One of these comments would have been ok, especially if you added relevant substantive information. But at this point you're spamming the thread, so please stop.
I want to watch the superbowl from twitter: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/15/technology/with-nfl-deal-...
I have no idea how to watch the superbowl and I tried several apps. I had cable tv for like 1 year of highschool, and haven't felt any reason to purchase for myself since, but some things, like the superbowl / Olympics / World Cup etc. would be really great to be able to watch - no I'm not going to deal with cable / buying a TV just for 1-3 events yearly.
Interesting idea. It's been said that lack of alternatives to viewing sporting events is the biggest reason the remaining cable subscriber base hasn't cut the cord yet. Definitely an area sorely in need of disruption.
but you'll probably need a better directional antenna to have good reception (depends on the specific part of the world for how strong the signal is).
Once you're used to fast internet you won't want any of that though. Streaming HDTV on a 50Mbps+ internet connection ends up being a better experience since you don't have to go through all the setup hassle to make this work equivalently (installing the antenna, connecting it to a dongle on your own server, installing some kind of head end software, streaming from that server over your own network). I've done both and the antenna setup is now fully deprecated.
Focus on engagement. Twitter's value is LIVE, but they've never leveraged push notifications and text messages in a way that makes sure you never miss out when important/relevant conversations are happening, so how are you supposed to know when there's interesting content to engage with?
Right now you can turn on notifications for a user's tweets, but that gives you push notifications for all of their tweets which is super annoying. Also, 99% of users don't know that exists.
Their recent move to make trending topics and search more visible in the iPhone app is a step in the right direction but they're a long ways off.
FOMO and live is how they're different from Facebook. I can always go back to Facebook at any time and they'll show me what I missed and I can still engage with it. With Twitter, the discussion has come and gone and I'm left out if I don't know it's happening.
> Focus on engagement. Twitter's value is LIVE, but they've never leveraged push notifications and text messages in a way that makes sure you never miss out when important/relevant conversations are happening, so how are you supposed to know when there's interesting content to engage with?
100% agree. Twitter needs to be in the game of maximizing signal-to-noise for their users. In my experience, there's just /way/ too much noise when you're trying to follow along with a live event. I almost never want to see content from a random account with 10 followers. Nor do I want to see a d-list celebrity hocking skin care products. What I really care about is how the conversation is shaping itself over time.
There are many ways of fixing this that don't spoil Twitter's free-speech mission. Personally, I think the answer is in clustering tweets based on topic and sentiment, then presenting a really intuitive filtering UI. You could expose options that would help you understand the broader conversation, but also dive into it at a super granular level.
Getting this right would be in the hard-but-possible realm. Given how many engineers Twitter has stockpiled, I think it's worth trying. Solving the noise problem would necessarily cut down on abuse, too.
Facebook isn't great because of how it looks, but because they have React, hiphop (or what's the name now), things like that; and that allows them to scale and build and iterate more quickly.
Twitter had Bootstrap and that was great investment IMO... now the Bootstrap guys all left. Why?
Twitter's built Aurora, large parts of Mesos, Bootstrap, Storm, Heron, Pants, ThriftMux, DistributedLog, Apache Cotton, Iago, Scalding, Finagle, and Finatra. A lot of these exist so they can build things quicker.
I agree they need to go back to the chronological ordering of tweets. It would also be nice to have a couple levels of tweeting, like "conversational message" versus "I really mean it this time", so followers could filter by importance. I've unfollowed several great people because they just kept tweeting nonsense comments throughout the day in between a couple of really interesting posts.
I think this is what we all want, but I'm skeptical developers will return when it's implemented. Maybe if they focused on young devs? Give them an alternative to Snapchat?
that's interesting thought. i wouldn't be surprised if (big if) twitter opens up again and young developers embrace it for the first time (and old devs come back).
i would love to see twitter-as-a-protocol but it's not going to be the current twitter. people forget that instagram bootstrapped itself off twitter's social graph and then bailed when they reached critical mass
Release a new text-based product that sits in the area between Medium, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Shift focus away from likes and followers and towards the content. Make a bold announcement about how it will combat fake news.
Refocus the company to be the Netflix of live TV, focusing on the delivery of live sports and news broadcasts while enabling fans/viewers to discuss in real time.
It's a greenfield space no one else is really jumping upon yet. Focus may have turned to on-demand TV, but people still want to watch sports live, and Twitter already has acquired some of those deals as the sport franchises get more comfortable with online distribution. Trump's tweets, the presidential debates broadcast on Twitter and the fact people turn to Twitter during breaking news make it a logical extension to move into news and possibly finance too.
