Not Even Twitter Understands Twitter

Twitter&#x27;s problem is that they don&#x27;t even have the basic understanding of why they&#x27;re successful. In the past several years there hasn&#x27;t been a single change they&#x27;ve implemented that has improved things. The goal I guess has always been to attract the non-user.<p>But when I really study things most of the stuff that people think as fundamentally part of the service was instead added by the community and initially rejected by those running Twitter like use of the pound sign.<p>In fact when you look at when Twitter really slowed its growth was when they turned their back on that very community, especially developers. Anyone here actually believe that their experience with Twitter wouldn&#x27;t be far better if there were still independent clients?<p>Twitter imho would be far better served to improve the service for those using it than randomly try throwing stuff at the wall in an attempt to broaden its appeal.

&gt; Or what about hashtags. This is a brilliant concept invented by Chris Messina, which allowed people to group tweets from many different people into a single collection.<p>Yeah, IRC channels never existed. I think I lost a few IQ points on this article.<p>Are bookmarks really not a thing anymore? Is such basic browser functionality, such as back buttons and bookmarks passé today? I mean, I guess we all collectively forgot IRC ever existed. Or Usenet. Or RSS. Why not forget bookmarks exist as well. Oh right. None of that can be monetized.<p>The internet is fucking doomed. We&#x27;ve moved from the promise of open networks, federated protocols, and decentralization to centralized services, advertising everywhere, and tracking your every movement to sell to the highest bidder. And people are <i>worried</i> Twitter might die. Yeah, it&#x27;s really so sad they won&#x27;t live another day to track you or sell you useless shit. Sob story of the eyeball economy, right there folks.

<p><pre><code> When you favorite a tweet, you mostly do so for your own consumption. It is a way for you to tell yourself that this tweet is something you want to get back to, or remember for later use. </code></pre> That sure ain&#x27;t how I use it. Two reasons. (1) Favorites are public. (2) I don&#x27;t need to get back to a tweet or remember it for later use; they&#x27;re short, so I remember them in my brain.<p>I saw the article was much longer, but the author lost me at that point.

I disagree with the statement that people don&#x27;t use it for chitchat. That is <i>also</i> something people use it for: I have a lot of friends on Twitter who tweet whimsical things (and whom I tweet whimsical things to).<p>But this still makes Twitter very different from Facebook. On Twitter, I follow people who tweet about interesting things or who share some common interest with me. Facebook, on the other hand, is something I use to talk to the people I met at high school and Uni. Thus Twitter is always a fun place to go to, filled with content that will appeal to me. Facebook, on the other hand, is mostly lowest-common-denominator plagiarised content and life updates I probably don&#x27;t care much about.<p>Facebook is a place that represents some of your existing relationships. Twitter is a place where you make new ones.

Twitter moments could be so awesome, I have a feeling they will get it right, but its not quite there yet.<p>Especially for sports, when I&#x27;m watching a game I usually have twitter open to see people&#x27;s jokes &amp; analysis. Sometimes, I look at the moment the day after just cause I&#x27;m curious, but the moment doesn&#x27;t reflect my game experience at all.<p>Here is the twitter moment for the 1st day of the NBA season. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;i&#x2F;moments&#x2F;659130295396896768" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;i&#x2F;moments&#x2F;659130295396896768</a> -- its mostly just pictures from official nba and team accounts. There are no jokes, and there is very little analysis. It has some random highlights from games. But the biggest highlight of the night ( game winning block on Lebron ) is missing for some reason.<p>Same with this moment on the most recent GOP debate: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;i&#x2F;moments&#x2F;659492422137827328?lang=en" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;i&#x2F;moments&#x2F;659492422137827328?lang=en</a> There are no jokes at all. There had to have been at least 1 donald trump joke out there that should have been included.<p>I think they are working on curation tools so anyone can curate moments, and I think that will really help if enough interesting people take the time to do it. But I really think it could be the newspaper or the &#x27;reddit&#x27; of a lot of topics.

They changed it because people were using them as likes rather than favourites.<p>I originally used them as &quot;favourites&quot; (for links that I was interested in but didn&#x27;t have time to read now) but others didn&#x27;t. Twitter catered for the majority and made the list of your favourites harder to get at and started putting things you favourite into other people&#x27;s timelines.<p>Whilst I preferred how it was originally it is clear to me that this change was motivated by how the community at large used the feature.

