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What Twitter Can Be

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Re: What Twitter Can Be

#151

Post by mcdougle »

austenallred wrote: post #93
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…

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/

TweetDeck seems to be exactly what I was looking for!

And that other site (twitter through their eyes) looks awesome. Thanks!

Re: What Twitter Can Be

#152

Post by Grue3 »

Interestingly, Tumblr already implemented some of these suggestions. With such features like "explore" or new search, The discovery of content is unmatched by other social networks. It is also way easier to get likes and reblogs than on Twitter (if you're a regular person, not a celebrity). Having your post go viral (into 1000s of notes) is quite satisfying and would never happen on Twitter if you're not already popular.

Re: What Twitter Can Be

#153

Post by ColinWright »

cpayne624 wrote: post #150
ColinWright wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Currently it's a complete dog's breakfast of scripts and hacks. People seem to like it, so I might look to package it properly, unless someone else wants to do it.

What are you using to draw the hierarchy?

dot/GraphViz

I curl the tweet, look for references to other tweets, curl them, lather/rinse/repeat until there are no more. Then I build a dot file and call GraphViz on it.

Trivial stuff - people seem to like it, and I've found it very useful. I should learn how to use GitHub and throw it up on that.

Re: What Twitter Can Be

#154

Post by soylentcola »

darklajid wrote: post #128
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…

There's a single thing G+ can offer that Twitter doesn't: Long posts. The rest? Bullshit. G+ is a closed and broken platform, built by an advertisement company. It made lots of questionable decisions in the past (this very same person has a blocked G+ account - for real name policy violations - that, combined with the amazing Google customer support means that I will never ever be able to rate an app for my Android p…

Long posts, the ability to embed media, and the simple, granular way to group contacts (friends, family, random people I'm "following" a-la Twitter, integrated live text/voice/video chat, etc.) are all things I prefer about it.

There are definitely negatives but so far the largest one I've found is that it was positioned as an alternative to both Facebook and Twitter but since none of those platforms are built on any open protocol (nor is G+ for that matter), it requires creating and maintaining yet another profile and platform for users. For the vast majority, that's just too much friction and it would require more than a nicer interface and a few features to see any large-scale adoption.

Re: What Twitter Can Be

#155

Post by mrweasel »

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.

I see the customer service via Twitter as a way to shut up the people that complains the loudest. You have a Twitter account, fine we'll deal with you before this dude that called in, because he's not going attract any additional attention.

Re: What Twitter Can Be

#156

Post by soylentcola »

darklajid wrote: post #129
theVirginian wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

G+ is what you have to use for YouTube insults and to rate the applications on your Android phone, ignoring that they might be free, cost a couple bucks or be > 10 $currency. If you want to give feedback, join the 'social network'. (That's especially fun if applications, even 'paid' applications, try to 'encourage' you to rate in the Play Store. "Look, Yatse. I love what you are doing. But I CANNOT rate you. Firefox?…

So...it's your Google profile that they use across their services. That's like saying you can't rate an iOS app because it requires an iTunes account. The social stuff can be used or ignored as you see fit.

Re: What Twitter Can Be

#157

Post by soylentcola »

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.

I've had a Twitter account for years but the only times I've used it were for customer service (harder for them to ignore public complaints, dedicated "social network" reps are probably better supported than the people staffing call centers), and for local "breaking" news (following demonstrations and riots here in Baltimore).

Otherwise it's always seemed to live up to its name and feels like a billion voices "twittering" about everything and nothing at the same time.

Re: What Twitter Can Be

#158

Post by edent »

ColinWright wrote: post #141

I got frustrated trying to follow various conversations on Twitter, so I wrote a tool to do this: http://www.solipsys.co.uk/TwitterConversations/HeliumBalloon... http://www.solipsys.co.uk/TwitterConversations/ListContainin... http://www.solipsys.co.uk/TwitterConversations/Assessment_20...

That's really interesting. I created something similar for App.net - see http://shkspr.mobi/hyper/?thread=1 would love to chat with you about doing the same on Twitter.

Re: What Twitter Can Be

#159

Post by ColinWright »

edent wrote: post #158
ColinWright wrote: post #141

I got frustrated trying to follow various conversations on Twitter, so I wrote a tool to do this: http://www.solipsys.co.uk/TwitterConversations/HeliumBalloon... http://www.solipsys.co.uk/TwitterConversations/ListContainin... http://www.solipsys.co.uk/TwitterConversations/Assessment_20...

That's really interesting. I created something similar for App.net - see http://shkspr.mobi/hyper/?thread=1 would love to chat with you about doing the same on Twitter.

Email me - address in my profile.

Re: What Twitter Can Be

#160

Post by sp332 »

frik wrote: post #146
sp332 wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Twitter's conversation handling has improved a lot lately.

Can you give an example?

These lines for conversations are new. If you follow the original poster and one of the people replying, it will pull out their responses and put them right in the timeline with a blue line. It sorts in your timeline according to the latest reply from someone you follow. Below that, you can see someone replying to themselves in a longer series of tweets, and Twitter folds them up so they don't clutter your timeline too bad.
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