads will wane to a point where their value can no longer deliver the massive value upon which so many companies rely.

I recently reinstalled adblock after seeing my first 30 second ad on youtube. I had happily used the web for 3 years without it.

This is an insightful comment, and the takeaway discussion is: is Twitter a product for just "quite a lot of people", or can they bend it to a product for everyone?

I think what investors are looking for is a move towards a product that is for everyone. But given that Twitter's core business / USP is precisely that it is not like "everything everyone else is using", could the conclusion thus be that investors had too high an expectation of what Twitter has to offer the world?

Interesting. I had not thought about that aspect before. When I think of it, Facebook’s UI is probably a lot more easy to use for most people. And even then some still struggle :)