Twitter's modern-day utility seems very low outside of news/sports/politics and the average joe has moved their engagement to more visual platforms like Instagram and Snapchat where it is much easier to create and consume more personal content and updates.
Twitter would also be able to focus their monetization and advertising efforts around a much tighter content and audience niche. Plus consumers are used to paying for some of this premium content, making monetization of a freemium model even easier.
I've seen other posts mentioning timeline changes, protocol changes, and opening up the API ecosystem, but I don't see any of these changes actually affecting Twitters bottom line.
Twitter is a great place to discuss what's going on right now. Whether it be sports, a natural disaster, political debate, news, etc. Twitter needs to be the place to go when you want social commentary / news on what's happening RIGHT NOW.
Twitter is very useful for professional announcements in a very informal setting. I use Twitter to follow colleagues and artists, not friends nor celebrities.
I think there's something TV-ish that's possible, but Netflix level? That seems difficult both in licensing and execution. However, I will agree what you propose now appears to be their end game. #hattip
They already have licensing deals with NFL and MLB, and built out the streaming infrastructure. I'd argue the licensing and execution is already proved out - it's time to focus on those, cut out the fat and double down on what's working.
This is literally the only time I ever use twitter: to see, in real time, what people are saying about a certain event. (The Oscars, Presidential Debates, the Superbowl, the début of Stranger Things, etc).
But the app brings in so much clutter, and the interface is poor for quickly incoming tweets...
"Twitter's modern-day utility seems very low outside of news/sports/politics"
Twitter has tremendous utility for the medical community. I am final year medical student and through twitter can follow worldwide leaders in emergency medicine (my field of interest). These doctors post clinical factoids, cases reports, unique ekgs, and other learning points live from the wards (all de-identified to protect patients of course). They also post opinions on the latest research publications. Twitter has become my best way to stay current in medicine.
Other apps targeted for doctors have attempted this. Doximity and Figure1 are examples. But twitter has done the best job.
That's great but it's fair to say that's niche - both in terms of the number of people I'm guessing who are producing that type of content and the amount of monetization that can occur from that community.
As a public company, Twitter has to focus on the mainstream, big numbers.
I would also suggest that Twitter refocusing to sports and news would give the specialist apps you mention (and others) a better chance at super-serving your community. Is Twitter's ephemeral nature, mixed in with non-medical updates, really the best way for you to spot trends and identify useful links? If you don't fire up the app every few hours do you risk missing a crucial link or update?
It is niche but works surprisingly well for any field with practitioners who are on twitter. So lots and lots of niches. And you're right that it's awful as a receiving interface. Nor do I have any idea how you turn this into money, or growth or what have you. But it is a thing.
If you can't turn it into money or growth (which Twitter is failing at right now) it won't be a thing for much longer. Twitter exists primarily as a public company to make money not to provide a service to niche communities.
That's called the "Long Tail"... individual users/customers have a niche interest, but together they form a center of gravity approximately as large as the largest use cases.
You have to think a little differently to design for the long tail. You can't just design one consistent experience, you have to design tools that can be used in many scenarios.
Yes, I'm familiar with the long tail ;) The problem is that Twitter has proven that it's incredibly hard to monetize this kind of content at a level that the public markets demand.
The reality is Twitter has failed as a business more than anything and this is about repositioning Twitter as a business that can be monetized.
> That's great but it's fair to say that's niche - both in terms of the number of people I'm guessing who are producing that type of content and the amount of monetization that can occur from that community.
Although it's niche, you could substitute almost anything else for 'medical' and have it work. There's an equally good and thriving literary Twitter, arts Twitter, gay Twitter, black Twitter, politics Twitter, dev Twitter.
Turns out that people like their news and sports mixed in with other ephemera anyway - it's a secret that TV networks have known for decades with late night TV and 'and finally' segments on network news.
For me the point where Twitter really lost its way is when it decided to focus on being a 'media company' and drawing attention to tweets from 'public figuresrather than finding better ways to enable people to tap into and contribute to communities that matter to them.
The monetization Twitter has been able to achieve from this niche content hasn't met expectations and that niche content has also seen stalled growth.
Ephemera is what makes a sport/news/politics-aligned Twitter a much more interest proposition that routes around the negatives of the product and the value proposition on that front.
> If you don't fire up the app every few hours do you risk missing a crucial link or update?
One thing that's always bugged me about twitter - its so transient. when you log on you only get a snapshot of what's happening at that moment - scrolling back through the days or weeks traffic is next to impossible because of the sheer volume of content.
But in this way, the OP of this thread is correct - Live is most definitely where twitter is king.
Yes, it's a niche but how many niches in a similar vein exist on Twitter?
