
Jack in a Box: Can Twitter Be Saved? - donohoe
http://www.newyorker.com/business/currency/jack-in-a-box-can-twitter-be-saved?intcid=mod-hn
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jph
Twitter could make a lot of people happy by re-opening the API access (e.g.
third party apps) and adding access control (e.g. teams and channels).

Twitter has so much untapped potential, a bit of which you can see in the new
Moments. For comparison, Facebook is doing a fantastic job IMHO at
highlighting stories, groups, events, and friends that I want to see.

~~~
lotso
> Twitter could make a lot of people happy by re-opening the API access (e.g.
> third party apps) and adding access control (e.g. teams and channels).

Wouldn't this have a huge impact on their ability to monetize the twitter
stream with ads and richer content? Of course this is developer friendly, but
does it help them make real money?

~~~
dasil003
Twitter has been _ruined_ by the tech bull market. Their valuation went too
high too fast, and now they are constrained by Wall Street's lack of
imagination and being measured by Facebook's chosen KPI.

Does a monthly active user of Facebook equal one on Twitter? Public
conversation happens on Twitter—it is where celebrities and intellectuals put
ideas into the public sphere. When you watch television news you constantly
see tweets mentioned, when have you ever once seen a Facebook post? Twitter is
like the Beat Generation, and Facebook is like a scrapbooking club. Even if
Facebook wanted to make themselves relevant for public discourse (which they
don't because Wall Street doesn't have a metric for that), it is incompatible
with their current rent-seeking post promotion model and feed tax.

Meanwhile, no one, even within Twitter, can quite define what it is. Wall
Street hates that, but what it really means is that there is still untapped
potential there. Last I checked Twitter was 1/5th the size of Facebook. It's a
bloody travesty that being 20% the size of the biggest social network ever is
not considered viable, especially when it has so much unexplored potential.

Twitter would have fared much better in a bear market where they managed
costs, and let the API flourish. Who knows what apps could have come out in
2015, 2020, 2025 if the fucking bankers hadn't gotten their mitts all up in
the oven before the baking was done.

~~~
rokhayakebe
_Meanwhile, no one, even within Twitter, can quite define what it is._

I must try: Twitter is RSS Feed. Twitter is a notification app for updates.

~~~
karmajunkie
Come on. If message brokers were conceived of today, the elevator pitch would
be "twitter for servers.".

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zensavona
I don't think Twitter is going to shut down anytime soon.

I do think though that they've overscaled (employee and spending wise) hugely
though.

Remember kids, cashflow.

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n0us
I've never been able to understand whether twitter is a service for me to talk
back and forth with other people or if I am supposed to just follow famous
people. I also wish there was a way to see "whats going on in the world right
now" that was more intuitive than trends where I feel as if you need pre-
existing inside knowledge to understand why something is trending. Moments is
perhaps a step in the right direction but I don't feel like it's exactly what
I'm looking for.

I would also be more inclined to use it if I could include a link without
having to shorten the URL, aka, let users include a link or photo without
counting against 140 characters and also don't make @mentions count against
the count. Or retweet titles for that matter. So it would be link + mentions +
retweet text + (insert your text here 140 characters or less) It's just too
difficult to say anything real and by the time I've messed around with
shortening sentences and deleting punctuation to make it fit I'm pissed off
and don't end up sending the tweet.

People have said all of these things before and they seem to have no interest
in changing so I don't know, it might be too late for me to take a real
interest in using Twitter seriously.

~~~
sparkzilla
The 140 characters forces concise communication. It suits people who like to
read and write witty one-liners and those who like to share URLs. It's fast to
read. Change the limit and you will also change the site's core appeal to
many.

~~~
n0us
I'm not saying change the 140 character limit. As it stands there is usually a
limit of 0 characters because by the time I fit a link, mentions, and a
retweet into a tweet I am over the limit. Make these things not count against
that limit and instead always allow for the user to input 140 characters of
_their own text_

~~~
sparkzilla
I agree with you. But it's likely they will extend the character limit to much
more, and that will change the nature of the service.

~~~
n0us
It might be interesting to see Twitter modify their core service on some
variation of what I posted, but also reopen their API and serve as a backbone
for real time messaging applications that other developers can use either at
the cost of money, or allowing Twitter to populate their feed with ads and
subsequently share part of the profit with the app maker.

I see a lot of potential for what Twitter has in their hand but the fact that
that potential has not been utilized already makes me wonder if it will ever
be used/if there is some kind of organizational disfunction going on that is
preventing them from acting nimbly. Things like twitter polls and moments seem
like bandaids to cover a slashed artery. They're designed to restore faith in
the company so they don't get destroyed by timid investors but they don't add
any real value to the company as I see it.

Periscope is a step in the right direction also and I think that it adds some
real value but I am left wondering why they didn't just acquire Meerkat.
Still, either one is an early stage risky bet that isn't going to save Twitter
within the next year or two which is what I think they will need. It's
essentially a one product company.

