
What Twitter Can Be - coloneltcb
http://lowercasecapital.com/2015/06/03/what-twitter-can-be-2/
======
ThePhysicist
For me, the biggest problem with Twitter are their Draconian rules concerning
third-party apps. I had several ideas for cool apps built on top of the
Twitter API (e.g. a Twitter-based news aggregator, an online volunteering app,
...), but each time I gave up on the idea after reading the terms of their
developer program:

No showing of tweets with content from other social networks, no altering in
the presentation of tweets, very severe rate limits, ....

I think if Twitter wad a little less paranoid about protecting their content
they could actually become a viable and useful communication tool for a large
part of the Internet (even more than today).

~~~
state
But how exactly do they make money on developers using their API?

~~~
krisdol
The way I see it, third party applications increase the value of using
twitter, bringing more users to it. Twitter as a social sharing tool has very
little value to me, personally, but as a chat tool, marketing tool, or
customer support tool I think it has a lot of potential. Its presentation/UX
is not very optimized for those experiences, though -- and that's why third
party apps exist. If an open source project builds its chatroom on top of
twitter, that's a huge value-add and would bring people to use twitter in
order to efficiently communicate with the company, in the same way people use
Slack because companies host their support on it.

By the way, I think their rate limiting is fine for most third party apps.
There is a lot that can be done with intermediate caching and the Streaming
API.

~~~
lotso
Brings value is not the same as brings money.

------
normloman
I used to be on twitter. Left because nobody talks with you, just at you. And
when you do actually get a conversation going, it's hard to follow when it's
thrown in the same chronological time line with other conversations. The
hashtag doesn't do much to foster conversation either. Merely a way to label
slogans. This dichotomy between being a public feed but also being a place for
conversations is at the core of why twitter sucks.

~~~
untog
_it 's hard to follow when it's thrown in the same chronological time line
with other conversations_

That, at least, shouldn't be the case. Your conversations live in the
Notifications tab.

~~~
sp332
Twitter's conversation handling has improved a lot lately.

~~~
frik
Can you give an example?

~~~
sp332
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.

------
jusben1369
The thing about Twitter is that it should have been TV vs trying to be
channels. I don't know why they were never comfortable enough in their skin to
let third parties extend the living heck out of their platform. Using Twitter
and getting a Gen 1.0 iPhone were very similar experiences. Pretty much wow
and thinking the sky was the limit (vs what they actually were initially).
Apple harnessed an app developer community and made their product 10x more
valuable. Twitter locked everyone out. I always thought the Twitter competitor
launched by Dalton (App.net) totally missed the boat. We didn't need a paid
service to save us from ads we needed an open free platform that drew in
millions and millions of users to draw in app developers etc. That would have
crushed Twitter.

~~~
akrymski
Except that TVs are commodities compared to channels. They didn't want to
commoditise their own business.

~~~
jusben1369
hah well all analogies break down if you peck at them long enough. Twitter
should have enabled developers to create great things on their medium vs
trying to be both the platform and the app creator.

~~~
SandersAK
But the analogy doesn't break down. The value is in owning the medium. This is
exactly why entities like comcast don't want to become dumb pipes. yes it is
better for everyone if they do, but in their shorter term interest, it's much
better to own the high value stuff.

~~~
jusben1369
It does breakdown. Twitter done right is a marketplace with network effects.
ISP is an easily replaceable service. If I'm CNN I can't just pick up and
leave Twitter for another Twitter at a lower cost. Same thing all the way down
to a tech company with 10 people who use it to communicate outrages. People
are already there. They expect you to be there too.

------
smhg
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
a lot of relevant people post on G+. I guess they either don't post personal
stuff or efficiently use Circles. Many, but definitely not all, are of course
close to Google.

Some other advantages for me: the fact that you can read the whole story (not
just sentence-per-sentence) and the -theoretical- ability to drag in non-
professional relationships (yes, I like Circles).

I realize no one takes G+ serious anymore and that it's a graveyard for most.
But it seems to work well for some (professionally). In a way it can make
Twitter lose (one of) its edge(s): follow tech-people.

This isn't meant as a G+ promotion. I just wanted to make clear why Twitter
might not be a good fit for some.