What I heard davycro describe above sounds a lot like the K-12 mathematics community on Twitter dubbed the MathTwitterBlogosphere #MTBoS. It connects everyone from kindergarten teachers in France to university professors and has been a source of tremendous professional development for me over the past four years.
Are there enough other communities like us out there to be material to Twitter's business? I don't know, but the #MTBoS derives great value from having Twitter as a gathering place.
That was the original use case: "micro blogging". There is a case to be made for improving that interface and expanding the way people interact with Twitter for that. Curated follower lists for example.
Twitter also has incredible utility in terms of the InfoSec and Quant communities. All the latest papers and exploits are posted regularly, something that exists nowhere else. It also extends across borders, I follow numerous Chinese, Italian, and Middle Eastern hackers who post code and associating write-ups regularly.
The same goes for stock traders, the network offers incredible insights.
You might want to check out Figure1 which is a social network for medical professionals and very twitter like but has a user base that's full of very people.
Could you recommend 5-10 leaders in emergency medicine to follow? (I'm trying to build up a good follow list outside of my usual domains, and I find recommendation graphs to be really useful)
Depends on what content you're looking for, but off the top of my head, here's a variety of type of EM-related people/accounts. The first two are teaching resources. The rest are active (both clinically and on Twitter) clinicians or EM-focused students.
@emcrit
@epmonthly
@MDaware
@precordialthump
@seth_kelly
@mcsassymd
anything tagged #FOAMed (Free Open Access Medical education – often has an EM focus)
My undergrad degree's in biomedical engineering, and I've been a self-taught coder since middle school. I'm currently pursing my PhD in engineering in addition to my medical degree, and working on using computational simulations and analytics to improve our understanding of how electrical abnormalities occur in the heart. I've always been interested in startups but haven't actively been involved in one. My goal is to work in a academic setting where I do both clinical medicine and research, and hopefully help translate research work to the clinic by working with startups that are my or other people's research findings.
Not intrusive, thank you for the question. I'm a self-taught hacker/coder. Before medical school I made a Facebook application, when those were a thing, called Quiz Monster, which had about 3 million DAU for a few years. Thankfully earned enough through ad revenue to pay for my medical education. I see myself as a clinician first, but will always be a hacker and plan to return to software after residency.
That's one of the reasons I built GroupTweet. To facilitate private group communication on Twitter with any number of participants that can persist through permanent Twitter accounts (instead of temporary Group DMs that are limited to 20 people).
Would love any feedback or suggestions on how it could be improved.
Happy to offer free use to anyone on this thread looking to test out the service.
Definitely agree with this. Figure1 is great for focused learning, but Twitter has allowed me to hear about random clinical pearls, interesting cases, the latest research, and the ensuing discussions between active clinicians.
> Twitter's modern-day utility seems very low outside of news/sports/politics
What's the evidence for this claim? In academia, Twitter is super important, much more than Facebook or any other social platform. Academics are addicted to Twitter and I think you could charge them, e.g., for tweets longer than 140 characters.
Well, you should consider the possibility that you and your coworkers are not representative of academics more generally. In my research field Twitter is quite matter of factly really big. Also note that this was just an example showing that there are more areas where Twitter is doing really well than those that OP listed.
I'm talking about tens of thousands of people not individual cases. Pretty much every university, non-university research institution, and funding agency have active Twitter accounts. In my experience, most departments, and labs also have twitter accounts, not to speak of individual researchers. Jobs are found on Twitter, careers are made, new collaborations start there. I'm talking about tens of thousands of people who are highly active on a daily basis, whereas /u/kleiba was referring to himself and some unspecified coworkers which I interpret to be his lab mates.
Third Party Live TV content is significantly more expensive, competitive & complicated than the third party content Netflix pays for. To say it is a "greenfield space no one else is really jumping upon yet" is really naive, try to do little research on the market, live content is fragmented for a reason. Therefore we will need billions in cash to create a Netflix of Live TV, there are only a handful of companies(Apple, Microsoft) that can actually outbid the current players. Moreover the winning bidder is likely overpaying for the content making it less likely to see a direct financial return. To make it work it will require near perfect execution and cash Twitter does not have.
They've managed to already for it for NFL and MLB rights, and there's plenty of cheaper rights out there and up for grabs. Netflix didn't start producing original content to begin with, but Twitter could ramp their way up to obtaining a lot of the crown jewels of sport.
Their live streaming was all about content negotiation and marketing which I think they did a poor job of. The actual streaming was handled by MLB Advanced Media which is far and away the leader in this space. Twitter should just acquire them if they want to get into this space.
I imagine one day I open Twitter to read my friends tweets and get greeted with message:
"Hello! Today, to make world more disrupted with innovation, we pivoted Twitter to become a sports TV channel! All your tweets are gone, instead open a bottle of beer and watch this great game! 20 well-fit males kick the leather sphere! Isn't it impressive?"
