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What Twitter Can Be

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Re: What Twitter Can Be

#111

Post by theVirginian »

smhg wrote: post #67

This might sound very weird in this day and age, but in my professional life (web developer), Twitter and G+ compete content-wise. And G+ wins easily. Disclaimer: I'm a very light Twitter user. I'm almost surely missing out on features I never bothered to discover. The main advantage G+ has in my eyes is its signal to noise ratio. It seems far better than Twitter's. Again, specifically in my professional world, quite…

Whereas some people I know have twitter and very few use it regularly, I have never even met someone who has a G+ and very few people I know would even recognize it as a social network over a simple rebranding of their gmail account.

Re: What Twitter Can Be

#112

Post by brador »

Torgo wrote: post #83
brador wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How did Twitter get traction and sticking power where the others failed? What was it doing differently?

I think it's because they iterated really fast on new features, and presumably stayed with what was popular. Original Twitter isn't even all that close to what Twitter is today. gnusocial is playing catchup featurewise, moves much slower, and frankly the default theme is really ugly.

How did they know what was popular? Which features did they iterate on?

Re: What Twitter Can Be

#113

Post by cauterize »

bentcorner wrote: post #98
hagope wrote: 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.

Does it feel right to a part of the consensus customers should have regarding large companies? It does for me.

The Comcast site has a form you can fill out to remove you from their snail mail list. As someone has been a customer for 4 years, getting advertisements in my mailbox made me irrationally angry. I filled out the form but saw no drop in volume. Taking my silly issue public via Twitter helped get the problem resolved.

I had a sense of pride knowing I publicly shamed Comcast enough that they did something about their poor mailing practices. And it only took a few days and maybe 500 total characters.

Re: What Twitter Can Be

#114

Post by jonathansizz »

walterbell wrote: post #70
mcdougle wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Lists are the way to go. Conference or other temporal hashtags are a good way to discover users who are focused on a single topic, who you can then curate into a list. Once you find a few topic experts, they become a discovery source for other experts.

Exactly. I had several abortive attempts at Twitter before I 'got it'. You have to build up your feed slowly and organically. Start by making the effort to follow a few, very high-quality accounts based on your interests, then use these accounts to find others, and so on (unfollowing as necessary to keep the signal/noise ratio as high as possible). This requires substantial effort on the user's part.

Re: What Twitter Can Be

#115

Post by mahouse »

fweespeech wrote: post #47
state wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Who do you charge for the API calls?

Re: What Twitter Can Be

#116

Post by WaltPurvis »

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…

Examples of this actually happening? Genuinely curious, as I've never heard of this phenomenon.

Re: What Twitter Can Be

#117

Post by Torgo »

brador wrote: post #112
Torgo wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's because they iterated really fast on new features, and presumably stayed with what was popular. Original Twitter isn't even all that close to what Twitter is today. gnusocial is playing catchup featurewise, moves much slower, and frankly the default theme is really ugly.

How did they know what was popular? Which features did they iterate on?

I assume they can see what uptake there is for features using analytics, but what comes to mind are native retweets and subtweets. Those are relatively new. They have also changed how blocking works multiple times based on feedback.

Re: What Twitter Can Be

#119

Post by emmab »

mahouse wrote: post #115
fweespeech wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Who do you charge for the API calls?

Ideally the developer would be able to choose between paying themselves or letting users pay through micropayments.

Re: What Twitter Can Be

#120

Post by aswanson »

Maybe its just me, im too old and not famous enough...but Twitter just seems to me to be a celebrity (that includes fame of any kind) circle jerk...and if you're not famous, you dont exist. Its weird. I hated fb towards the end of my usage of it...but at least like the old sitcom 'Cheers', at least sometimes you could go 'where everybody knows your name...'
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