OK, I'll admit, I haven't been following what is going on with Twitter, but come on people, their product is limited to 140 characters. Surely they have something to fix.
Fixing Twitter
21–30 of 139 posts
Re: Fixing Twitter
#22I think it's time to rethink the 140 charcter limit. When people want to post more than 140 characters, they include it as an image (so not searchable), which is considerably more effort. Why not allow longer tweets, and only show the first 140 chars by default (along with an indication of how long it's going to be), and then load or show the rest on demand?
It's impossible to have meaningful conversations with that kind of limit. You end up having to use "1/N" over and over again. That limit has always left me wondering how Twitter even got started...
Re: Fixing Twitter
#23Twitter's real problem is that it does not have, and never will have, a CEO with the authority to make big changes. No matter what the next CEO's vision is, as a non-founder it will be impossible for that person to satisfy all of the major stakeholders.
> a non-founder it will be impossible for that person to satisfy all of the major stakeholders.
As Twitter is a publicly-traded company, it would be impossible for that person to satisfy all of the major stakeholders.
Re: Fixing Twitter
#24Great 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 BuzzFeed or something, and then you can use Google, the search engine people actually use, to find it. If it's not important, it doesn't need to be found; that's not what the platform is about.
Re: Fixing Twitter
#25> 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…
Most people do all those things on Facebook.
Re: Fixing Twitter
#26Twitter's real problem is that it does not have, and never will have, a CEO with the authority to make big changes. No matter what the next CEO's vision is, as a non-founder it will be impossible for that person to satisfy all of the major stakeholders.
> a non-founder it will be impossible for that person to satisfy all of the major stakeholders. As Twitter is a publicly-traded company , it would be impossible for that person to satisfy all of the major stakeholders.
"Satisfy" was the wrong word but I couldn't think of the right one. What I'm saying is that the CEO of Twitter will never have the same power as say Mark Zuckerberg does.
Re: Fixing Twitter
#27> 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…
> Whenever there is a major thing going on my timeline will tell me about it. Because my friends will be retweeting stuff, or tweeting news articles they saw about whatever the thing is elsewhere.
That's very true, and I'm surprised I didn't remember that while reading this article. There are news stories that I've seen first on Twitter, and had trouble finding an actual news article.
Of course, it's not going to cover every last "major debate in the US" or "bomb has exploded in Bangkok" mention. It'll only cover it if people I follow think it's interesting enough to tweet about. If I wanted CNN, I'd have a cable subscription.
Re: Fixing Twitter
#28Well twitter has just recently restructured the product team so maybe big things are in-store: http://recode.net/2015/09/02/twitter-restructures-product-te...
Re: Fixing Twitter
#29I think it's time to rethink the 140 charcter limit. When people want to post more than 140 characters, they include it as an image (so not searchable), which is considerably more effort. Why not allow longer tweets, and only show the first 140 chars by default (along with an indication of how long it's going to be), and then load or show the rest on demand?
If you're interested in a service exactly like Twitter but without the limit, take a look at GNU Social - https://gnusocial.no. Granted, it's mostly developers on there, but Twitter was similar when it started.
Re: Fixing Twitter
#30Twitter like Trello is a tool, a mainstream tool got to be horizontal product [1].
There is no point discussing about it should be this or that. Feel free to use it the way you want it to be.