
Can Twitter Survive What is About to Happen to It? - nreece
http://www.twine.com/item/123c9051b-g8/can-twitter-survive-what-is-about-to-happen-to-it
======
old-gregg
Ughh... I wish there was a HN feature: custom filters, i.e. a regexp one could
use to filter out irrelevant (to him/her) news: twitter, facebook, .+ionaire -
all these would be in my filter: I'm an engineer and I'm not interested in
media/entertainment/advertisement business, yet sometimes they occupy well
over half of the front page. I assume this happens due to a widespread belief
that building a media company is how a programmer can "make it" these days.
Twitter, Walt Disney, Austin American Statesman or AutoTrader - there is no
difference and all of them are of no interest to a programmer: they're not
"high-tech" companies. Sure, they employ programmers and can't be run without
computers, but that applies to _every business in 2009_

Custom filtering would also allow me to see promising submissions to bubble up
to _my_ start page, taking the spots of killed media/hype/iphone/getrich-
with-3-lines-of-javascript stories.

I wanted to write such UI myself and just let it be - i.e. I'd crawl HN and
generate my own front page but I suspect Paul wouldn't be happy about it.

~~~
mixmax
_a widespread belief that building a media company is how a programmer can
"make it"_ \- I've noticed that too, and I think it's bollocks.

It's much smarter to go after a niche market where you can easily make
milliions instead of shooting for the one in a million chance that you'll make
the next facebook. Chances are you won't.

~~~
wallflower
I'd love to read a book styled along the lines of "The Millionaire Next Door".
Call it "The Entrepreneur in the Woodwork" - profiles/statistics on eBook
sellers, ISVs (especially niche business apps), niche site owners, niche
iPhone app studios, the mythical highly profitable subscription sites
(salsabootcamp.com is one), the gadget blogs that make mint from affiliate
links (coolest-gadgets.com), maybe even some non mainstream blogs. Cap the
success level though - no outliers - Leave out the JohnChow.com Adwords or
Dooce.com anomalies.

I think it might be hard to find these people to interview though. Domain
records and traffic stats and presence can be false starts.

------
tlrobinson
As they point out, number of followers is, unfortunately, a very poor metric.
Yesterday someone posted an article called "Top 237 Twitter Users Who Will
Follow You Back" (<http://socialnewswatch.com/top-twitter-users/>).

As an experiment, a sort of Twitter honeypot you could say, I followed every
single one of them on a fresh dummy account, using a simple Ruby script with
the Twitter gem.

Less than a day later I already have _more_ followers than the original 237 I
added. I haven't posted a single tweet, so no one has any valid reason to
follow me, except to try to gain more followers.

I suspect many of them will unfollow me shortly, after they realize I won't
follow them back. I'm saving all the "new follower" emails I get from Twitter,
and in another day or so I'll compare them to my remaining followers to see
who's guilty.

The vast majority of the unsolicited followers are people peddling some sort
of bullshit get-rich-quick MLM scheme.

~~~
raamdev
To help with the comparison, you can get emails when people unfollow you too:
<http://useqwitter.com/>

~~~
Zev
qwitter isn't very useful; It only seems to work sporadically for a few
minutes at a time. I know I've lost followers without getting a message from
it.

~~~
tlrobinson
I haven't gotten an email from Qwitter in months, so either no one has
unfollowed me (unlikely) or its totally broken.

------
forsaken
I replied to this on my blog:

<http://ericholscher.com/blog/2009/mar/15/twitter-spam/>

A basic outline of my arguments:

Hypertweeting/Notification Overload: Unfollow

Hashtag spam: Same as real spam problem, just need selective aggregators that
only follow certain people, or some sort of (bayesian?) filtering.

@reply spam: True, but could be solved by clients, and the rate limiting on
the api means that you have a low chance of being spammed this way. Plus it's
really easy to systematically catch.

------
krschultz
The next thing that is about to happen to it, is that Facebook ripped off its
model completely with the new front page and status updates. Although it
doesn't allow for a lot of means of tweeting, it is already happening - I
noticed several conversations today that spawned off status updates. None of
my group is on twitter, it will offer no compelling reason to switch now.

~~~
jackowayed
except that, for me at least, the new Facebook is filled with noise to an
extent that Twitter won't be for a long time.

I only follow people that I actually want to know about. But being a Facebook
friend, up until now, has been much more than seeing occasional newsfeed
updates. I've never said "I'll be friends with this person so I'll see their
stati," it's always, "I'll be friends so that they can invite me to parties
and write on my wall."

Over the last couple days, I've been frantically hiding newsfeed updates from
people that I don't care about.

