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Fixing Twitter

dcurt.is

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Re: Fixing Twitter

#121

Post by alkonaut »

mahouse wrote: post #99

I'm a power user and have been on Twitter since 2007. I used 3rd-party apps until they fucked them all. I'm now forced to use their glittery official app full of ads and suggestions and things I don't care about. I follow less than 50 people and use Twitter 24/7 literally. I never miss a tweet. > First, for normal users, Twitter feels too much like a one-way broadcast system. It needs to feel more like a community, w…

When/how did Twitter mess up third party clients? I find the official apps/page terrible (hard to follow conversations, embedded ads etc) and I'm very happy with tweetbot as my client.

Re: Fixing Twitter

#122

Post by sushrutbidwai »

Bigger issue is no developer trusts twitter any more. Just like LinkedIn. twitter has been unkind to the developers which helped it make popular. Remember things like lists, hashtags, media embed are all brought to twitter before twitter did so itself. But developers of these innovations were treated badly. And hence no developer wants to develop for twitter platform any more.

Re: Fixing Twitter

#123

Post by mahouse »

alkonaut wrote: post #121
mahouse wrote: post #99

I'm a power user and have been on Twitter since 2007. I used 3rd-party apps until they fucked them all. I'm now forced to use their glittery official app full of ads and suggestions and things I don't care about. I follow less than 50 people and use Twitter 24/7 literally. I never miss a tweet. > First, for normal users, Twitter feels too much like a one-way broadcast system. It needs to feel more like a community, w…

When/how did Twitter mess up third party clients? I find the official apps/page terrible (hard to follow conversations, embedded ads etc) and I'm very happy with tweetbot as my client.

They severely limited the amount of requests per minute (for example you can only reload your timeline 15 times every 15 minutes). They have also refused to open up the API endpoints that would allow those 3rd party apps to have a functionality on par with the official clients. They also limited the number of authenticated accounts under one app to 100,000, a limit which has been hit by some clients already.

That said it must be understood that tweetbot is probably the only worthy 3rd party client as of now. There are lots of Android clients but they are all of a very low quality. Whether this is because of the lack of incentives to build an app that uses an API that could close at any moment, or just reveals how bad Android apps are overall, remains to be seen.

Four years ago or so I used twicca, which was pretty good at that moment, but it hasn't been updated since then.

According to Ryan Sarver, former Twitter Platform Director:

"Developers ask us if they should build client apps that mimic or reproduce the mainstream Twitter consumer client experience. The answer is no." "We need to move to a less fragmented world, where every user can experience Twitter in a consistent way."

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/twitter-development-ta...

Re: Fixing Twitter

#124

Post by olivermarks »

Tech celebrities such as Guy Kawasaki have had teams of tweeters working for them for years: it seems reasonable to assume large numbers of people are employed to interact with show biz personality obsessives...just like all the faked autographs the Monkees etc used to mail to their fans...

Re: Fixing Twitter

#125

Post by falcolas »

I encourage anyone who thinks that #2 is as easy as the OP to give it a shot. It's actually quite a hard problem, especially when you have to deal with fake news tweets and want over 80% accuracy.

Disclaimer, I work for a startup doing exactly this, so if it's something you actually want to do for a paycheck, shoot me an email.

Re: Fixing Twitter

#127

Post by hackaflocka »

geofft wrote: post #24
hackaflocka wrote: post #5

Great points all. Especially #5. One of the strangest things about Twitter is that its search seems broken. Sometimes when I'm trying to locate past tweets authored by myself or by someone else, I can quickly find them on Topsy, but almost never directly on Twitter. Twitter has begun to feel stale. Considering how much I love learning from people like pmarca and pg through it, this is something that worries me.

I suspect that the number of people who use Twitter search for that is exceedingly low and non-monetizable compared to their target market. Twitter has been working on excellent support (where "excellent" is defined as "good for Twitter") for embedding tweets inside news articles and the like. This means that if a celebrity (not a startup celebrity, a celebrity) tweets something important, it'll get picked up by Buzz…

Topsy has a simple "from" flag to restrict search results to a certain user. It only works sometimes when used directly in the Twitter search box.