That will be day when I throw out my router to the window, flush smartphone into toilet, install MS-DOS and Fidonet software.
Foursquare managed to do this by migrating the original functionality to Swarm and pivoting the flagship product to something more monetizable.
Arguably it saved the company from going under while still enabling the original functionality for those who wanted to use it.
FWIW I'm not a sportsball fan either, but you can't argue that those of us with MS-DOS and Fidonet are in the minority. Sport is a super-majority content area that is very brand and advertiser friendly.
Did they actually manage that transition, though? I haven't heard anyone talk about Foursquare in years. My entire social circle effectively ran itself via Dodgeball when that was active; many of us remembered it fondly enough to give Foursquare a try, after Dodgeball's founders came back out of Google purgatory. It quickly became obvious that they really just wanted to become a cheap Yelp knockoff, though, and we all left. I don't remember hearing anyone propose a group migration to Swarm at the time, and I certainly haven't heard anyone talk about it since.
Checkin-based spontaneous social organization just... doesn't happen anymore, so far as I can see. Shame, because I really enjoyed it. If a new service came along which looked like it wasn't going to be evil, I might sign up and try to get my friends on board - but I wouldn't trust the foursquare people at this point.
I just looked at my cell phone and there's a notification of 9 friends checking in on Swarm - most of them early fellow-dodgeball users.
YMMV but most of my friends who were hardcore users switched over to Swarm upon the pivot. The migration was automatic btw - Foursquare told you in the app that checkins were no longer supported and offered easy install of Swarm with the same login credentials.
"Refocus the company to be the Netflix of live TV, focusing on the delivery of live sports and news broadcasts while enabling fans/viewers to discuss in real time." I didn't feel like their experiments in live broadcasting NFL games drew a large audience last year. I think twitter offers sports fans a solid mobile experience(checking real-time reactions from other athletes and sports fans) while watching the game on a big screen HDTV. The biggest sports and political events are also social in nature, most of the time you're watching in a group of people. How do you get a group of people to watch a sports/political event on twitter and discuss in real-time? I agree that Twitter's modern day utility lies here but the switching costs for the user have to be reduced.
"How do you get a group of people to watch a sports/political event on twitter and discuss in real-time?" Via friend lists. If all your friends are watching the game and tweeting at the same time then you are discussing the game with them
"the switching costs for the user have to be reduced" The rise of smart TVs with apps will lead to ever easier delivery of streamed programming to traditional mediums such as TV, while also opening new viewing experiences on mobile, tablet and computer.
Live sports rights are expensive. ESPN has been feeling the pain of having to pay the high prices while losing subscribers. Twitter wouldn't do any better with their ad-based monetization.
You're so right. Twitter is all about NOW, about Live events, about the moment. Another way to exploit this would be to create a "news" space, a collection of journalist and press accounts which could be harnessed to provide live news feeds on trending stories. Maybe they do this already, but if not, they should
I think Ben Thompson's take on live-TV-on-Twitter is spot on:
"Twitter is still selling the exact same value the service offered back in 2006 — 'live commentary, live connections, live conversations' — and the only product ideas are to do what old media like television does, but worse: becoming the first screen for what is happening now means a screen that is smaller, more laggy, and, critically, in the way of seeing the actual tweets one might care about. It’s also an example of the worst sort of product thinking: simply doing what was done before, but digitally." [1]
Trying to replicate live TV - a market whose margins are currently contracting - is likely to mean preparing for a bloodbath.
Could be an interesting case. reddit is already doing this for 'real time' conversations (via F5 refresh) in respective subreddits during games, speeches, conferences, etc.
I would add a feature that is similar to goole+ circles: allow the user to view the tweets of a subset of sources. I think it makes sense for twitter: one circle for each interest/ point of view.
Circles sort of make sense from a design point of view, but suck from a UX point of view. They are too time-consuming to maintain for a user. I think adding some sort of tagging system could be a better system, so I could use tags to say "this tweet is 'tech' related" or "'sports' related" and then followers could decide if they only want to follow a subset of my tweets by tag. Would make search/discovery easier too.
Twitter sort of has this functionality via lists. During football season I only look at my 'NFL List' which is comprised of football analysts, beat writers, other media folk and 'regular' but smart football fans.
1) Go private. Twitter is a simple product that will be increasingly difficult to monetize to appease the stockholders. Being public will either mutate it into a video-ad nightmare or end up being shut down or sold.
2) Keep the timeline simple.
3) Better custom timelines, searches, and notifications.
4) Stop trying to copy Facebook, Whatsapp, Snapchat, etc. and just be the best Twitter possible.