Twitter has the advantage over Facebook in that really the only reason to
follow someone is to get their tweets. Soon, friending someone and hiding
their updates will be something I think of as one action on Facebook.

~~~
krschultz
I agree with frantically hiding newsfeed items, there must have been 20 people
I forgot were in my contacts that popped up into my newsfeed, I'm not a huge
fan of it - but it really undercuts Twitter.

------
wallflower
The non-spamming Twitter community might be able to handle the problem
collectively.

I think a 'Flag' API/feature that is similar to Craig's List would work. One
vote does not mark you a known spammer, but if many users flag you and your
tweets as spam, Twitter could throttle/disable your reply capabilities.

~~~
jackowayed
They already kind of do that, mostly targeted at spam-following (following
lots of people to get their attention for your spam). A large number of people
blocking the user and/or having a high following/follower ratio (following
many times as many people as follow you) get you looked at for spam.

But for now, neither spam @replies (which happen occasionally too) nor spam
#hashtags violate the TOS, I believe.

------
jacobscott
I would be more worried about the "it" that is facebook providing a better
experience for their core usecases.

From what I can tell, given the new Facebook UI, all Facebook needs to do to
implement twitter is:

* Streamline directed relationships (fan versus friend) for "follow" functionality

* Streamline status privacy settings (so that changing your status can be equivalent to a tweet)

* Write lite.facebook.com that looks just like twitter/jaiku/etc

In addition, it seems to me that Facebook has the following advantages over
twitter:

* Funding: 500mm versus 50mm

* Scale Facebook has many more users and engineers

* Platform/Apps Facebook has a rich platform, twitter doesn't

Thoughts?

~~~
wallflower
The biggest difference between Twitter and Facebook updates (at the moment) is
that your Facebook news feed is limited by who you have some connection to
(albeit possibly very tenuous). The beauty (and ugliness) of Twitter is that
it's interest or topic-based - you don't need a pre-existing connection to
start following or viewing someone's public tweets.

That being said, I will be sad if Twitter is subsumed by Google or Facebook.

EDIT: Technically easy but Facebook is a good walled-garden (privacy
controls). I don't know if they'll let some public weeds in just to compete
with Twitter. Twitter allowing Facebook users to auto-post an update to their
Twitter identity could work.

~~~
jacobscott
So Facebook makes it easier to post public news feed items, and then writes a
twitter-like UI on top of that data. There are obviously subtle usability
issues here, but technically it seems straightforward...

~~~
gnaritas
Neither Twitter nor Facebook are who they are for technical reasons; their
popularity was more about timing the market and being the right company at the
right time. Unlike say Google, who are on top for technical reasons and
dominated by being smarter, faster, and better.

Since their popularity isn't based upon their technology, beating them
requires a hell of a lot more than just duplicating their technology.

~~~
jacobscott
Twitter is still nascent compared to Facebook traffic-wise, and I bet that the
vast majority of twitter users are also facebook users. So, if Facebook gives
you the same functionality AND user experience, why maintain your twitter
account?

~~~
thamer
Facebook doesn't have the live search that makes Twitter so powerful. This is
a large part of the user experience for many.

------
danw
It's asymmetric. If someone irritating you, stop following. This is a non
issue.

------
ams1
how many times does it need to be said? there is no spam on twitter. you just
unfollow.
([http://www.randsinrepose.com/archives/2009/02/09/a_twitter_d...](http://www.randsinrepose.com/archives/2009/02/09/a_twitter_decision.html))

~~~
cperciva
Unfollow doesn't help with @reply and search/hashtag spam.

~~~
mechanical_fish
I can see how this might be a problem.

But before we dig into this problem, let us pause for a moment and reflect on
the age-old terrible plight of the tool developer. Twitter developed a tool
that could not be spammed. So the users went busily to work, layering a
spammable protocol on top of it. And now those users demand that someone
figure out how to keep the spam out of their spammable protocol. In the
meantime, Twitter gains a reputation as a system that's filled with spam.

Perhaps it is time for a corollary to Zawinski's Law of Software Envelopment:
"Every social application evolves until it fills up with spam. Those that
cannot be filled up with spam are replaced by those that can." Though I guess
Doctorow proposed this theory years ago when he wrote _All Complex Ecosystems
Have Parasites_ :

<http://craphound.com/complexecosystems.txt>

------
dschobel
Perhaps twitter should restrict its content to tweets about Erlang for a day
or so.

------
diN0bot
The twitter management apps make a big difference. It's like looking at email
without spam filters or automatic folders and say-- man! the signal will never
make it through! --yet most of us use email daily with no trouble.

------
cosmo7
Much as I love the tweets, Twitter's signal:noise ratio has always been very
close to zero, so I don't think spammers will be able to ruin it the way they
ruined Usenet.

------
dsims
Even if Twitter Search somehow becomes useless due to spam, Twitter itself
will continue to be useful.

