

Ask HN: How would you make Twitter irrelevant? - matc

If there were a way for Twitter to become irrelevant, what would that be?
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Joakal
A project that delivers decentralised twitter-like applications as well as
interfaces that aggregates it. There's several projects I believe. Essentially
make it akin to an email service.

I suppose if you're aiming for the next best thing after Twitter, it might be
brief videos with voice recognition. eg "Joakal: Met HN's founder!" "(PG
talking) I like blackberries. Blackberry companies are best" (10, 20 or 30
secs?). That would make spam control and aggregation pretty challenging but
lots of potential for advertisements and interviews.

Here's a brief advertisement (edited), "The Last Exorcism - BEST OF
Chatroulette reactions": <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CNSaurw6E_Q> And
brief comedy (edited), "Top 20 5 Second Films Presented By UPROXX":
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=saqO_ZqX6uY>

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adrianwaj
Well, to answer the question: What are you doing now or what's happening? you
could have users wearing glasses that collects video and sound from the
environment and sends it into the network for recording and broadcast. The
glasses may also have an inbuilt screen and headphones that can receive from
the network. Getting lifestreaming right.

The glasses could also detect a user's emotions by their eye state and voice
(or pulse.) It may autodetect location and detect sounds to attach
environmental metadata -- so great metadata. Think The Terminator combined
with Brainstorm.

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ohashi
In theory there are only two options for this.

A. Something that is better than Twitter comes along and people like it more.

B. People no longer find Twitter useful/interesting/whatever makes them use it
in the first place.

So basically, irrelevancy by competition or by societal shift.

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sp332
Lots of things are "better" than Twitter, for almost any way you could measure
"better". The only thing Twitter has going for it is size - everyone is on
Twitter. Also they are now really fast and pretty reliable, but even back when
that wasn't true, they were still growing like crazy.

~~~
anujkk
Well, you can also look it in opposite way. Why is everyone on twitter? There
must be something that twitter is doing better than others? Ease of use?
simplicity? better marketing? hype? Why are you on twitter?

Make something that makes each one of those "everyone" to leave twitter and
join your site and you'll make it irrelevant.

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jcr
If someone here had a way to make Twitter irrelevant, they would be working on
it, very quietly.

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wavephorm
Twitter is an easier-to-use, web-enabled IRC. I suppose if you were to add a
slick Twitter-like interface on top of an IRC with permanent handles/profiles
then you'd end up with a real-time Twitter.

