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What Twitter Can Be

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Re: What Twitter Can Be

#41

Post by declan »

austenallred wrote: post #7

Twitter’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 cele…

>"guessing exactly who/what you’d be interested in without tons of info is virtually impossible."

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.

Re: What Twitter Can Be

#42

Post by moey »

aaronbrethorst wrote: post #36
moey wrote: post #27

Serious question people, out of the people here that USE Twitter, how much would you pay a month for Twitter, if anything? 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…

http://blog.app.net/2014/05/06/app-net-state-of-the-union/

Yeah but this is not app.net. I think paying for something that already serves you useful purpose is different then signing up for a new service.

Re: What Twitter Can Be

#43

Post by azazo »

austenallred wrote: post #7

Twitter’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 cele…

I see this as the biggest problem with Twitter also.

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.

Re: What Twitter Can Be

#44

Post by untog »

moey wrote: post #27

Serious question people, out of the people here that USE Twitter, how much would you pay a month for Twitter, if anything? 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…

I don't think the results are particularly surprising. There is a reason Twitter is free, after all.

Re: What Twitter Can Be

#45

Post by declan »

moey wrote: post #27

Serious question people, out of the people here that USE Twitter, how much would you pay a month for Twitter, if anything? 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…

I used Twitter quite a bit for work purposes (before I left CNET/CBS last year to found a recommendation startup) and might have paid for it then.

But 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.

Re: What Twitter Can Be

#46

Post by cmdrfred »

sirbetsalot wrote: post #35

of course the author misses the biggest reason twitter sucks. Abuse, fake accounts, and trolling cause more "authentic" real name users to leave every day. Twitter does nothing to punish people who can just grab a picture of you from the net, create and account and start ruining your reputation instantly. And we all know you can't win against a troll unless you out troll them with your own bots. Twitter is the staine…

https://twitter.com/REALsirbetsalot

Re: What Twitter Can Be

#47

Post by fweespeech »

state wrote: post #30
ThePhysicist wrote: post #9

For 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…

But how exactly do they make money on developers using their API?

The same way everyone else does:

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

Re: What Twitter Can Be

#48

Post by afandian »

moey wrote: post #27

Serious question people, out of the people here that USE Twitter, how much would you pay a month for Twitter, if anything? 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…

You much would you pay or how much do you pay? Your message and the poll disagree.

Re: What Twitter Can Be

#49

Post by walterbell »

sirbetsalot wrote: post #35

of course the author misses the biggest reason twitter sucks. Abuse, fake accounts, and trolling cause more "authentic" real name users to leave every day. Twitter does nothing to punish people who can just grab a picture of you from the net, create and account and start ruining your reputation instantly. And we all know you can't win against a troll unless you out troll them with your own bots. Twitter is the staine…

http://techcrunch.com/2012/07/29/surprisingly-good-evidence-...

"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."

Re: What Twitter Can Be

#50

Post by hagope »

One of the best use cases of twitter for me is customer service, a few complaints about @comcast is way more effective than calling and waiting on the phone for 20 minutes and fighting with the customer service agent... I was able to resolve my issue with a few back and forth DMs with @comcastcares ... I don't think many people have enjoyed this experience, it's like night and day.
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