

Sh*t… Twitter is exciting… again - andreasklinger
http://klinger.io/post/16812835593/sh-t-twitter-is-exciting-again

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fingerprinter
Cannot agree, at all. Anecdotal evidence only, but I find myself using twitter
less and less. If anything, what I'm using it for these days is to follow
someone interesting (like a developer on a project I like, or, since I'm also
into Olympic lifting, those types of people) and see if they tweet anything.

So, I lurk and follow. Rarely do I engage anymore. And they are never
conversations since 1. twitter absolutely SUCKS as a communication platform
(can't see what people reply to a person, can't see what people say about a
subject...no way to aggregate the information etc) and 2. twitter still, to
this day, drops tweets.

#2 fathoms me. As an experiment I followed the exact same people from two
different twitter accounts. Using twitter.com for both, I had remarkably
different streams. This is just awful.

Even so it seems that most of Twitter is marketing these days. Spam upon spam
upon spam followers and replies. And most everyone is selling something and
tweeting about it. It gets very, very tiring.

Twitter isn't really interesting to me anymore. Not sure if it will be in the
future, but I don't see myself using it much in the near term.

~~~
MatthewPhillips
I agree. I was an addict 2 years ago, a frequest user a year ago, and now
rarely check my stream, and never post anything.

For me personally, I'm kind of over social networks entirely. I don't find
them interesting any more. I'm hoping to see a revival in personal home pages,
where you can share your thoughts in a place that you own and control. We just
need the mechanic that makes it dead simple for others to consume the content
(Wordpress is not it).

~~~
untog
_I'm hoping to see a revival in personal home pages, where you can share your
thoughts in a place that you own and control._

To an extent, I think Tumblr fills that role. I post photo albums (which it
handles well) and long text posts (which it doesn't) to my Tumblr, and people
can 'like' them, comment and so on. The concept of 'reblogging' doesn't fit in
with that though.

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FrankenTan
Possibly irrelevant, but adding my experience anyway:

It might be niche experience, but twitter is awesome for me. My swedish
twitter-bubble is boiling with discussions, humor and interesting links and
topics every day. Some politicians even keep an active presence and
respond\discuss in tweets when they can or even in blog-posts arguing their
point or explaining a difficult topic.

I don't know if it's an English quote originally, or if it's confined to
Swedish twitter, but there's a saying that goes "facebook makes you hate
people you know, twitter makes you love people you don't." which I find quite
apt.

There's a general positive attitude and a lot of people enjoy the every day
struggles and joys of others rather than the self-censorship or inane postings
often found on facebook. Admittedly, I'm sure that exists on twitter too, but
in my twitter-bubble it's rare.

Some brave companies use it to give\encourage support for complaining users
and to notify problems or errors rather than try to sell stuff. Even if few
manage to actually _inform_ rather than try to sell things.

Journalists sadly tend to mostly only follow journalists, and social media
experts follow social media experts, so their experience tend to be quite
different and closed off.

While I, and most others I follow (so I guess it's equally 'closed'!) follow
various people from various stratas of society, politicians, sick people,
journalists and even homeless people.

It's quite alive, active and enjoyed, but I suspect it's quite easy to find
relevant and amusing twitter-users when there's only a few thousand (Swedish
tweeps) of them and the interesting\fun\literate ones follow other
interesting\fun\literate ones.

[edit]It's also been described as "a competition in one-liners" and "a
collection of lovable narcissists", which I also find very accurate.[/edit]

~~~
lukejduncan
digression: I hate the term "social media expert/specialist"

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jentulman
The only thing I've discovered about the discover feature is that I care very
little for the things that the majority of people are tweeting about.

Not that I don't think it has promise. Once that feature is targeted more than
just geographically (I'm guessing it is from the content) and has some sort of
Googlesque awareness of my personal leanings then it might be extremely
useful.

For the moment though I couldn't give two hoots about what it appears to be
filled with, sports, celebrities or #banalMemeOfTheDay

~~~
andreasklinger
Completely agree.

But they can do a few steps to improve this a lot. As you said location (or
typical tweet keywords, or followings) to improve that.

They need to figure this out ;)

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cletus
This is such a puff piece that one has to wonder if it's not simply a PR
plant.

I've been saying for the last year or more that Twitter is doomed. I stand by
that prediction. Twitter was originally envisioned as a place for real-time
status updates. It became a place where, to a certain extent, news broke but
now? It seems to be a graveyard where people follow celebrities.

Not that there isn't necessarily a business model in following celebrities but
it seems like the difference between being Facebook and being Myspace.

Twitter is (IMHO) terrible at conversations. As others have mentioned, they're
disjointed.

This post raves about Twtitter's real time abilities and potential but:

1\. There is only real-time data to process while people use it and, honestly,
I don't see the incentive to produce it. Twtitter just seems to be another box
your brand management company checks on their social media checklist; and

2\. There's still no hint of a business model anywhere.

Honestly, the idea that Twitter will be "bigger than Google", even for a
narrow area like "real time", is laughable.