~~~
darklajid
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 phone). There is
_nothing_ good about G+.

Twitter sucks in various ways. But G+ is not better. Not at all. Unless we're
really just talking 'character counts'. In all other ways? Worse, so. much.
worse.

~~~
lmm
> G+ is a closed and broken platform, built by an advertisement company.

So just like Twitter then?

~~~
darklajid
That's a good point. I admit defeat.

The single retort I can come up with is that I'd still prefer to feed anything
_but_ Google with data, but really.. You're right. No difference.

------
austenallred
Twitter’s biggest problem is that Twitter increases or decreases in value
along with user’s willingness to curate their feed. Many will never do that.

So Twitter tries to do the work for you, but guessing exactly who/what you’d
be interested in without tons of info is virtually impossible.

The closest they can get is the current logged-out homepage: “Here are a bunch
of random categories. You like the NBA? Maybe celebrity chefs? Cute animals?
Country artists?” (Those are literal examples.) Total shot in the dark.

~~~
azazo
I see this as the biggest problem with Twitter also.

Twitter is my favorite app, but it's because I have spent five plus years
curating my feed.

There is a fundamental problem with the way they onboard new users and this is
why so many people don't stick around.

The onboarding process asks you to select interests and then recommends people
to follow based on those interests.

However, they often recommend celebrities and 'popular' accounts.

These people are often terrible at Twitter, so new users see a bunch of
boring, self-promotional content in their feed and don't come back.

~~~
mcdougle
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
that I found via other sources -- like if I follow their blog, I'd follow
their Twitter too).

It'd be better if it was easier to categorize the feeds I'm following and view
by category depending on what I feel like at the moment. I know they have
lists, but I only just found that a little bit ago -- and it's so hidden that
I actually have to _type the URL into my address bar_ because I can't get
there from a link on the homepage. Viewing by category should be, if not the
default, then one big link away from the initial page.

~~~
walterbell
Lists are the way to go.

Conference or other temporal hashtags are a good way to discover users who are
focused on a single topic, who you can then curate into a list. Once you find
a few topic experts, they become a discovery source for other experts.

~~~
jonathansizz
Exactly. I had several abortive attempts at Twitter before I 'got it'. You
have to build up your feed slowly and organically. Start by making the effort
to follow a few, very high-quality accounts based on your interests, then use
these accounts to find others, and so on (unfollowing as necessary to keep the
signal/noise ratio as high as possible). This requires substantial effort on
the user's part.

------
kin
At first Twitter was awesome because of their API but then that closed off so
now I have to use their stuff only I feel as if they haven't done anything in
the past few years but scale.

I've tried being a user for years but they really need a better way to manage
and view lists. The frequency of celebrity tweets vs. friend tweets vs.
company tweets is all different. How I ingest that content is differs
depending on my mood or what I want. Thus far, there's no easy way to sort
through the content to quickly find what I'm looking for or interested in. It
all requires endless scrolling and weeding out the noise.

~~~
nicolewhite
What is it about Twitter's list manager that doesn't address this issue for
you?

~~~
walterbell
It does not exist on mobile?

~~~
kaws
Personal Profile > Settings Cog > Lists

~~~
walterbell
Thanks. Not present on my iOS app version, but perhaps it was added in the
last few months. I've delayed app updates because of the risk of auto-playing
video ads.

------
codingdave
The scariest statistic in that article is that one billion users tried
twitter, then walked away. I'm sure some of those are novelty accounts that
just never took off, not truly unique users, but that is still a ton of people
who already wrote twitter off as irrelevant to their life.

That is a large hurdle to overcome. Where are you going to grow your userbase
if that many people already made their decision against you? I can assure you,
that is not a tech question, it is a marketing issue.

