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Twitter is Pivoting

daltoncaldwell.com

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Re: Twitter is Pivoting

#41

Post by dm8 »

nemesisj wrote: post #2

I hate to be that (negative) guy, but I'm starting to get really tired of Dalton constantly pissing all over twitter. Particularly because he's competing against them. I'm an App.net backer, and I think it's cool what he's doing, but FFS, let someone else carry the water, if it even needs carrying at all. This all just feels really petty and whiney, particularly when you're already at work solving the problem.

Even I agree with you when you say that author comes across as negative towards Twitter. Also, I hate the way he hates brand advertisers and advertising. C'mon, we all need advertising. We all need effective channels to market our products and companies. The problem being digital advertising is completely broken. But that doesn't make whole brand advertising bad!

Re: Twitter is Pivoting

#42

Post by dbecker »

nemesisj wrote: post #2

I hate to be that (negative) guy, but I'm starting to get really tired of Dalton constantly pissing all over twitter. Particularly because he's competing against them. I'm an App.net backer, and I think it's cool what he's doing, but FFS, let someone else carry the water, if it even needs carrying at all. This all just feels really petty and whiney, particularly when you're already at work solving the problem.

I don't follow the social media space very carefully, so I had no idea who he was. I read the article, and thought it was insightful.

Perhaps it was old news from a same source if you follow the space carefully, but I suspect most readers are in my position.

And it's hard to fault a posting that is genuinely insightful for most readers.

Re: Twitter is Pivoting

#43

Post by wmf »

javajosh wrote: post #27
wmf wrote: post #9

I get the impression that social media douchebags already pivoted Twitter in that direction a few years ago, and now Twitter is just confirming it. The sad part IMO is that it seems like they could fix their developer relations problems and their business model by charging to send relevant tweets to existing followers, not unrelated ads. Of course, I don’t even use Twitter so you probably shouldn’t ask me.

True, but the root problem is in education. Our schools are passing out "social media douchebag" degrees left and right - we can expect nothing less. This is only partially tongue-in-cheek. The balance of information systems operate on trust, just as economies do, and eroding trust at the institutional level is a bad sign.

As much as I like to make fun of the douchebags, I have to admit that there is some merit to the idea of Twitter as an opt-in marketing channel or a character-limited version of Google Reader — at least those use case are useful to some people. The original Twitter, although authentically social, ranged from boring (I don't care what you had for lunch) to frustrating (you can't have any meaningful discussion in 140-character chunks).

Re: Twitter is Pivoting

#44

Post by flexxaeon »

TillE wrote: post #37
spot wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

http://www.quora.com/Twitter-1/Why-do-some-tweets-have-a-per... i knew twitter was broken but this takes the cake. i have been using twitter for years and had no idea.

Hey, Quora got slightly less obnoxious about blocking their content. Finally. Just a week or two ago, I followed a link to Quora and they were still doing the scummy old Experts Exchange trick of blurring out most of the answers.

haven't used quora enough to discern but it seems to be selective. sometime i get the roadblock, other times not

Re: Twitter is Pivoting

#45

Post by danso »

chaz wrote: post #34
danso wrote: post #4

Of all the rhetorical points that Dalton makes, this one was the most damning for me: >>> His announcement was formatted as a direct reply to the official Twitter account. This means the announcement would only be seen by his followers that also follow the official Twitter account. I don’t get the feeling he did this on purpose. An experienced Twitter user would know to add a “.” at the beginning of his message so th…

To be fair to Chernin, he's a board member, not a leadership executive. Most Twitter employees will never meet him and many may not even know who he is (or the other board members). Smaller companies have a board that's much closer to the employees, where it's not uncommon for senior employees to be in frequent contact with individual board members for advice. Larger companies will have boards that are far more diver…

This is a fair and worthwhile distinction...still, Twitter is one of those services that seems hard to "get" without a good college-try at it -- I only joined because our company more-or-less said everyone should make an account. And now I'm thankful that happened because the mechanisms of Twitter make it a unique platform for consuming and sharing information...and yet without using it, I could not be convinced that it was nothing more than blogging for people who liked blogging about really trivial things.