I'm guessing Twitter has about as many users as it can ever hope to have, which means it's no longer about growth, it's about profits. That means it's time to cut costs, largely in engineering. You need a far smaller team to run a service and make incremental improvements than you need to grow a service aggressively.
I consider myself pretty tech oriented but I've never understood twitter, this is probably just my own stupidity but I've tried several times and it never makes sense.
I mostly just see replies to other conversations and I don't understand the context. Scrolling through the timeline I can't parse structure, it just seems chaotic.
Barely anyone I know uses twitter. It just seems to be a way to follow celebrities and politicians, I don't really care what they have to say.
Definitely. I had the same opinion, couldn't really figure out why it had any value. At some point I created a politically-oriented (anonymous) profile to interact before one of our local elections. I followed enough of the people who used it well (media, some politicians, various individuals) to pick up the value in it.
Killed that profile, created my own, still enjoy it. I don't follow too many people, I prune noise by either unfollowing or muting. I still don't care to be one of the chatteratii but it's great.
Some journalists (usually serious ones), some startuppy people, some friends, some investors. I often read stuff long before it hits the news, I see what journalists say on a less-scripted platform. Find opinions you value, follow them. Use e.g. Tweetbot.
That is true, the timeline is fragments of multiple conversations or popular statements. You are right that it is difficult to parse the feed, because your brain has to context switch between all the conversations. Whereas for instance a hacker news feed gives you exclusively top level headlines with a place to go for discussion.
Like a giant flock of birds all chirping to their immediate neighbor with slight variations on the same theme? Like a massive digital game of chinese whispers.
I'm sticking to the tree branched nature of reddit/HN. The flock can go flap their wings all they want.
Its the best source for breaking news. If something is going on I can search a twitter hashtag and parse out the good stuff for myself. Scroll through quickly and find people on the spot who may be periscoping etc.
Also because of the twitter culture/brevity In my personal experience people are more apt to reply. I have hired and been hired etc just through tweeting. I think there is a sort of casual atmosphere that can be used to get people to respond who otherwise never would.
Or rather what they think is causing Twitter to lose users/engagement. Those things directly affect whether Twitter will sink or swim within the next year or so which I think are critical.
If the question "How would you turn Twitter around?" is being asked in public with tons of people giving great answers, I'm sorry but you have a major leadership problem.
People will stop switching to gab.ai? Twitter actually thrives on conflict - stop trying to turn it into a safe space for the easily offended! Or at least don't force it to be a neutered safe space for everyone - leave it up to the users to turn it into that for themselves, not for everyone else.
Saudi investment money means none of that is ever ever going to happen. Twitter ain't ever going back from regressive left ideologies. If anything they're going to double-down.
The fact that Feminist Frequency is on the "safety council" should tell you enough about it and how useless it is.
Well, "regressive left" is pretty vague and can mean pretty much whatever you want, but the connection between Saudi Arabia and Feminist Frequency is very specific and should be easily explainable.
This is rock-solid analysis, but I still have a couple questions. First, Saudi Arabians have invested hundreds of millions of dollars in Twitter. Is this really the best strategy for weakening it? Or are you saying they're using Twitter as a weapon to poison America with the evils of feminism, or something?
Second, on a practical level, how did this happen? Someone from Saudi Arabia called up a Twitter executive and said "hey we think your platform could use more feminist perspectives" and they were like "oh yes, this makes perfect sense coming from you, and as you own 5% of our company we take your word as gospel"?
And obviously, what does Marxism have to do with feminism?
Sorry if you were joking, sometimes it's very hard to tell.
relaunch it. have a countdown to the end of Twitter 2007-2017 and let everyone know it's starting all over again. Rush to get your username. The new twitter will be just like it was in 2008 but stable and working but get back to what made it great in the first place.
I have no clue why they stopped developing it any further, in old days you would eagerly wait for a new feature, every couple of month. That's also true back then it didn't even have image upload.
I'd expect it be something between Facebook and twitter itself. Nope never google+.
It needs a fresh look hmm! By fresh I meant the design as the aesthetics of web Facebook messenger a modern, miminial, fresh look. That Facebook lacks.
I'd want to it be bit less minimal but not as much bloated as Facebook hence I suggestrd earlier something between the Facebook and twitter itself.
It's stalled and boring, and at this point it looks like a driveless train that could hit the dead end pretty soon.
I have no clue why they stopped developing it any further, in old days you would eagerly wait for a new feature, every couple of month.
Capital turns these companies into SJW havens where nothing gets done but they get to promote the companies as part of valley culture/cultural meccas. Look at Github, for example.