Re: Fixing Twitter

#128

Post by wpietri »

OoTheNigerian wrote: post #90

"Nothing great is Built On Twitter" That quote sums it all up. Most of Dustin's suggested extensions are things other people should have built on Twitter. Of course, it also keys into Dalton's App.Net plan where Twitter should have been the stream and people should have used a countless applications to make the stream more discernible and allow Twitter focus on ensuring the backbone stays in place. Funny enough, that…

I think there are two pretty good reasons that Twitter moved away from being an open platform, and they are: 1) ensuring a good user experience, and 2) making money.

The tweetstorming thing, for example, conveniences particular writers at the expense of all the other writers (and quite a number of readers). I hate it, and will unfollow anybody who does it regularly. It's the tragedy of the commons for an attention economy. Twitter's demand that people be concise is a large part of its value to readers. The more they control the UI, the easier it is to nudge people in particular directions that shape good user experiences.

But that's a small thing next to making money. To experiment with various ad products, they need extremely fine grained control of and reporting on user experience, and they need to be able to rapidly change that as they come up with new ideas. That's hard enough even when they control everything; getting a zillion developers to do that is impossible.

Focusing on the core was great, but nobody was paying them for the core. They're spending ~$1.5 billion/year. Anybody who says, "Twitter should do X" without explaining how their plan will help pay the bills is not going to get a lot of consideration at Twitter HQ.

Re: Fixing Twitter

#129

Post by jeffmould »

harryh wrote: post #39
[deleted] wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[deleted]

Why do you care about keeping an authentic follower list? I'm honestly curious because I've never really understood this phenomenon.

As someone who has managed accounts for business, keeping an authentic follower list to me is about providing a valuable, ethical service to clients. It would be easy for a client to hire me to increase their followers and for me to do so with the thousands of fake accounts. Instead I choose to provide a true follower increase, meaning people that actually value their product. In most cases business owners and managers are appreciative to this approach. It is better to have 50 followers who engage with your product/service, than to have 1000 followers who do not.

Somewhat related, but my follower count stays about the same on average. I go through spurts where I post a lot and then don't post at all. I don't use Twitter that often for direct engagement with individuals, but do from time to time. About a month ago I woke up one day with over a thousand new followers. I thought for a second I had tweeted out something great the night before and was curious what it was that drew so many new eyes. A quick glance at my followers though revealed that ever last one of the new followers was a spam account. To me this devalues the entire ecosystem at Twitter. Twitter has this hard limit on following 2000 people until you reach some undisclosed threshold of followers (presumably close to 2000 followers). I believe that many of the spam accounts are created solely for the purpose of following people to bypass that arbitrary limit. To me though, Twitter has it completely wrong here. It would seem they are encouraging spam accounts by having this limit in place in the first place. There are better ways to detect spam accounts than saying if a user is following >2000 people yet doesn't have 2000 followers they must be spam. Twitter can tell if a user interacts with the systems and tweets on a fairly regular basis. This to me is a better determination of whether an account is spam than simply the number of followers an account has.

Re: Fixing Twitter

#130

Post by joesmo »

electic wrote: post #59

There might be no fixing Twitter. The reason Twitter grew imho is because of the rich ecosystem of developers they had. Those developers, time and time again, found new ways to use Twitter and did the development, marketing, and educating of the public. The result was rich engagement and growth. Everyone had a different reason for using Twitter because there were so many apps. Now, those apps are gone. How do you go…

Indeed. The trust has been lost. Trust is a really simple issue that many people in our industry like the article's author simply don't get. To expect Twitter to recover in this area is absolutely ridiculous. Yes, there are plenty of young, stupid developers, but given Twitter's animosity towards developers in the past, even with a dedicated campaign, I doubt they could get any significant ones to work with the platform again. From a business' point of view, it's suicide, from a developer's point of view, it's a waste of time and effort, and from an investor's point of view, it's a risk not worth taking.
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