------
ColinWright
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/HeliumBalloonOnTheMoon.png)

[http://www.solipsys.co.uk/TwitterConversations/ListContainin...](http://www.solipsys.co.uk/TwitterConversations/ListContainingFirstElement.png)

[http://www.solipsys.co.uk/TwitterConversations/Assessment_20...](http://www.solipsys.co.uk/TwitterConversations/Assessment_20150325.png)

~~~
frik
Have you created a web service or app around it? Or is it on Github? A visual
conversion graph would indeed help, the Twitter UX isn't really useable to
follow up any longer conversation. I assume the Twitter UX has been even
slightly degraded a bit over time for A) scalability reasons B) so that users
stay longer on Twitter (good for advertisement statistics)

~~~
ColinWright
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.

~~~
cpayne624
What are you using to draw the hierarchy?

~~~
ColinWright
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.

------
hagope
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.

~~~
bentcorner
Customer service via twitter just feels wrong to me. I'm a low-frequency
twitter user so maybe I don't "get it", but it feels very much like shouting
into the void. There's no feedback saying "yeah, we heard you".

Whereas with a phone call you're actively navigating their support structure,
or with a contact form, where you have a tracking id in your email box.

~~~
cauterize
Does it feel right to a part of the consensus customers should have regarding
large companies? It does for me.

The Comcast site has a form you can fill out to remove you from their snail
mail list. As someone has been a customer for 4 years, getting advertisements
in my mailbox made me irrationally angry. I filled out the form but saw no
drop in volume. Taking my silly issue public via Twitter helped get the
problem resolved.

I had a sense of pride knowing I publicly shamed Comcast enough that they did
something about their poor mailing practices. And it only took a few days and
maybe 500 total characters.

------
Animats
_" Shortcomings in the direct response advertising category have resulted in
the company coming in below the financial community’s quarterly estimates."_

Well, yes. The problem with all social networks is that ads interfere with the
"social". Ads are a big annoying guy getting in your face when you're trying
to talk to someone. Or worse, they're your (soon to be former) "friends"
who've been tricked into "sharing" (i.e. spamming) ads.

Remember, Twitter's big period of growth was before they had ads. They only
put in ads when they had users hooked.

The first one is always free.

~~~
notahacker
The direct effect of Twitter ads isn't that bad; by the standards of web
advertising it's hardly intrusive. It's the probable side effects of
optimising for that revenue stream that are the trouble. One of Twitter's
virtues from an advertiser's perspective is that most recent Tweets are often
barely more compelling than than whatever message or link they're trying to
promote. Streams which efficiently filter out irrelevance mitigate against
that[1]. Reverse chronological order with ads interspersed is probably a local
optimum for ad discoverability, and I bet the marketing guys test that....

Same goes for the risks of allowing any old third party to build the next
successful Twitter platform on their API when they know "filter out the ads"
is going to be a much-requested feature.

Being more controversial, I still can't help thinking that whilst Twitter has
long made a virtue of brevity, 140 characters is just _too restrictive_ for
the average non-regular user. It's often not enough to convey the reason why
people should go to an obfuscated link, never mind enough for a person not
used to truncating their thoughts to express a view that doesn't involve an
image or a third party site. I'm not interested in receiving Tweets by SMS,
but would find Twitter streams a whole lot more engaging if they tended to be
250-400 characters.

[1]of course this is what the portal promoters thought in the pre Google era.
But since then Facebook and LinkedIn's heavily polluted streams have been
highly successful, and Twitter has even less potential to become primarily a
search tool rather than a way to stumble over moderately interesting content,
some of it promoted.

------
walterbell
Twitter lists (especially in combination with Flipboard) are useful for
filtering/curation, but have seen few improvements and remain unavailable in
the mobile app.

Lists could exhibit business value comparable to Pinterest curation, if
Twitter paid any attention to the feature. They are micro-social networks that
amplify the value of Twitter's main accomplishment: a directory of pseudonymns
for writers, marketers, subject-matter experts and other publishers of time-
sensitive content.

