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Twitter Falls Below IPO Price as Concerns Mount Over CEO, Growth

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Re: Twitter Falls Below IPO Price as Concerns Mount Over CEO, Growth

#131

Post by brainflake »

From a product standpoint, I feel like Twitter has barely changed in 5 years. There's been some polish and redesign, sure, but the main dynamics are almost exactly the same.

Facebook has features like intelligently improving the quality of your feed, being able to hide posts from certain people, prioritizing posts (not just stacking them based on their age), calendar/birthday stuff, events, chats, etc.

Twitter is just a never ending stream of information, not prioritized and always overflowing with too much content (at least IMO).

I think Facebook nailed it with realizing their engagement levels are directly related to the quality of the newsfeed, and because of this they put a great deal of effort into making it as relevant as possible to each user. They realize that if you friend (or follow) somebody, you're not necessarily interested in ALL of their content, but maybe only their most interesting or popular. They also realize that if you only log in 2 times per week, they should prioritize with the best recent content, not just the stuff that was posted 1 hour ago.

Re: Twitter Falls Below IPO Price as Concerns Mount Over CEO, Growth

#132

Post by prawn »

mikegioia wrote: post #29

To me the problem with Twitter lies solely with what Twitter's logged-out homepage looks like. I don't know what it's trying to be but asking me to sign up, browse categories (?), and read top celebrity posts is not it. Why is logged-out Twitter not a search engine? They have up-to-the-second thoughts from their users about everything and it's the first place I go when a site is down, or some news story is breaking.…

I agree, but one point against that is that the web experience with Twitter is probably the worst - it's clunky. I hate using it.

I use the phone app (simple, OK) and the OS X app (neglected, but a great way to use Twitter IMO). In those two apps, there isn't a logged out front page. They could improve both to create a useful equivalent though.

Re: Twitter Falls Below IPO Price as Concerns Mount Over CEO, Growth

#133

Post by runevault »

brainflake wrote: post #131

From a product standpoint, I feel like Twitter has barely changed in 5 years. There's been some polish and redesign, sure, but the main dynamics are almost exactly the same. Facebook has features like intelligently improving the quality of your feed, being able to hide posts from certain people, prioritizing posts (not just stacking them based on their age), calendar/birthday stuff, events, chats, etc. Twitter is jus…

I find it interesting you mention the improved feed, people I've talked to (obviously this is anecdotal but it is all I have to go on) HATE it, and especially the fact it always defaults to it instead of staying with most recent as they prefer.

Re: Twitter Falls Below IPO Price as Concerns Mount Over CEO, Growth

#134

Post by JacobAldridge »

brainflake wrote: post #131

From a product standpoint, I feel like Twitter has barely changed in 5 years. There's been some polish and redesign, sure, but the main dynamics are almost exactly the same. Facebook has features like intelligently improving the quality of your feed, being able to hide posts from certain people, prioritizing posts (not just stacking them based on their age), calendar/birthday stuff, events, chats, etc. Twitter is jus…

I know that "intelligently improving my feed" was the final straw for me leaving Facebook, and if Twitter forced it on me it would probably end my Twitter fetish as well.

AND I know that I'm likely not the ideal client for Facebook and their efforts probably enhance the experience for said clients. I'm not sure who Twitter's ideal client is...

Re: Twitter Falls Below IPO Price as Concerns Mount Over CEO, Growth

#135

Post by tallerholler »

brainflake wrote: post #131

From a product standpoint, I feel like Twitter has barely changed in 5 years. There's been some polish and redesign, sure, but the main dynamics are almost exactly the same. Facebook has features like intelligently improving the quality of your feed, being able to hide posts from certain people, prioritizing posts (not just stacking them based on their age), calendar/birthday stuff, events, chats, etc. Twitter is jus…

I feel like facebook rather than stay stagnant has actually declined. By trying to be everything for everyone, it is a diluted, unorganized, mish mash of things and it's hard for me to even grasp what the core value is anymore. Is it a social network? a photo app? a news aggregator? a gaming platform? one thing is for sure by spreading out to multiple audiences it opens them up to be competed with. At least twitter has stayed true to it's original intent.