Re: Twitter is Pivoting

#46

Post by jonnathanson »

chaz wrote: post #34
danso wrote: post #4

Of all the rhetorical points that Dalton makes, this one was the most damning for me: >>> His announcement was formatted as a direct reply to the official Twitter account. This means the announcement would only be seen by his followers that also follow the official Twitter account. I don’t get the feeling he did this on purpose. An experienced Twitter user would know to add a “.” at the beginning of his message so th…

To be fair to Chernin, he's a board member, not a leadership executive. Most Twitter employees will never meet him and many may not even know who he is (or the other board members). Smaller companies have a board that's much closer to the employees, where it's not uncommon for senior employees to be in frequent contact with individual board members for advice. Larger companies will have boards that are far more diver…

Not only that, but it's also a bit of a stretch to draw any connection between NewsCorp's stewardship of MySpace and Twitter's developer strategy. There is no real connection there.

Chernin is not going to be leading or planning developer-relations strategies for the platform. Most likely, to your point, he's going to be there to develop content and media partnerships. He's one of the most powerful and connected people in Hollywood, and has been for 30-something years now. That's the value he's bringing. He's not a tech guy, nor does Twitter need him to be.

Small, mildly embarrassing flub of a first tweet, but Dalton's drawing way too many far-out inferences from it.

Re: Twitter is Pivoting

#47

Post by dm8 »

I have to disagree with author on some of the points. And looks like he doesn't like the fact that FB and Twitter are part media, part software companies.

"a media company writing software that is optimized for mostly passive users interested in a media and entertainment filter."

What's wrong in being media company? We all agree that software is eating the world, so why is it bad if Twitter is "disrupting" real-time media consumption? I loved Twitter's Olympics coverage. Even though I was thousands of miles away from London, I could feel the excitement.

Same for Hurricane Sandy. It was so useful to get latest news update in such a terrible time (for everyone involved). I was caught in another disaster few years back and the biggest problem was not getting important news updates from credible agencies/people. Twitter solved that problem for Hurricane Sandy coverage.

Twitter/FB are becoming like "breaking news" for every news. Be it earthquakes, celebrity gossip, world cups, olympics or new product launches!

Re: Twitter is Pivoting

#48

Post by anu_gupta »

zaidf wrote: post #35

An experienced Twitter user would know to add a “.” at the beginning of his message so that his followers would see it. Signed up for twitter on the day it launched(I think) and did not know that. Twitter is a painful product to use. It isn't made for humans. Twitter doesn't have to show a username in tweets; they can easily translate it to the name. Twitter doesn't have to require each reply to appear like an out of…

Well, if you're Zaid on Twitter, and that's your original account, you signed up about a year after Twitter launched.

Re: Twitter is Pivoting

#49

Post by lucisferre »

spot wrote: post #29
danso wrote: post #4

Of all the rhetorical points that Dalton makes, this one was the most damning for me: >>> His announcement was formatted as a direct reply to the official Twitter account. This means the announcement would only be seen by his followers that also follow the official Twitter account. I don’t get the feeling he did this on purpose. An experienced Twitter user would know to add a “.” at the beginning of his message so th…

http://www.quora.com/Twitter-1/Why-do-some-tweets-have-a-per... i knew twitter was broken but this takes the cake. i have been using twitter for years and had no idea.

This is the exact reason Twitter needs to change or accept it will never have true long-term mass market appeal. It's UX is targeted at geeks and not for the average user. This was great for getting off the ground, but the fact that these things still exist is pretty sad. I'm not at all surprised their new CEO didn't get this. In fact it underlies the need for the to pivot even more.

Re: Twitter is Pivoting

#50

Post by lordlarm »

I actually have used and are using twitter. It is a horrendous user experience - but I know how to fix it.

My main problem is my diverse interest in different subjects and twitters current inability to let me organize and follow what I like.

I'm following approx. 200 people divided 30% technology, 30% cycling and 30% friends/locals. For me, it would be impossible to imagine following more than 250 or 300 people with todays interface - because they are all thrown into each other and reading the raw feed is a clutter and mess of subjects.

You would think, considering their main goal is to get people following their interest, that they would get this part of the interface right. But the contrary - it is what is worst with twitter.

The solution (and problem) I'm hinting to is of course lists and as Facebook, G+ and virtually every other social network already have found out: people like to organize interests, people and subjects into different "buckets". Facebook had a lame interface for this many years, but does a better job now.

My point is, as an experienced twitter user, I know where the pains are and my first day in office I would make sure that the accessibility of lists were greatly improved.

The second day I would use to fix a decent conversation view and comprehensible reply scheme.

EDIT: To point out the inaccessibility of lists today, here is the general way to read up on a subject: tool-icon > lists > choose list. That's 2 clicks too many. You could also use the shortcut "gl" and spare 2 clicks, but still, it is 1 request too much and way too complex for the regular user.

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