I see Twitter as another "bubble" company (like Quora). People in the Valley
think it's big because "everyone" (in the Valley) uses it but this gives a
_very_ distorted view. Twitter is more mainstream than Quora but I wouldn't be
surprised if Twitter's 7-day actives were _much_ lower than the ~175 million
accounts and stagnant, even _waning_.

~~~
nickik
Who cars what other people do? If you don't follow people that retweet stupid
celebrites its awesome. I get lots of intressting and funny tweets (or very
short conversations) about poltics and computer sience. Don't blame twitter if
you follow the wrong people.

Twitter is fine as it is for me, if the add other features they might be
useful or the might not be useful as long as the main service dosn't change I
don't really give a shit.

That said I dont belive that Twitter will ever be bigger then Google.

~~~
lambda
The problem is, even most interesting people to follow retweet random crap
about their personal life at times, and when they do tweet interesting
content, I sometimes want to have a conversation about it, which I can't do
there.

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Qz
I went to check the #discover tab on a lark. Absolutely nothing interested me.
I have 4700+ tweets to my username, you'd think that would be enough info to
show me one story about gaming perhaps (considering 99% of my tweets are about
gaming).

~~~
jgroome
Not sure what Discover is. Do you mean what you see at
<http://discover.twitter.com/>?

The following people are recommended as interesting to me: Snoop Dogg (haven't
listened to his records in years), Martha Stewart (have no real idea why I'd
want that), Serena Williams (her off of the tennis?), Juanes (who?), the San
Francisco Zoo (I'm in the UK...), Rachel Zoe (who?), Dana White (who?), etc...

There's a strong possibility that I'm hopelessly out of the loop. Either way,
my opinion of the Twitter service remains unchanged.

~~~
barrym
<https://twitter.com/#!/i/discover> is the Discover tab.

~~~
Angostura
'Sorry that page does not exist'

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jgroome
Maybe this is another one of those "new twitter" things.

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lukejduncan
Not everyone has access to the "new new " twitter yet. For whatever reason my
fiance doesn't have access to it with her account.

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jgroome
Damn twitter, you're confusing!

Just FYI, and this is probably inappropriate for here, but a woman you're
engaged to is your fiancée - a man you're engaged to is your fiancé.

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DarkShikari
Everything Twitter does, Tumblr seems to do better.

The main thing Twitter seems to be used for is retweeting amusing or
interesting tweets -- often from comedy accounts, like "madeupstats" or
"shitmydadsays". But Tumblr has way better content (in large part due to the
elimination of the 140-char limit) and can do pretty much the same thing.

I never used Twitter much, but now I follow at least half a dozen Tumblrs.
Some examples:

<http://catalogliving.net/>

<http://annalsofonlinedating.tumblr.com/>

<http://dumbdeviantart.tumblr.com/>

<http://animesos.tumblr.com/>

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monsterix
Looking at negative opinions here, and my own small understanding of the
subject, let me propose an alternate approach for Twitter to really become
exciting again:

And no it is not exciting as you've premised in the article.

Here is an over-the-edge idea though: Merge Twitter with Square. Think.
Probably Square will get a big consumer-face for its mobile payments company
where every user of Twitter is able to exchange/collect/sell/charge anyone
(friends) for petty purchases. And Twitter will get a business model.

Using a nicely integrated web-to-mobile-to-anything system, Twitter can
empower people to use their twitter accounts to not only converse, but also
share money with each other. Just like we do in college.

That's much more value than serving like a news hose. How does this sound to
you?

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andreasklinger
What you are basically saying is * Join Payment with an identity provider.

You can do this with Google or Facebook in the same way. Facebook is better
suited for that actually.

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monsterix
Except that here are two companies - one minting money but not consumerized
and another minting users but not monetized. :)

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brador
A very interesting read Andreas. Google's core is search, which real time is
not quite ready to cover yet, but it will eventually.

For Twitter, it's hot right now. You're right about that.

If they focused on core and social, they could overtake Facebook soon, then
Google in 5 years once real-time search tech becomes a reality. Everyone I
know who regularly uses Facebook also uses Twitter. Either service could
replace the other.

~~~
andreasklinger
I had exactly the same logic.

The interesting realisation for me - twitter doesn't need to beat facebook in
social or communication. That's not their game. And Google "just" enables
search and can improve via real time there. Twitter will put context to
content. Think the "New York Real Times" or Press Agencies.

~~~
brador
Agreed. But Twitter needs those page views from Facebook, that "time spent
online" to be on their side of the fence rather than Facebooks. Real time is
the next big thing.

But. Governments are cracking down. Real time, together with collaboration =
swift revolutions. These are bad for all leadership positions, whether
democraticly elected or not.

Real time will have a very large number of obstacles placed in its path by
these authorities. But it's the natural course of evolution, and will most
likely win out in the end.

An interesting few years ahead!

~~~
andreasklinger
Yea i was thinking to include this in the article. The crazy fact that the
best providers of real time filtering are actually people working

a) against spam or virus

or

b) filtering public opinions (like email filters)