I should include a disclaimer to this comment that despite attempting to use Twitter multiple times, I still cannot find a use for it, so I would not consider myself a &quot;Twitter user&quot;. That said, the criticism of the favorite -&gt; like change makes no sense to me.<p>&gt; Favorite (old) = neutral statement related to the importance of the tweet for you. It&#x27;s mostly a bookmark, not really an endorsement.<p>&gt; Favoriting a tweet didn&#x27;t mean it was her favorite (as Twitter apparently believes)<p>Oh yeah? If that&#x27;s true, that&#x27;s a <i>terrible</i> UX. Any time you have to say &quot;xxx doesn&#x27;t actually <i>mean</i> xxx&quot;, you should stop and think extra hard about what you&#x27;re saying. &quot;Favoriting&quot; a tweet should mean exactly what it says it means.<p>And considering how favoriting a tweet notifies the recipient, and a person&#x27;s favorites are public, I don&#x27;t buy that favoriting a tweet was a neutral reaction to a tweet. If I got a notification that said Bob favorited tweet yyy, I would take that to mean endorsement.<p>Just because some users are using it as a bookmarking service doesn&#x27;t mean that&#x27;s what most people use it as or what Twitter intends it to be used as.

Ironically, Not even this guy understands how people (other than marketers like himself) use Twitter. It&#x27;s rare to see anyone favoriting a tweet to &quot;reference&quot; it later. Most people use favorite as a token of acknowledgement (I saw this and approve). Favorites are not endorsements either, since it doesn&#x27;t get broadcasted to my followers.

Twitter succeeds because it takes a feature everyone already likes - chatroom - and breaks down the walls. Hash tags serve to group users into &quot;rooms&quot;, following groups users, favorites (&lt;3) invite users into your conversation. The brilliance is in making it universal so everyone clicks Twitter&#x27;s Ruby.

A realisation I just had: Twitter and Tumblr are similar in many respects. Both are microblogging (though the former more micro) services, both are interest-based networks, both work fairly similarly (retweets&#x2F;posts, hashtags&#x2F;tags, etc.). The demographics are different (Twitter&#x27;s is broader than Tumblr&#x27;s, which is largely just young people), but they&#x27;re not fundamentally different services.<p>Yet their corporate masters differ. Tumblr, the company, totally <i>gets</i> Tumblr, the community. They understand why the site is popular, what people want. Twitter, though, believes it is Facebook.

Twitter is only interesting because it happens to be the current iteration of instant messenger &#x2F; community chatroom. Kik, AOL IM, ICQ, IRC.. there&#x27;s no particular innovation from Twitter keeping users there. It just happened to be in the right place at the right time, and right now it seems as though anything with a half decent design UI and interesting set of features could sprout up to draw migration from twitters core&#x2F;casual userbase.

Not having people use your product the way you expected it is not a problem. <i>This</i> is in fact the greatest lesson from Twitter history: you don’t make your product; your users will.<p>The problem here is that Twitter is slow to respond to these usage patterns; we don’t really know if they realize how people use their product and they seem to try random things to satisfy investors and&#x2F;or users.

Some people consider the fav button as a marker, the expression of feeling is not necessarily what they want. I understand this UX change might bring more users because it made others subconsciously feel being endorsed, but personally I don&#x27;t like it, it&#x27;s like twitter claims that I have something which I don&#x27;t.

Are people still complaining about the icon change that has no functional differences whatsoever? Star, heart, whatever, it saves the tweet in a list for later access.

This just reinforces my belief (and I&#x27;m a broken record on this) that Twitter would have been far better as a protocol than as a company.

Best article I&#x27;ve read in awhile. How many points will there stock fall Monday?

I&#x27;m confused. The article apparently thinks that it&#x27;s fine to favorite something you don&#x27;t actually think is your favorite, contra twitter. But then why not heart something you don&#x27;t actually like? The logic doesn&#x27;t seem to work out.

Can I heart this?<p>This post is spot on.

From the article:<p>&quot;Last year it had a revenue of $1.4 billion, but it&#x27;s [sic] operational costs was [sic] $1.9 billion&quot;<p>How on earth could it cost 1.9 Billion to run &quot;Twitter&quot;? 50 WhatsApp engineers and 100 Elixer servers could handle everything. That&#x27;s just insane. They need to cut costs NOW.