

What Twitter needs to add next - Uncle_Sam
http://mnmlist.com/what-twitter-needs-to-add-next

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benofsky
I completely agree, I think Twitter should focus on monetizing and improving
the web experience (because it kinda sucks right now and if more people use it
-> easier to monetize).

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becked
What's wrong with the web experience? I hear this all the time, but i like
it's simplicity ...

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ludistan
At the beginning you should have focused app, that does one thing very well,
10 times better than anyone else. Then (if that sticks) you should gradually
add features, but only if that makes user experience that much better. I've
seen a lot of great apps do that and win big time. I think Twitter has a lot
of problems with fail whale, so maybe they don't have the time (resources?) to
expand their core product.

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VMG
I might as well ask here: am I too stupid to use twitter? Whenever I visit it,
I see somebody responding to somebody else ("@otherguy yeah I totally agree")
- but I can't see the original post, which annoys me. Is this normal or am I
too stupid to use twitter?

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Psyonic
haha, I used to wonder exactly the same thing. I asked my friend who actually
uses Twitter, and he basically said, "You're doing it wrong." He said that
Twitter is all about the stream, and using it for historical conversations
like that is awkward and difficult. Which makes me question the point, but
there you go.

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joelanman
I use the Seesmic web and Android client, mainly because they do a great job
of showing conversations (click 'in reply to' in the meta message).

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jufemaiz
That does require that the comments are public (or that the author has granted
you access to view the comments if private).

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aditya42
Just because a service has a feature, doesn't mean a user _has_ to use it. At
its core, Twitter remains a 140-character-update service. (And no Leo Babauta,
Twitter will never go beyond 140 characters because of the SMS-length limit.)

And I fail to see what decentralising Twitter has to do with keeping it
simple.

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jonhohle
It's already possible to send tweets which would overflow an SMS. Twitter
limits tweets to 140 characters UTF-8 characters, which can be multibyte. SMS
is 140 8-bit chars.

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aditya42
Not if you're using SMS to send tweets, like some of us still do.

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knorby
I don't think removing the 140 character limit would be bad necessarily, as
long as only 140 characters are displayed by until a "view full tweet" option
is invoked. The problem is that people will complete a thought over multiple
tweets, so the stream becomes polluted.

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BenS
I disagree. Sure, Twitter needs to improve stability and speed. But I think
the location and annotations are exciting and it makes sense for them to learn
what works and adds value to the core experience.

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dpcan
No, they have value. The value is in the simplicity. They would be adding
"noise" if they keep this up.

Twitter just needs to leave their sh.. alone.

I think...personally... if they want to improve the experience, they should do
it through optional add-ons using their own API.

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philipkd
I would like to see this design-tweak, if not on Twitter, then on a 3rd-party
client: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1445955>

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BigZaphod
After I saw the headline I was all prepared to come here and say, "No what
they need to do is make what they have stable and scalable." It turns out
that's mostly what this little article says, too, despite the misleading
linkbait-ish headline. Sigh.

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benatkin
The linkbaitish headline is how the article makes its point. Between seeing
the link, clicking on it, and viewing the article, I guessed what the feature
was going to be, and guessed wrong. Without that mechanism, the article
wouldn't have affected me in the way it did.

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betty
Built in syncing of read tweets between all clients.

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sfphotoarts
Who uses twitter anymore? Nearly everyone I know prefers Facebook status
updates because you can comment on them and everyone's already running FB 24/7
anyway.

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kamidev
Well, I guess that really depends on who you know and how you use social
media.

Most of my Facebook "friends" really are personal friends or at least
acquaintances that I know for non-professional reasons. They are nice and
often interesting people and I enjoy staying in touch. But I won't do business
through FB and would consider it an incredible waste of time to follow status
updates 24/7.

On Twitter, I follow several loosely connected circles of people. Some I
consider friends, others I don't know and have never met. Shared professional
or cultural interests is common. Keeping an eye on my stream through a good
client gives me a narrow, personal and often useful heads-up about things that
interest me.

