But people just love to debate whether Twitter is alive, dying, or already dead, so I figured they could use a common space to talk about it.
Twitter is dead, long live Twitter! Cheers, @ducu
194 karma · joined June 5, 2010
But people just love to debate whether Twitter is alive, dying, or already dead, so I figured they could use a common space to talk about it.
Twitter is dead, long live Twitter! Cheers, @ducu
I'm looking for help on my side project, dev/marketing, probably someone like you. Check my about and ping me if interested. Maybe a fresh project that you find interesting would make it easier to get back to work. Good luck.
But the parallel between food and web in terms of consumption doesn't stand. The currency for food is money and organic food is more expensive, while the currency for web is generally time spent, and so the junk web is more expensive.
And no, we should not regulate either. Just promote the more valuable and healthier options. By the way, besides tools such as Freedom which only reduce the intake of junk web, what services do you think would fit in the category of organic web?
Thanks for pointing this out, I'm thinking about changing the Twitter app settings to read-only. All it does is parse your home timeline to get the tweets so read-only is enough for Svven.
I'm very interested because (as I mentioned several times here already so sorry for the plug again) I'm building http://svven.com. It's also about recommendation but instead of AI I'm betting on the intelligence of the people - a social approach to relevance.
I will sure try Recent News to compare the results.
I think the difference between the two comes from the nature of user relationships. While on Facebook it had to be reciprocal (following was added later and it's not used much), on Twitter the user relationships can be one way. That makes all the difference. This is why on Facebook the user relationships are just replicas of real-life relationships, which was great for user acquisition but it's also a huge limitation that Facebook can't get past. On Twitter on the other hand anyone can follow anyone and while user acquisition is more difficult, it opens up the world and gives a lot of opportunity for new user relationships. Because of this Twitter is the best social network we have so far.
And also a little worried given your description of some of your students :P But sure, it should be interesting, also because Svven is built in Python and I see this is what you teach.
I just followed you on Twitter, I'm @ducu, let's DM there.
Svven for example puts together people tweeting same links. Tweeting, not liking. Two tweets containing same link can have very different and often contradictory messages.
To give a practical example, some of you probably noticed PG's controversial tweet about unions (https://twitter.com/paulg/status/663456748494127104), and also the reply that took double the likes of that (https://twitter.com/MarkAmesExiled/status/663495439069614080). Because the reply contained the link to PG's tweet, in Svven you can see all sides of this story around the same link.
But if you're interested in different perspectives from your own, isn't this part of your, well, interests? Do you still need to break out of that?
Personally I see the "filter bubble" as a non-issue. Partly because people will go with their interests no matter what. Forcing them to see everything else reminds me of this image
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Clockwork_Orange_(film)#/med...
Your concern is the so called "filter bubble". I think it all comes down to how this kind of system is implemented. Svven in particular encourages you to navigate further from your fellows and it immediately adapts to however your interests (ie. tweets) are changing. A new tweet gives you a new perspective.
This is obvious if you look at tools such as http://svven.com or http://nuzzel.com.
I'm still not there yet, and I lost a lot of karma because of it. This is a post of mine that got 31 points - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8339667
And it was picked up by somebody with more karma that created a poll about it and gained 71 points on that - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8339900
That was a bit unfair..
I understand how it helps the forum work well, but for the user doesn't seem much more than a vanity feature. Being able to flag/downvote is something I really don't care about.
Anyone can point out what are the features that can be unlocked with more karma? I'd like to know what I'm missing.
It discovers the people that tweet same links as I do, and gives me what else they tweet.
Disclaimer: I built it.
Well I applied for YC Fellowship and didn't make it. That was a pitty also given the naming coincidence - "fellowship" is the core concept in Svven.
Twitter just doesn't offer any incentive to tweet interesting stuff, besides the vanity features (stars/favs/likes/whatever they just introduced).
Svven gives you a good incentive to do so. Thanks a lot for trying it, check back after tweeting some cool links! ;)
Sorry for the plug, but this is exactly how http://svven.com can help. New user tweets a couple of links - gets other people that tweeted same links - and also the other links they tweeted. How's this for a solution?
That's true, bad wording from my part, I was just trying to discuss Twitter as a service rather than Twitter as a business.
I think that this confusion is more the reason why adoption and retention are not that great. Besides this, I think Twitter is the most valuable social network to date, you just have to hack your way around it to make it useful.
You guys here on Hacker News don't seem to fancy Twitter so much and I wonder why..
Svven is quite different from Flipboard, it may seem more like Nuzzel but it's different from that as well. Lemme explain..
IMO Flipboard is a beautiful RSS and social reader where users subscribe to various feeds. And because it works on the subscription model (like Twitter or whatever RSS tool), users inevitably get overloaded with lots of content. There's no proper filtering on Flipboard.
Nuzzel is a filtering tool, very useful if you're already subscribed to (ie follow) lots of profiles on Twitter. Simple tool for power users.
Svven on the other hand is a discovery tool, and the way it works is quite unique. It starts from the links you tweet, and automatically discovers similar people (aka fellows) based on that. Then it aggregates the news tweeted by these fellows -- so this 2nd step is kinda like what Nuzzel does.
Because of this approach Svven works pretty well for Twitter users that haven't figured out who to follow yet. They only need to tweet a couple of links so Svven discovery kicks in and figures out the rest. This also introduces an important incentive for users to tweet what matters to them. So you see although they look alike, Svven is quite different from Nuzzel.
It finds interesting people and content based on what you tweet. Here's how it works in three steps.
1) Svven gets the links from your tweets. It also shows other people who tweeted same links as you did lately...
2) ... these people are your fellows. Svven finds and ranks them based on the same links you tweeted.
3) Your fellows also tweeted other links. Svven aggregates and orders these links according to their ranks.
Keep tweeting what matters to you, so Svven will give you the best of Twitter.
AMA here or on Twitter, thanks a lot for any feedback! Cheers, @ducu