- Go private. Twitter is a simple product and will be increasingly difficult to monetize enough to satisfy shareholders' desire for ever-increasing profits.
- Keep it simple. Stop trying to be Facebook and Snapchat and Youtube all at once.
- Better AI / search to enable/improve things like custom timelines and notifications.
- Optional paid accounts with appropriate benefits. Keep the cost low and don't penalize unpaid accounts.
Pivot to a NSFW platform. It already is but most people don't know that side of it. I'm pretty sure porn is the only reason tumblr's still breathing so it might work.
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[ 1340 ms ] story [ 3834 ms ] threadRevert it back to pure text, which can include any type of url
Make the tweets always load chronologically
Make the interface faster loading and less JavaScripty
open up the API
basically, turn it back into #OldTwitter from 2010
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00PDM76ZW/
but you'll probably need a better directional antenna to have good reception (depends on the specific part of the world for how strong the signal is).
Once you're used to fast internet you won't want any of that though. Streaming HDTV on a 50Mbps+ internet connection ends up being a better experience since you don't have to go through all the setup hassle to make this work equivalently (installing the antenna, connecting it to a dongle on your own server, installing some kind of head end software, streaming from that server over your own network). I've done both and the antenna setup is now fully deprecated.
Access to most live broadcasts on mobile is still an unsolved problem.
- No character penalty for URLs
- Let people play with the data and metadata, exposing fake accounts is good for all
- Encourage bots to be bots
- Stump the chumps. Make this type of charade harder to pull off: @rea1DonaldTrump vs. @realDonaldTrump
Guaranteed to kill twitter within a year.
Right now you can turn on notifications for a user's tweets, but that gives you push notifications for all of their tweets which is super annoying. Also, 99% of users don't know that exists.
Their recent move to make trending topics and search more visible in the iPhone app is a step in the right direction but they're a long ways off.
FOMO and live is how they're different from Facebook. I can always go back to Facebook at any time and they'll show me what I missed and I can still engage with it. With Twitter, the discussion has come and gone and I'm left out if I don't know it's happening.
100% agree. Twitter needs to be in the game of maximizing signal-to-noise for their users. In my experience, there's just /way/ too much noise when you're trying to follow along with a live event. I almost never want to see content from a random account with 10 followers. Nor do I want to see a d-list celebrity hocking skin care products. What I really care about is how the conversation is shaping itself over time.
There are many ways of fixing this that don't spoil Twitter's free-speech mission. Personally, I think the answer is in clustering tweets based on topic and sentiment, then presenting a really intuitive filtering UI. You could expose options that would help you understand the broader conversation, but also dive into it at a super granular level.
Getting this right would be in the hard-but-possible realm. Given how many engineers Twitter has stockpiled, I think it's worth trying. Solving the noise problem would necessarily cut down on abuse, too.
Facebook isn't great because of how it looks, but because they have React, hiphop (or what's the name now), things like that; and that allows them to scale and build and iterate more quickly.
Twitter had Bootstrap and that was great investment IMO... now the Bootstrap guys all left. Why?
Twitter's built Aurora, large parts of Mesos, Bootstrap, Storm, Heron, Pants, ThriftMux, DistributedLog, Apache Cotton, Iago, Scalding, Finagle, and Finatra. A lot of these exist so they can build things quicker.
it clearly still has mindshare.
It's a greenfield space no one else is really jumping upon yet. Focus may have turned to on-demand TV, but people still want to watch sports live, and Twitter already has acquired some of those deals as the sport franchises get more comfortable with online distribution. Trump's tweets, the presidential debates broadcast on Twitter and the fact people turn to Twitter during breaking news make it a logical extension to move into news and possibly finance too.
Twitter's modern-day utility seems very low outside of news/sports/politics and the average joe has moved their engagement to more visual platforms like Instagram and Snapchat where it is much easier to create and consume more personal content and updates.
Twitter would also be able to focus their monetization and advertising efforts around a much tighter content and audience niche. Plus consumers are used to paying for some of this premium content, making monetization of a freemium model even easier.
I've seen other posts mentioning timeline changes, protocol changes, and opening up the API ecosystem, but I don't see any of these changes actually affecting Twitters bottom line.
Twitter is a great place to discuss what's going on right now. Whether it be sports, a natural disaster, political debate, news, etc. Twitter needs to be the place to go when you want social commentary / news on what's happening RIGHT NOW.
I think there's something TV-ish that's possible, but Netflix level? That seems difficult both in licensing and execution. However, I will agree what you propose now appears to be their end game. #hattip
But the app brings in so much clutter, and the interface is poor for quickly incoming tweets...