Re: Twitter Falls Below IPO Price as Concerns Mount Over CEO, Growth

#136

Post by dantillberg »

stagger87 wrote: post #41
mikegioia wrote: post #29

To me the problem with Twitter lies solely with what Twitter's logged-out homepage looks like. I don't know what it's trying to be but asking me to sign up, browse categories (?), and read top celebrity posts is not it. Why is logged-out Twitter not a search engine? They have up-to-the-second thoughts from their users about everything and it's the first place I go when a site is down, or some news story is breaking.…

There is a search icon in the upper left of the landing page for me. It opens up a search bar.

Wow, I had no idea.

I've gone to the twitter website (on my phone, especially) several times in the past to try and look up "local, now" things -- e.g. I hear a big bang/explosion, or there are fire/police in force nearby, or I thought there was a tremor, or there's a big storm.

And every time, I've sighed and been disappointed that (as I thought) I couldn't search tweets without being logged in, and I rarely ever log in to any services on my phone. And so then I clicked away, opened up facebook/NYT/boston.com/etc. instead.

Re: Twitter Falls Below IPO Price as Concerns Mount Over CEO, Growth

#137

Post by djloche »

brainflake wrote: post #131

From a product standpoint, I feel like Twitter has barely changed in 5 years. There's been some polish and redesign, sure, but the main dynamics are almost exactly the same. Facebook has features like intelligently improving the quality of your feed, being able to hide posts from certain people, prioritizing posts (not just stacking them based on their age), calendar/birthday stuff, events, chats, etc. Twitter is jus…

Twitter is useful to me specifically because they do not filter the feeds. If they start removing or preventing me from receiving content I specifically request to receive, that will be the knell for twitter. I can put up with ads. Even being flooded with ads would be better than twitter deciding to hide content from me.

Re: Twitter Falls Below IPO Price as Concerns Mount Over CEO, Growth

#138

Post by vezzy-fnord »

natecavanaugh wrote: post #83

Is there anyone else who hates Twitter because of its 140 character limit and overall focus on broadcasting rather than sharing? For the 140 character limit, I get the historical SMS reasons and that it helps you "focus" your content, but taking 10 minutes to squeeze a thought in that turns from something half interesting to "bc u r 4 the GPL" or whatever. Sure MAYBE I could reword things a little denser, but a tweet…

No, I agree. Twitter as a general-purpose communication platform is impractical. Yet a ton of industry figures have crowded into it for some reason. Twitter is the flashy, arbitrarily constrained version of what fingering other people's .plan files was in the 80s and 90s.

Re: Twitter Falls Below IPO Price as Concerns Mount Over CEO, Growth

#139

Post by Rainymood »

teen wrote: post #102
meerita wrote: post #99

I have never installed Snapchat. I don't know if it is good or bad. All my friends doesn't have Snapchat, but everyone has Twitter. I found Twitter a better place, and it's ageless to me compared to all those new-UI paradigms that come each year. The problem of Twitter is they cut off all the innovation of 3rd party software developers to keep their shitty in house software.

snapchat is pretty cool

relevant username ;)

Re: Twitter Falls Below IPO Price as Concerns Mount Over CEO, Growth

#140

Post by MichaelGG »

prawn wrote: post #132
mikegioia wrote: post #29

To me the problem with Twitter lies solely with what Twitter's logged-out homepage looks like. I don't know what it's trying to be but asking me to sign up, browse categories (?), and read top celebrity posts is not it. Why is logged-out Twitter not a search engine? They have up-to-the-second thoughts from their users about everything and it's the first place I go when a site is down, or some news story is breaking.…

I agree, but one point against that is that the web experience with Twitter is probably the worst - it's clunky. I hate using it. I use the phone app (simple, OK) and the OS X app (neglected, but a great way to use Twitter IMO). In those two apps, there isn't a logged out front page. They could improve both to create a useful equivalent though.

It's terrible. I recently started to use it and I'm shocked at how poor it is. Scroll down, see something interesting. Click. Now I've lost where I was, no way back. Going back reloads the entire page (slow) then, since content is loaded in after scrolling, scrolls one page down and stops. They're basically saying "don't engage too long with Twitter, just keep it quick and then stop".

How they have 3000 employees and no one that has fixed their main product is very strange.

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