~~~
minthd
How do you combine twitter list with flipboard?

~~~
walterbell
Username (top left corner) -> Following -> Accounts -> Twitter -> Your Lists
-> Follow

------
lawl
Twitter died to me when they closed down their API's.

~~~
chippy
I remember hearing presentations from their devs about twitter annotations,
metadata etc. Such enthusiasm at those times.

------
aswanson
Maybe its just me, im too old and not famous enough...but Twitter just seems
to me to be a celebrity (that includes fame of any kind) circle jerk...and if
you're not famous, you dont exist. Its weird. I hated fb towards the end of my
usage of it...but at least like the old sitcom 'Cheers', at least sometimes
you could go 'where everybody knows your name...'

------
throw_it_away
Honest question: I've tried Twitter a bunch of times, tried to engage with it
for a couple weeks, then given up when I felt that either the tweets were not
curated enough for me or that nobody was listening to me. Is there some guide
for technically literate people to start using Twitter effectively? Right now
I use Feedly and blogs to serve this purpose, but the appeal of real time news
a la Twitter seems quite sweet, if only I could tap into it.

~~~
janfoeh
Yes, please! From other peoples' descriptions, I can rationally understand
what benefit Twitter brings them, but I have never been able to replicate that
for myself.

I have always walked away, convinced that it's a real-time medium that
requires constant attention, because I find it to be nigh impossible to read
up on any discussion ex post facto.

That is especially true for any discussion with more than two participants —
those are tree-ish in nature to me, and for the life of me I cannot figure out
how anybody makes sense of them in Twitters one-dimensional chronological
organisation.

Help please?

~~~
binxbolling
To steal someone else's metaphor, try thinking of Twitter as a river. If you
try to bottle it up or consume it all you'll drown. If, on the other hand, you
dip in for a swim as you please, you might find it all bit more manageable. As
the rush of tweets flows by you, just check out some, then turn your phone off
and carry on. When you load it again, don't feel you have to go back and
"catch up" or give it the constant attention you mentioned.

YMMV, but I also think the emphasis on "conversations" is a bit misleading.
Lots of people do have conversations on there, but I personally love it for
breaking news, link-sharing, jokes, and photos. If your frame of reference is
a forum with posts, or an article's comments, or a real-life conversation...
you're going to have a bad time.

~~~
DaveWalk
I've heard this too; it drives the completionist in me nuts. After reading a
Twitter stream for 5 minutes, I look up and wish I had caught up on the news,
or read a short article from Instapaper / Pocket.

I have no doubt this says more about me than about Twitter, but I never could
never see a way around it. Similar experience with Reddit, comparing the
default front page to one tailored to the subreddits I enjoy the most. Of
course I gave up on Reddit too after a while...

------
sirbetsalot
of course the author misses the biggest reason twitter sucks. Abuse, fake
accounts, and trolling cause more "authentic" real name users to leave every
day. Twitter does nothing to punish people who can just grab a picture of you
from the net, create and account and start ruining your reputation instantly.
And we all know you can't win against a troll unless you out troll them with
your own bots. Twitter is the stained toilet bowl of human interaction.
Twitter would instantly better if it forced real names and banned people for
abusive comments outright. Until then, Twitter is unusable.

~~~
forgottenpass
The idea of an everyone-can-talk-to-everyone social network is initially
appealing. You can write (and there were) thousands of articles about twitter
extolling the virtues of the "internet community" or "the conversation" and
"personal brands." It was all very 1995 internet enthusiasm with a new coat of
paint. Then everyone tried it, and it turns out nobody wants to hear from
everybody.

Trolls/abuse/whatever aren't the problem. They're the most extreme
manifestation of the real problem: everyone wants to broadcast themselves to
as many people as possible but nobody actually wants to listen to anyone but a
subset of the people they've already decided to hear from.

