What Twitter Can Be
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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).
As the app grows the usage grows and twitter makes more money.
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.
1) Ads via the in-line feeds [removing ads is a ToS violation, same way the real world ad networks now is basically a js/link configuration...can sell CPC this way]
2) Charge for API calls.
3) Charge for "premium membership" that unlocks the api at like $10/user/year
--- For in-house development and/or SaaS software that interfaces with Twitter. Even something like $.10 per 1,000 requests would add up pretty fast for large deployments.
Example? http://freshdesk.com/integrations/help-desk-ticketing-twitte...
These people could be milked by Twitter. Its a SaaS webapp so they can protect their API access.
3) Charge for "premium membership" that unlocks the api at like $10/user/year
--- app piracy isn't an issue if a user is paying to unlock the API for their account
Also, if app piracy is an issue because they can get ahold of your API keys, that just means you need to route it through your internal API and secure things properly. It isn't Twitters job to fix the fact you don't want to have any infrastructure.
Where does it say that? I've been working with folks and using products that do exactly that and they haven't had issues. Yes you have to display it like Twitter wants, but I've not seen any limit to also showing FB or other content.
That seems reasonable. I don't like any of this social media stuff, but Twitter has the best APIs. Maybe because they sell access, so they want it to be a good product?
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.
That, at least, shouldn't be the case. Your conversations live in the Notifications tab.
Now, with the recent articles about Twitter's apps collecting the list of applications you have installed on your mobile, I tend to think that Twitter is as broken a concept as 'You can shout 140 characters - but no more - and people need to reply just as terse' sounds to your granddad. There's no way to justify the crazy limitations and the owner of the platform turns out to be another FB.
Next up: Real name policies on Twitter?
Can break down with sub-conversation trees a little, but that's hardly only twitter's problem. I'd be more than happy with reddit-style @reply threads.
> ... when you do actually get a conversation
> going, it's hard to follow ...
http://www.solipsys.co.uk/TwitterConversations/HeliumBalloon...
http://www.solipsys.co.uk/TwitterConversations/ListContainin...
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.
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.
But here's the thing: I have a Google account. Otherwise I wouldn't be able to put down cash in the damn Play Store¹. Just recently I bought a couple of $10 apps. They take my money. They know who I am. I cannot rate any application.
Because my 'Google Account' isn't good enough for that, I need that 'social stuff'. Which I cannot, because my G+ account (I gave it a try, didn't like it all that much and got nymbanned²) is ~dead~.
That's actually like Amazon requiring an account to order things (fine, 'normal'), but you have to connect Facebook to post a review. In one word: Insane. Or broken.
①: Now that is a moronic name and never gets better.
②: I used to change my name from my ~real name~ to 'Ben .'. Account locked out and lots of things are broken. Of course, a while later they changed their minds and now ~real names~ are optional and if you don't want to give a last name they suggest that you use .. '.'. I wish I was making this up.
The rest? Bullshit. G+ is a closed and broken platform, built by an advertisement company. It made lots of questionable decisions in the past (this very same person has a blocked G+ account - for real name policy violations - that, combined with the amazing Google customer support means that I will never ever be able to rate an app for my Android phone). There is _nothing_ good about G+.
Twitter sucks in various ways. But G+ is not better. Not at all. Unless we're really just talking 'character counts'. In all other ways? Worse, so. much. worse.
So just like Twitter then?
The single retort I can come up with is that I'd still prefer to feed anything _but_ Google with data, but really.. You're right. No difference.
There are definitely negatives but so far the largest one I've found is that it was positioned as an alternative to both Facebook and Twitter but since none of those platforms are built on any open protocol (nor is G+ for that matter), it requires creating and maintaining yet another profile and platform for users. For the vast majority, that's just too much friction and it would require more than a nicer interface and a few features to see any large-scale adoption.
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.
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/ 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.
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.
1) Google with "site:twitter.com inurl:lists big data"
Google's listings are decent indicator of higher quality lists. Substitute whichever topic you are interested in.
2) Look at your sources' memberships. If there's someone on twitter you follow closely for a topic, check out their memberships to see who has already listed them for that topic and that list may be one to start with.
3) We have a list search you can try out and sort by various metrics to find higher signal lists
I tried to get into Twitter for a while and ultimately stopped using it.
