

How Twitter Could Lose The Game By Design - andrewbaron
http://dembot.com/post/182271103/how-twitter-could-lose-the-game-by-design

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olefoo
I have a theory that one of the things that makes twitter appealing to many
people is it's ephemeral nature. Seen this way it's historical flakiness is
actually one of the the things that makes it popular. Whether valid or not,
there is a sense in which twitter seems to be a good venue for casual social
messages that aren't going to be archived and potentially used against you at
some later date. Whereas facebook (again validly or not) sends a message that
this is the repository of your accomplishments, and that it will be your
permanent record.

The thing is that as human beings we need both fireproof digital libraries
that can keep our memories safe, and the electronic equivalent of the floating
world where the record of what was said evaporates with the morning dew.

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novum
I don't think it's quite accurate to call Twitter ephemeral, though. All kinds
of third-party services are trying to index and archive as many tweets as
possible, plus there's always the possibility that Twitter will cut a more
formal deal with Google (or any other search engine).

Plus, there have been numerous documented instances where deleted tweets can
still be found by Twitter's own search engine.

In short, the old rule of thumb still applies: if you don't want it archived
and indexed and preserved forever, don't put it online in the first place.

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thwarted
It's the _perception_ of ephemeral, through the UI and the way twitter
presents "real-time" (most recent first, difficult to scroll through older
stuff, less than stellar search (at least compared to other services)).

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caa09hh
I know exactly what the writer means by that problem. The first page is really
useful to search for new tweets on a topic, but once you login to use what you
found, you can't revisit the original home page without logging out.

I find that to be really annoying, especially when I want to tweet about
multiple topics that I want to search for first.

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tolmasky
I've run into that twitter logo thing on summize.com (search.twitter.com) so
many times. Every single time I'm there like a fool I click on the twitter
logo, I never learn.

As a side note though, if you really want this article to be taken seriously
(especially by people at twitter), I would rename it. I'm sure they see a
million "why twitter will fail" style posts every day, so the honest points of
your article doesn't shine through.

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Tichy
That article would have benefited greatly from the N-list approach.

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andrewbaron
Too many too list :)

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calcnerd256
_I have used Twitter daily for years_

No, you haven't.

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ryanwaggoner
Twitter launched in early 2006, so I'm not sure how I see how this is
impossible...

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calcnerd256
Sorry about that. I really should check my facts before being snarky. For some
reason I thought twitter was only a year or so old. Maybe that's when it
really took off or something.