But twitter can't restructure as an RSS reader for worthless thoughts (and
links to worthwhile thoughts) for those with short attention spans. Maybe they
can clamp down on abuse, it might give the flash in the pan a few more years
of life.

~~~
sirbetsalot
So lets see. in about 30 minutes I can deck into the Twitter API and create
about 100 accounts and cron job your Twitter account for a post and then
inundate you with thousands of crazy insults from random accounts. I can do
all of this because you said you didn't like blue cheese and I for one sir
think you are an IDIOT and should be taught a severe lesson for not liking
blue cheese. ~Twitter Reality.

~~~
forgottenpass
I'm sorry, but I don't think I understand what your post is trying to say.

I just see a non sequitur about twitter abuse. Did you interpret when I said
abuse is not _THE_ problem with twitter, that I meant I don't find abuse on
twitter to be _A_ problem?

That wasn't what I was trying to say, but otherwise I'm confused as to how
your post is a reply to mine.

~~~
sirbetsalot
Just in case you don't get it. This is the typical train of thinking on
Twitter. You say something intelligent looking for conversation, and
eventually you are going to run into the crazies on the platform just looking
to broadcast thoughts that have nothing to do with the original point and then
quickly turns into negative, abusive slop. (the blue cheese remark should have
clued you in.) I understand fully what you are saying, but respectfully
disagree. Clearly tales of abuse and outright ugly human behaviour turn
millions upon millions of core users off the platform. This has been said a
dozen times by Dick Costello himself. That being said, I can see your point,
and will pontificate on it.

------
adventured
"Though you wouldn’t know it by looking at the stock price or by reading the
headlines, Twitter is owed recognition for ramping up their product
development"

Sacca is incorrect when it comes to Twitter's stock price. They're being given
an epic benefit of the doubt on their valuation. Few companies get that sort
of charity; ask Groupon, Angie's List, Etsy, etc. about that.

They're substantially overvalued by any normal market standards. A $24b market
cap for a company that has never - in nearly a decade of existence - earned a
profit; worse, they've bled a billion in red ink over that time. It's also
trading at a rich sales multiple of about 16.

------
moxyb
I think he's describing the perfect digital news platform that I would think
of.

~~~
austenallred
I _think_ what you're imagining is pretty much what we've been building for a
year or so, but I could be wrong.

It seems obvious - a lot of "news reports" nowadays are pretty much a couple
lines of text with a bunch of tweets dropped down beneath them. But making
that scalable is actually pretty difficult.

The first difficulty (and we've confirmed this and talked about the problem
multiple times with directors of product at Twitter) is finding what the
"best" stuff is.

We tried some time ago doing that for news - can we just algorithmically find
the best tweets with regard to topic x? Even given full API access, the answer
is either "not really" or "yes, but austenallred and his team aren't good
enough programmers to figure it out."

There simply aren't enough inputs - it's the same reason Google has always
struggled at real-time news. There are favorites and retweets, but those are
largely a function of how big someone's following is. Some guy walking on the
street taking amazing photos will never have as many retweets as CNN, even if
you try to control for the number of followers, or measure retweets as a
function of the number of followers somehow.

Then even if you could get that, the tweets aren't always analyzed in the
right context. Run that type of analysis and the top tweet is likely to be a
joke tweet or something like "OMG I'm praying for Boston."

The best solution that we can come up with is crowdsourcing the finding and
curation of tweets. It's working OK, but there's a long way to go. Basically
we let everyone find and submit tweets, tag them with specific topics, and
then upvote/downvote and fact-check for accuracy. (for details on how it
works, see [https://grasswire.com/about](https://grasswire.com/about))

Once you add a couple lines of text, you can turn the raw firehose of Twitter
into something that can be consumed by somebody like my mom. That, I think, it
a really big deal. It's working fairly well for news right now, and as more
people join and submit it gets better. Our hopes are that we can expand into
different verticals, and create daily digests of the best stuff with regard to
topic x that you can consume in 30 seconds.

~~~
tomrod
Where can I find what you're building?