Part of the problem I think is I have kind of a wide range of interests -- sports, software, entrepreneurship, etc. So Twitter probably can't gauge my interests very well. I ended up with a lot of those self-promotion feeds and ESPN writers, but nothing ultimately with substance (except for certain people that I found via other sources -- like if I follow their blog, I'd follow their Twitter too).
It'd be better if it was easier to categorize the feeds I'm following and view by category depending on what I feel like at the moment. I know they have lists, but I only just found that a little bit ago -- and it's so hidden that I actually have to type the URL into my address bar because I can't get there from a link on the homepage. Viewing by category should be, if not the default, then one big link away from the initial page.
Conference or other temporal hashtags are a good way to discover users who are focused on a single topic, who you can then curate into a list. Once you find a few topic experts, they become a discovery source for other experts.
Most of the people I follow I found through people I know retweeting them or through looking at the feeds of other successful/important people (for example, I recreated the feeds of other investors/entrepreneurs) - http://theireyes.austenallred.com/
And that other site (twitter through their eyes) looks awesome. Thanks!
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.
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.
http://www.solipsys.co.uk/TwitterConversations/HeliumBalloon...
http://www.solipsys.co.uk/TwitterConversations/ListContainin...
http://www.solipsys.co.uk/TwitterConversations/Assessment_20...
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.
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.
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.
Otherwise it's always seemed to live up to its name and feels like a billion voices "twittering" about everything and nothing at the same time.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
I have no doubt this says more about me than about Twitter, but I never could never see a way around it. Similar experience with Reddit, comparing the default front page to one tailored to the subreddits I enjoy the most. Of course I gave up on Reddit too after a while...
Thanks! Maybe I should try to treat it more like the worlds' biggest IRC channel then. I will give it another shot some day…
"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-...
"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."
Trolls/abuse/whatever aren't the problem. They're the most extreme manifestation of the real problem: everyone wants to broadcast themselves to as many people as possible but nobody actually wants to listen to anyone but a subset of the people they've already decided to hear from.
But twitter can't restructure as an RSS reader for worthless thoughts (and links to worthwhile thoughts) for those with short attention spans. Maybe they can clamp down on abuse, it might give the flash in the pan a few more years of life.
I just see a non sequitur about twitter abuse. Did you interpret when I said abuse is not THE problem with twitter, that I meant I don't find abuse on twitter to be A problem?
That wasn't what I was trying to say, but otherwise I'm confused as to how your post is a reply to mine.
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.
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.
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)
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.
We basically see this as the back-end that could power some really cool stuff (apps, partnerships with publishers)
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.
Edit: unsure of the downvotes - I feel like this is relevant info to the parent comment.
He tried this at Uber too. Kalinick shut that down super quick, and I think he is banned from the premises.
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.
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?XDVhEtRR2EAlaVw2sOrQkWlBcohFw9na8aNc...
I think the results deserve a discussion on their own...
$20/mo unlimited tweets
1¢/tweet, top up your account a dollar at a timeBut the value for me was in interacting with a large number of people, and I suspect even charging a few dollars a year would lead to the vast majority of accounts disappearing, reducing the remaining users' incentive to pay, leading to more accounts disappearing, etc.
On the other hand, I would happily pay (today) for something that gave me full control over my content.
The major shareholder of the article wants Twitter to provide a more Facebook-style algorithm-decides-what-you-read, which Twitter indeed seem to be insistently experimenting with. That's a major turn-off for me and I think a misjudgement. People currently move from Facebook to Twitter as their primary social network because of exactly that problem. Personally, I want to decide for myself.
I like to see my network content, the content that I have already curated for myself, in chronological order. For whatever reason, social networks would prefer me not to have easy access to that any more.
Ideally, I would like to have the ability to take everything I have written on Twitter (content that I have provided) and easily transfer it to an alternative host.
I would like Twitter to give me the freedom to do that - so that I don't feel that I have to do it.
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.”
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.
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.
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.
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.
Once the news folks were paying attention some of them started reporting tweets directly and then it snowballed - there's a real positive feedback loop between news/politicians/celebrities - politicians and celebrities use twitter because the newspapers pay attention, and the newspapers pay attention because politicians and celebrities use it.
Information is too important to be siloed and dominated by a single service. Identities are too valuable to be contracted into an @whoami which is more or less owned by one organization.