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outofcuriosity
"...there have been multiple other apps that required me to use my Facebook
credentials to log in. Facebook, it seems, is now core to the mobile Web
experience."

Most social networks provide very little that a blog and an email address
don't, and for that modicum we pay with our privacy. Personally, I don't think
the convenience of OAuth is worth what the networks earn from selling my data.
I wonder what'll happen to their market share when smartphone OS developers
start including authentication layers in their kernels.

~~~
mmanfrin

      Most social networks provide very little that a blog and an email address don't
    

Except, of course, the core reason social networks _are_ : the baked-in
audience of all your friends and family who are pushed all of your updates.

------
danielrakh
"I like it, too, but, boy, does it need some rethinking—the visual dissonance
between Moments and the Twitter Stream is deeply unsettling."

I agree. That's exactly what I aimed to remedy with my redesign:
[https://medium.com/@danielrakh/redesigning-twitter-
moments-f...](https://medium.com/@danielrakh/redesigning-twitter-
moments-f71658bbde68)

~~~
smacktoward
_> 2\. Twitter Moments is trying to be everything but Twitter._

This is true, and I think it speaks to a deeper problem: nobody at Twitter
really seems to understand exactly _why_ the core product was successful, so
they're afraid to evolve it out of fear that they'll somehow break the magic
spell. When ancillary products like Moments are developed, though, the
designers and developers feel freer to be bold, because there's no spell there
to break. So when those products get bolted on to the side of the main
product, they feel exactly like that -- bolted on.

Facebook has been much more fearless about changing their core product as
their userbase has grown and changed -- remember when the News Feed was a
controversial new thing? -- and as a result they can give their products a
unified feeling that Twitter can't.

~~~
brk
_nobody at Twitter really has a feel for exactly why the core product was
successful_

My 2 cents...

When twitter launched, Facebook was still closed to the general public,
personal "blogs" were popular but somewhat out of reach of the general public
(setup complexity), and a lot of people realized that while they had things to
say, those things weren't enough to fill a blog.

Twitter allowed people to converse publicly, put micro-blog style opinions
out, and do it without needing to register any domains or customize a page
(MySpace).

IMO, twitter primarily filled a time-sensitive gap that has now mostly been
overtaken by aspects of Facebook, Linkedin, etc. Much of Twitter is kind of
paparazzi-like, and if a company came along that _really_ leveraged the
celebrity and sports icon base Twitter would fade away to a bunch of "SEO and
Marketing Experts" all tweeting pre-scheduled thinly-veiled promos at each
other.

~~~
danielrakh
That might have been the spark that lit the fire but I believe that people who
are NOT celebrities that tweet actively, do it to reach a broader audience and
engage in conversation with others in their vertical. This is in stark
contrast to the network you would have in Facebook which is much more
intimate.

Twitter is the internets water-cooler conversation. Facebook is the
conversation you have at home with your family and friends.

------
throwitupbirdie
You know how people claim Bin Laden won the war on terror by making us give up
civil liberties and get into multiple useless wars that cost trillions of
dollars?

Facebook won the war on Twitter by making ludicrously large offers through
proxy bidders on all of the well-established twitter clients. Twitter reacted
by squelching third-party clients.

Twitter has never known how to innovate, but they used to be open enough to
let "the crowd" do that for them. Now?

~~~
dewitt
> _Facebook won the war on Twitter by making ludicrously large offers through
> proxy bidders on all of the well-established twitter clients._

Citation needed.

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hugh4
Sure. Livejournal is still going strong somewhere, after all.

Most people will eventually move on to the next thing, though, and the thing
after that. Live by the network effect, die by the network effect.

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TazeTSchnitzel
Twitter isn't developer-friendly? Hmm, perhaps not to client developers.

But the wide variety of (non-spam) Twitter bots suggests they are quite
friendly.

~~~
smacktoward
Twitter has no problems with developers who want to _write data into_ their
system. It's developers who want to _read data out of it_ they needed to kill,
because the only way to make an ad-based model work was to ensure that only
they could determine where people see content from Twitter.

In other words, they turned it into a Roach Motel: data checks in, but it
doesn't check out. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jKhGHxO-
woc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jKhGHxO-woc)

~~~
TazeTSchnitzel
Ah yes, I'm familiar with that. Not sure why it didn't come to mind when I was
thinking about it.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lrfhf1Gv4Tw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lrfhf1Gv4Tw)

------
lalos
could Twitter theoretically be a public benefit corporation? I would argue
that they provide enough value to society yet they are having issues with
pressure from the market

~~~
riffic
Twitter is not a public utility and you're mistaken if you believe a
centralized service should function as one. I'd rather see a distributed model
like SMTP, where organizations would run their own twitter-like service.