Twitter has tremendous utility for the medical community. I am final year medical student and through twitter can follow worldwide leaders in emergency medicine (my field of interest). These doctors post clinical factoids, cases reports, unique ekgs, and other learning points live from the wards (all de-identified to protect patients of course). They also post opinions on the latest research publications. Twitter has become my best way to stay current in medicine.
Other apps targeted for doctors have attempted this. Doximity and Figure1 are examples. But twitter has done the best job.
As a public company, Twitter has to focus on the mainstream, big numbers.
I would also suggest that Twitter refocusing to sports and news would give the specialist apps you mention (and others) a better chance at super-serving your community. Is Twitter's ephemeral nature, mixed in with non-medical updates, really the best way for you to spot trends and identify useful links? If you don't fire up the app every few hours do you risk missing a crucial link or update?
I could see paying for a tool that helped collect, filter and organize what the top people are saying and pain points in general.
If you can't turn it into money or growth (which Twitter is failing at right now) it won't be a thing for much longer. Twitter exists primarily as a public company to make money not to provide a service to niche communities.
Thanks for explaining that to me.
http://www.thelongtail.com/conceptual.jpg
You have to think a little differently to design for the long tail. You can't just design one consistent experience, you have to design tools that can be used in many scenarios.
The reality is Twitter has failed as a business more than anything and this is about repositioning Twitter as a business that can be monetized.
Although it's niche, you could substitute almost anything else for 'medical' and have it work. There's an equally good and thriving literary Twitter, arts Twitter, gay Twitter, black Twitter, politics Twitter, dev Twitter.
Turns out that people like their news and sports mixed in with other ephemera anyway - it's a secret that TV networks have known for decades with late night TV and 'and finally' segments on network news.
For me the point where Twitter really lost its way is when it decided to focus on being a 'media company' and drawing attention to tweets from 'public figuresrather than finding better ways to enable people to tap into and contribute to communities that matter to them.
The monetization Twitter has been able to achieve from this niche content hasn't met expectations and that niche content has also seen stalled growth.
Ephemera is what makes a sport/news/politics-aligned Twitter a much more interest proposition that routes around the negatives of the product and the value proposition on that front.
One thing that's always bugged me about twitter - its so transient. when you log on you only get a snapshot of what's happening at that moment - scrolling back through the days or weeks traffic is next to impossible because of the sheer volume of content.
But in this way, the OP of this thread is correct - Live is most definitely where twitter is king.
What I heard davycro describe above sounds a lot like the K-12 mathematics community on Twitter dubbed the MathTwitterBlogosphere #MTBoS. It connects everyone from kindergarten teachers in France to university professors and has been a source of tremendous professional development for me over the past four years.
Are there enough other communities like us out there to be material to Twitter's business? I don't know, but the #MTBoS derives great value from having Twitter as a gathering place.
The same goes for stock traders, the network offers incredible insights.
https://figure1.com/
@emcrit
@epmonthly
@MDaware
@precordialthump
@seth_kelly
@mcsassymd
anything tagged #FOAMed (Free Open Access Medical education – often has an EM focus)
My favorites though are docs I know from away rotations and the wards. They aren't famous, but their opinions especially matter to me.
Also follow @medicalaxioms
Are you involved with software development in an amateur or professional capacity? Are you interested in startups? How did you find HN?
Do you have CS/Math (or related) education in addition to being a student of medicine?
Hope I'm not too intrusive ;)
Twitter's open communication channel might not be suited for such infoshare. Telegram/Whatsapp has potential in that area.
Would love any feedback or suggestions on how it could be improved.
Happy to offer free use to anyone on this thread looking to test out the service.
What's the evidence for this claim? In academia, Twitter is super important, much more than Facebook or any other social platform. Academics are addicted to Twitter and I think you could charge them, e.g., for tweets longer than 140 characters.
"Hello! Today, to make world more disrupted with innovation, we pivoted Twitter to become a sports TV channel! All your tweets are gone, instead open a bottle of beer and watch this great game! 20 well-fit males kick the leather sphere! Isn't it impressive?"
That will be day when I throw out my router to the window, flush smartphone into toilet, install MS-DOS and Fidonet software.
Arguably it saved the company from going under while still enabling the original functionality for those who wanted to use it.
FWIW I'm not a sportsball fan either, but you can't argue that those of us with MS-DOS and Fidonet are in the minority. Sport is a super-majority content area that is very brand and advertiser friendly.
Checkin-based spontaneous social organization just... doesn't happen anymore, so far as I can see. Shame, because I really enjoyed it. If a new service came along which looked like it wasn't going to be evil, I might sign up and try to get my friends on board - but I wouldn't trust the foursquare people at this point.
YMMV but most of my friends who were hardcore users switched over to Swarm upon the pivot. The migration was automatic btw - Foursquare told you in the app that checkins were no longer supported and offered easy install of Swarm with the same login credentials.