~~~
austenallred
[https://grasswire.com](https://grasswire.com)

We basically see this as the back-end that could power some really cool stuff
(apps, partnerships with publishers)

~~~
har777
I'm nitpicking but the lack of a scrollbar makes me feel strangely out of
control. Any specific reason for the removal ?

------
shortstuffsushi
This article at one point proposes splitting content into separate apps. I'm
unsure of the end goal of this; I guess that it's trying to provide a clearer
divide for users, allowing them to filter content in a sense. It seems like
this would be better solved by filtering better within the app, separating
apps is just going to lead to more confusion, imo.

------
moey
Serious question people, out of the people here that USE Twitter, how much
would you pay a month for Twitter, if anything?

[http://directpoll.com/v?XDVhEtRR2EAlaVw2sOrQkWlBcohF0N2Z](http://directpoll.com/v?XDVhEtRR2EAlaVw2sOrQkWlBcohF0N2Z)

I value the service, and am wondering what other people value it at.

I will post the results here after set number of people vote.

 __ _UPDATE_ __Initially I was going to wait a little longer, but after
looking at the results from this sample, the trend is pretty be predictable.

RESULTS LINK: (VIEW AFTER VOTING PLEASE)
[http://directpoll.com/r?XDVhEtRR2EAlaVw2sOrQkWlBcohFw9na8aNc...](http://directpoll.com/r?XDVhEtRR2EAlaVw2sOrQkWlBcohFw9na8aNcxY0oMnk)

I think the results deserve a discussion on their own...

~~~
declan
I used Twitter quite a bit for work purposes (before I left CNET/CBS last year
to found a recommendation startup) and might have paid for it then.

But the value for me was in interacting with a large number of people, and I
suspect even charging a few dollars a year would lead to the vast majority of
accounts disappearing, reducing the remaining users' incentive to pay, leading
to more accounts disappearing, etc.

~~~
moey
Lets say one had to pay 1 cent to tweet, don't you think that the quality of
data would be much better? A lot of spam bots would be out of business.

------
firasd
This is a great essay (and shows that even if it’s predictable, it’s always
good to balance criticism with praise, support, and a sense of a positive path
forward.)

As for Sacca’s suggestions, I have mixed feelings on the specific features he
suggests for encouraging people to Tweet more (“Tweeting Shouldn’t Be So
Scary”) and increasing engagement (“Using Twitter Doesn’t Need To Feel As
Lonely”) but I like his suggestions about improving the timeline:

“Live Is The Biggest Opportunity Yet.”

This is the section he describes most lucidly and is the simplest to implement
on top of the existing product. It’s currently done in a ham-​fisted way—where
I am in India it prods me with modal dialogs about cricket matches!—but there
will need to be less prodding if it’s built as a standard set of pages where
you can follow the best tweets for a sporting event, TV show or news topic
while the situation is ongoing even if you’re logged out. It’s a bit like
following a hashtag, with some curation and highlighting of popular tweets on
the topic thrown in.

“Channels Will Make Twitter Easy, Easy, Easy.”

I sort of lost the thread in the middle of reading this in terms of figuring
out exactly how this is different from Live or other category based curated
tweets but I kinda get it. These are his examples: “Want to know what are the
most popular articles linked to on Twitter? That should be a channel. What are
the most popular sites linked among the people we follow or people that our
friends follow? Great channel. Which books are people Tweeting about? Channel.
Which videos are garnering the most attention? Channel. Any particular .gifs
blowing up? Channel.”

“Twitter’s Save Button Would Let You Keep All The Good Stuff.”

This is a relatively complex concept and would be difficult to implement in a
clear way but I like the idea. “We could keep every product we saw mentioned,
every book that looked interesting, every destination we wanted to visit
someday, every concert we wanted to go see, and every ad that piqued our
curiosity. All of this could be saved to a Vault within Twitter with just one
button in line with the RT and Fav buttons in each Tweet.”

------
josu
The author of the article is Chris Sacca.

