Twitter is very confusing and useless to anyone who wants to use less than one hour per day. So, if they focused on interactivity between anonimous,famous and "live events", most people who do not want to live on Twitter, will have a reason to open the app at least a few times a day.
Fixing Twitter
131–139 of 139 posts
Re: Fixing Twitter
#132"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 ec…
Re: I get where you are coming from. However, people use services differently. Twitter has failed in determining how services should be used.
Re: Annoying Tweetstorming.
People should be able to mute content from certain apps. Just like you can silence your Candy Crushers.
Re: Making Money.
On a sarcastic note, "I'll think of a way if I am paid 6 figures a year" :). But seriously, we are making content more valuable by adding more people to its service. Twitter can retain the rights to serve ads on those third party services while sharing some of the ad revenue.
Re: Fixing Twitter
#133As I've written in past comments ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10094396 ), and as this post suggests, rebuilding developer relations and improving integrations would go a long way. There's a lot of potential locked in the platform right now; they should work on letting developers get access to it more easily and strive to remove the cloud of uncertainty that has built up around it (i.e., will they shut me do…
Do you think that's even possible? They really burned a lot of bridges with the way they treated developers in the past. Trying to build a business on top of somebody else's social networking platform has been a spectacularly bad bet the last 5 years or so. I sure wouldn't be first into that pool.
I hope it is. At the very least, they should be trying. It certainly won't be an overnight process, but with time and enough developer-friendly decisions / public guarantees, it could happen. They should start yesterday, though.
Re: Fixing Twitter
#134> Twitter has turned into a place where famous people and news organizations broadcast text. That’s it. It has? I don't follow any news organizations or famous people. Well, a couple of Hugo-winning authors. But than's not like Beiber famous. And my timeline is a vibrant place full of friends talking with each other. It's like an IRC channel where I get to decide who's there. And it works great for that. > Second–and…
Thank you a bunch for saying this, I feel the same way. I cultivate a list of accounts I follow strictly because their posts tend to be relevant or interesting. If you have a stream of garbage on Twitter, don't follow people who post garbage. I follow people primarily in tech and programming. Most of them use Twitter to talk about things they work on, issues they have, things that are interesting. Occasionally they s…
> If you have a stream of garbage on Twitter, don't follow people who post garbage.
That's Twitter's problem, not the user's problem. Your comment is akin to the old open source saying, "It's open source, go fix the bug yourself."
Re: Fixing Twitter
#135The primary problem for twitter is that they more than ever is a protocol for link-sharing. If twitter wants to survive they need to get content onto their platform which means loose the 140 character. In some ways and ironically, Medium could be a kind of replacement for twitter if they found a nicer balance between long and short posts.
What about Tumblr? Commonly when people ask to lose the 140-character limit I try and understand what people are trying to accomplish and how that is any different from what Tumblr has now. After spending some time on tumblr, I've noticed the 140-character limit is great from a reader point of view. What it ensures (like you are alluding to) is that one user doesn't dominate my feed/attention with one really long pos…
But Tumblr is Tumblr, they start from a different context.
Re: Fixing Twitter
#136Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 sai…
Ok thanks that explains a lot. It's true that tweetbot does seem to stand out, I did try a few others and while they were a lot better than the official, they were still flawed in one or many ways.
It struck me as odd to have a public API that serves the same content twitter is serving themselves, while they actively lower the quality of their own content by introducing ads! Maybe they have finally realized that, and will just keep strangling the API until they own their own content once again.
You couldn't imagine youtube having a free API that served the same videos without ads.
Re: Fixing Twitter
#137I really, really want to like Twitter, but I just can't. Most of the content in my stream is crap, as I (apparently) don't know the "correct" people to follow. Finding the "correct" people to follow is difficult, and even then they sometimes spew multiple boatloads of crap. :/ I wish there was a way to filter some of it out and only keep the good stuff.
Conversations are almost impossible to follow. Once you locate a good tweet, its a confusing process to find all the related tweets. Sometimes, they are below the tweet (which is confusing as I don't read from the bottom up most of the time) and sometimes they are buried inside the tweet. Grrrr!!!
Finally, putting non-text media in a tweet is turning out to be horrible. At least when tweets used to be ASCII, I could reasonably read through them. Now, I have pages and pages of little silent movies that start playing when they come into focus. How annoying is that!?
I really like the "World News Headline" feature that Dustin proposes and would probably use Twitter more if it has something like that. However, given that Twitter is transforming itself into a Vine/Instagram clone I probably won't be hitting the tweet box much in the future. :(
Re: Fixing Twitter
#138Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have a very similar attitude towards bot accounts. Early on, they were instantly recognizable and took no time to identify and block. Now that I'm doing it for a while, I feel obliged to continue and I've discovered that some bot accounts look semi-legit at first (Twitter's 'uncanny valley') but that dragging their profile image into Google's reverse image search would give them away. Same image, loads of different…
That's my reasoning behind deleting tweets as well. They just aren't worth preserving. I only tweet about the things I'm passionate about, which are human rights, privacy and politics so I can and do tweet impulsively to vent from time to time. I almost always regret those tweets and I don't want them be on my timeline permanently. Data mining is a concern, though not a big one because I'm pretty sure twitter keeps m…
I'm fortunate to still have an API token from before they required that :-) Can't make any new ones though. But for the occasional script it can be useful :-)
Re: Fixing Twitter
#139Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hm, why does that site need my authorisation to read MY profile when I can use it also to audit other people's accounts? A scam to get auth?
Twitter requires auth for every API call, even reading public information. They would burn out their own API quota pretty fast if they didn't have each user grant them a read-only token.
Ah, that makes sense. Thanks!