What Twitter Can Be
lowercasecapital.com
What Twitter Can Be
1–10 of 174 posts
Re: What Twitter Can Be
#2Twitter will never "be" because I don't want what I say to be on the record forever. It's too personal and too unpredictable. Make a corny joke and you lose your job. Be a pretty girl and get harassed. Say something against common opinion and get harassed. It's not that this happens all the time, but the risk far outweighs the benefits.
Like anything, it's nice when it's a small tight-knit group of people using it, but when it's open to the masses, it loses any value it once had.
Re: What Twitter Can Be
#3I think he's describing the perfect digital news platform that I would think of.
Re: What Twitter Can Be
#4I think he's describing the perfect digital news platform that I would think of.
Did you try https://sublevel.net? It’s very close to perfect.
Re: What Twitter Can Be
#5Nothing in there about turning it into a decentralized open network instead of a proprietary service, so I will continue not to care about Twitter.
Re: What Twitter Can Be
#6I think he's describing the perfect digital news platform that I would think of.
That's what I was thinking by the end of the article as well. He definitely described a platform that I would be excited to use. And I am among the 1 billion that tried Twitter and didn't stick around.
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.
Re: What Twitter Can Be
#7Twitter’s biggest problem is that Twitter increases or decreases in value along with user’s willingness to curate their feed. Many will never do that.
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.
Re: What Twitter Can Be
#8Nothing in there about turning it into a decentralized open network instead of a proprietary service, so I will continue not to care about Twitter.
We tried that. It didn't stick.
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.
Re: What Twitter Can Be
#9For me, the biggest problem with Twitter are their Draconian rules concerning third-party apps. I had several ideas for cool apps built on top of the Twitter API (e.g. a Twitter-based news aggregator, an online volunteering app, ...), but each time I gave up on the idea after reading the terms of their developer program:
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).
Re: What Twitter Can Be
#10Nothing in there about turning it into a decentralized open network instead of a proprietary service, so I will continue not to care about Twitter.
We tried that. It didn't stick. 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.
Sure, I observe that it has succeeded. I'm just not willing to invest any time or attention in it, since I've learned my lesson with proprietary communication platforms!