"the switching costs for the user have to be reduced" The rise of smart TVs with apps will lead to ever easier delivery of streamed programming to traditional mediums such as TV, while also opening new viewing experiences on mobile, tablet and computer.
"Twitter is still selling the exact same value the service offered back in 2006 — 'live commentary, live connections, live conversations' — and the only product ideas are to do what old media like television does, but worse: becoming the first screen for what is happening now means a screen that is smaller, more laggy, and, critically, in the way of seeing the actual tweets one might care about. It’s also an example of the worst sort of product thinking: simply doing what was done before, but digitally." [1]
Trying to replicate live TV - a market whose margins are currently contracting - is likely to mean preparing for a bloodbath.
[1] https://stratechery.com/2017/twitter-live-and-luck/
2) Keep the timeline simple.
3) Better custom timelines, searches, and notifications.
4) Stop trying to copy Facebook, Whatsapp, Snapchat, etc. and just be the best Twitter possible.
I'm guessing Twitter has about as many users as it can ever hope to have, which means it's no longer about growth, it's about profits. That means it's time to cut costs, largely in engineering. You need a far smaller team to run a service and make incremental improvements than you need to grow a service aggressively.
- Suspending accounts for no reason at all.
- Shadow banning users by hiding their replies (they refer to certain users as "low quality").
- Aggressive censorship of alternative opinions.
I feel like you're probably including instances of harassment here, which is generally unfair.
I mostly just see replies to other conversations and I don't understand the context. Scrolling through the timeline I can't parse structure, it just seems chaotic.
Barely anyone I know uses twitter. It just seems to be a way to follow celebrities and politicians, I don't really care what they have to say.
I'm probably missing something here.
Definitely. I had the same opinion, couldn't really figure out why it had any value. At some point I created a politically-oriented (anonymous) profile to interact before one of our local elections. I followed enough of the people who used it well (media, some politicians, various individuals) to pick up the value in it.
Killed that profile, created my own, still enjoy it. I don't follow too many people, I prune noise by either unfollowing or muting. I still don't care to be one of the chatteratii but it's great.
Some journalists (usually serious ones), some startuppy people, some friends, some investors. I often read stuff long before it hits the news, I see what journalists say on a less-scripted platform. Find opinions you value, follow them. Use e.g. Tweetbot.
Like a giant flock of birds all chirping to their immediate neighbor with slight variations on the same theme? Like a massive digital game of chinese whispers.
I'm sticking to the tree branched nature of reddit/HN. The flock can go flap their wings all they want.
Also because of the twitter culture/brevity In my personal experience people are more apt to reply. I have hired and been hired etc just through tweeting. I think there is a sort of casual atmosphere that can be used to get people to respond who otherwise never would.
Just my 2 cents.
* Let Evan return as CEO (merge with Medium)
... this will restore Twitter management to the situation around 2010, then ...
* Reform or cancel the Trust & Safety council
* Restore open API access and app ecosystem
* Remove side wide censorship tools, add self censorship tools (a la Gab)
* Reverse the timeline changes
* Stop pandering to far left ideologues
Something like that?
The fact that Feminist Frequency is on the "safety council" should tell you enough about it and how useless it is.
Second, on a practical level, how did this happen? Someone from Saudi Arabia called up a Twitter executive and said "hey we think your platform could use more feminist perspectives" and they were like "oh yes, this makes perfect sense coming from you, and as you own 5% of our company we take your word as gospel"?
And obviously, what does Marxism have to do with feminism?
Sorry if you were joking, sometimes it's very hard to tell.
Why.
* Remove side wide censorship tools, add self censorship tools (a la Gab)
Whose tools are that?
* Stop pandering to far left ideologues
I'm not aware of any such pandering. Care to give some examples?
But to Twitter, it is.
I'd expect it be something between Facebook and twitter itself. Nope never google+.
It needs a fresh look hmm! By fresh I meant the design as the aesthetics of web Facebook messenger a modern, miminial, fresh look. That Facebook lacks.
I'd want to it be bit less minimal but not as much bloated as Facebook hence I suggestrd earlier something between the Facebook and twitter itself.
It's stalled and boring, and at this point it looks like a driveless train that could hit the dead end pretty soon.
Capital turns these companies into SJW havens where nothing gets done but they get to promote the companies as part of valley culture/cultural meccas. Look at Github, for example.
- Keep it simple. Stop trying to be Facebook and Snapchat and Youtube all at once.
- Better AI / search to enable/improve things like custom timelines and notifications.
- Optional paid accounts with appropriate benefits. Keep the cost low and don't penalize unpaid accounts.