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What Twitter Can Be

lowercasecapital.com

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Re: What Twitter Can Be

#92
The scariest statistic in that article is that one billion users tried twitter, then walked away. I'm sure some of those are novelty accounts that just never took off, not truly unique users, but that is still a ton of people who already wrote twitter off as irrelevant to their life.

That is a large hurdle to overcome. Where are you going to grow your userbase if that many people already made their decision against you? I can assure you, that is not a tech question, it is a marketing issue.

Re: What Twitter Can Be

#93
post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

How did you go about curating your feed? I tried to get into Twitter for a while and ultimately stopped using it. Part of the problem I think is I have kind of a wide range of interests -- sports, software, entrepreneurship, etc. So Twitter probably can't gauge my interests very well. I ended up with a lot of those self-promotion feeds and ESPN writers, but nothing ultimately with substance (except for certain people…

I use TweetDeck. It's like the power user version of Twitter. I generally have 20+ columns on my screen at any given time.

Most of the people I follow I found through people I know retweeting them or through looking at the feeds of other successful/important people (for example, I recreated the feeds of other investors/entrepreneurs) - http://theireyes.austenallred.com/

Re: What Twitter Can Be

#94
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where can I find what you're building?

https://grasswire.com We basically see this as the back-end that could power some really cool stuff (apps, partnerships with publishers)

I'm nitpicking but the lack of a scrollbar makes me feel strangely out of control. Any specific reason for the removal ?

Re: What Twitter Can Be

#95
post #33

At first Twitter was awesome because of their API but then that closed off so now I have to use their stuff only I feel as if they haven't done anything in the past few years but scale. I've tried being a user for years but they really need a better way to manage and view lists. The frequency of celebrity tweets vs. friend tweets vs. company tweets is all different. How I ingest that content is differs depending on m…

What is it about Twitter's list manager that doesn't address this issue for you?

It's really tedious to see which users you are following are not in a list and to organize and add them to the list you want. Also it takes 3 clicks to get to the list you want and in general I just feel like sorting the people you follow should be a bigger part of the Twitter UI.

Re: What Twitter Can Be

#96
I think their time has passed. Social media is not like tv. With t.v., People want good new shows, they don't care if they're from nbc or hbo or someone new. With social media people actually want a new medium every few years. I don't think there is any feature Twitter could add that will overcome this fact.

Re: What Twitter Can Be

#97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>No showing of tweets with content from other social networks Where does it say that? I've been working with folks and using products that do exactly that and they haven't had issues. Yes you have to display it like Twitter wants, but I've not seen any limit to also showing FB or other content.

Have a look at their Content Display Requirements (especially the section on "timeline integrity") https://dev.twitter.com/overview/terms/display-requirements

They mean you can't mix the timelines together into one timeline. That seems to make sense to me. If you have a twitter timeline (which is different than tweets being displayed), it can only be Twitter.

Re: What Twitter Can Be

#98
post #50

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.

Customer service via twitter just feels wrong to me. I'm a low-frequency twitter user so maybe I don't "get it", but it feels very much like shouting into the void. There's no feedback saying "yeah, we heard you".

Whereas with a phone call you're actively navigating their support structure, or with a contact form, where you have a tracking id in your email box.

Re: What Twitter Can Be

#99
post #33

At first Twitter was awesome because of their API but then that closed off so now I have to use their stuff only I feel as if they haven't done anything in the past few years but scale. I've tried being a user for years but they really need a better way to manage and view lists. The frequency of celebrity tweets vs. friend tweets vs. company tweets is all different. How I ingest that content is differs depending on m…

What is it about Twitter's list manager that doesn't address this issue for you?

Tweetdeck provided an easy way for me to read tweets from different lists that I had created. And then Twitter bought them and killed off their Android app. And from that point there has been no simple way to follows lists on Mobile.

Re: What Twitter Can Be

#100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>No showing of tweets with content from other social networks Where does it say that? I've been working with folks and using products that do exactly that and they haven't had issues. Yes you have to display it like Twitter wants, but I've not seen any limit to also showing FB or other content.

Have a look at their Content Display Requirements (especially the section on "timeline integrity") https://dev.twitter.com/overview/terms/display-requirements

That only applies to showing a timeline. So you can't mix @user on Twitter with @user on Instagram in the same timeline. But if they aren't grouped, no problem. It also doesn't apply if there's human selection going on, a manual process. (Dunno if you can automate that with e.g. MT, heh.)

That seems reasonable. I don't like any of this social media stuff, but Twitter has the best APIs. Maybe because they sell access, so they want it to be a good product?

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