~~~
mountaineer
Chris has said he's going to be more vocal and clarified his stake in
Twitter[1].

[1] [http://lowercasecapital.com/2015/05/21/i-bleed-
aqua/](http://lowercasecapital.com/2015/05/21/i-bleed-aqua/)

------
lukasm
> For most people, Twitter is too hard to use.

I don't know how to use twitter and I don't care. Why? Cognitive overhead. I
use facebook messenger, whatsapp, HN, stackoverflow, github, Linkedin.

------
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.

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rrggrr
"Tweet nearby" & "Encrypted tweet nearby" & "P2P Tweet": These three functions
would blow the lid off active user growth. Across the globe Twitter remains a
key means for promoting events, demonstrations and encouraging political
action. Give users the means to reach by locale (Concert), and securely by
locale (Flash mob), and P2P (Iran, Syria, China) -- and sit back and watch the
audience skyrocket.

~~~
aaron-lebo
Perhaps I'm misunderstanding your point on Iran, Syria, China, but you are
talking about subverting authoritarian governments, right?

Why wouldn't those same governments require Twitter to cut those off? I don't
see how a centralized service like Twitter can ever provide that.

~~~
themeek
You are right to point this out. The United States has tried many times to use
social media platforms to cause uprising in other nations. These very same
nations (including the ones enumerated above) _do_ cut off the services. Take
the US installation of ZunZuneo in Cuba and the governments crackdown on
personal phones in response - China's ban of Google for US influence and
foreign surveillance - Russia's machinations against Facebook for influencing
its audience - Kiev's ban of CSOs as Western organization through UNITER was
revealed - North Korea's hacking of SONY in response to its partnership with
the US State Department and CIA on The Interview - Israel's hatred over Jeremy
Bird's participation in "OneVoice" political campaigning over Twitter - etc,
etc.

Continuing to use US private companies as soft weapons will increasingly harm
the reputations and global standing of these corporations. The military-
industrial complex gig is up. Other nations know what's happening. It's merely
a matter of denying the company access to a population while making it look
not so bad from the PR side.

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marssaxman
Nothing in there about turning it into a decentralized open network instead of
a proprietary service, so I will continue not to care about Twitter.

~~~
themagician
We tried that. It didn't stick.

You have to remember that in the early days Twitter and a log of competition.
Jaiku, Pownce, Google Buzz, FriendFeed, etc.. Then you had the open source
versions: Laconi.ca, Status.net, Friendi.ca, GNU Social, Twister, etc..

Say what you will about Twitter, but it's the only thing that ever got
traction or had any sticking power.

~~~
brador
How did Twitter get traction and sticking power where the others failed? What
was it doing differently?

~~~
Torgo
I think it's because they iterated really fast on new features, and presumably
stayed with what was popular. Original Twitter isn't even all that close to
what Twitter is today. gnusocial is playing catchup featurewise, moves much
slower, and frankly the default theme is really ugly.

~~~
brador
How did they know what was popular? Which features did they iterate on?

~~~
Torgo
I assume they can see what uptake there is for features using analytics, but
what comes to mind are native retweets and subtweets. Those are relatively
new. They have also changed how blocking works multiple times based on
feedback.

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derekmasters
Perhaps he should have included this, "we stopped talking about arab spring
once we realized how it was a bad job that pushed people into depeer shit,
perhaps now is the time to lift the carpet again and start talking about how
we can build better tools that are powerful enough to put these fucked up
countries back together"

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joshyg
I think their time has passed. Social media is not like tv. With t.v., People
want good new shows, they don't care if they're from nbc or hbo or someone
new. With social media people actually want a new medium every few years. I
don't think there is any feature Twitter could add that will overcome this
fact.

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soheil
If I were still at Twitter I'd do anything to get Chris on the team.

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yueq
Don't pump. You might consider $WB stock which is way undervalued comparing to
$TWTR.

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antidaily
Exactly why everyone moved over to App.net, right? Right, guys??

