Twitter is my go to source for news and stories that interest me. Great links if you follow great writers. I use it a lot and like it. Hope the new filters move down the peripheral chatter ( except when I want peripheral chatter). Thanks Twitter @twitter .
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From the standpoint of a rational, functional and productive society, the best outcome would be for Twitter to abandon the business model of selling access to its addicted user base to advertisers. Instead: charge users by the second, or by "tweet," at rates somewhat below those of the old regulated long distance phone call.
Twitter would then be used only by people who really have the need, time and/or money for it. Everyone else would be liberated from it. Twitter itself would shrink to a much more socially productive fraction of its former size, and many if not most of its senior executives could then try to find more socially useful work elsewhere, despite their experience making them most qualified for dope-pushing.
Of course, some head on-line dealers and their on-line addict clients will object to this modest proposal.
Twitter would then be used only by people who really have the need, time and/or money for it. Everyone else would be liberated from it. Twitter itself would shrink to a much more socially productive fraction of its former size, and many if not most of its senior executives could then try to find more socially useful work elsewhere, despite their experience making them most qualified for dope-pushing.
Of course, some head on-line dealers and their on-line addict clients will object to this modest proposal.
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As one of the earliest users of twitter, I've seen lots of changes through the years. We old users will adapt. This week I helped someone create an account for the first time, and that experience leads me to believe twitter HQ might be on the wrong track wrt on boarding new users. They should remove all the cruft (trends, suggested users, etc.) because this very attempt to onboard actually confuses new users. "I don't want to follow Taylor Swift" cried my newbie friend.
One final thought: why not launch a 2nd service where they could start fresh without all the baggage that old timers carry with them? Everyone does not have to be thrown into the same tweetverse. Keep the main service as is but offer different "versions" of the service for newbies and such. Remember Jaiku?
One final thought: why not launch a 2nd service where they could start fresh without all the baggage that old timers carry with them? Everyone does not have to be thrown into the same tweetverse. Keep the main service as is but offer different "versions" of the service for newbies and such. Remember Jaiku?
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"“This is really about helping all these people get caught up,” Mr. Seibert said.
All these busy people have time to look at Twitter? LOL
All these busy people have time to look at Twitter? LOL
For many, looking at Twitter is part of a job; serious users curate their lists to follow industry news. Your comment suggests that you still think Twitter is about millions of people tweeting about what they had for breakfast.
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If you limit the people and organizations you follow to a reasonable number Twitter is a very valuable resource. The links, not the 140 characters, are the asset. I probably use it five or six times a week. I find a lot of useful information on it. I hope Dorsey can find a way to keep it going without too many changes.
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Twitter, Facebook, and the like don't need filters so much as they need to be filtered out by anyone seriously interested in purveying or receiving any useful information. Before their advent, the dissemination of information was limited by the expense of getting it out there, either in newspapers or broadcast media or billboards. Now anyone who wants to say anything without taking time to cool down can get the attention of a television news program in the moment by wittingly tweeting an ungrammatical piece of nastiness. I appreciate social media's utility to allow people to communicate personally or even coalesce when ruled by dictatorships, but I could not care less about anything Donald Trump. Barack Obama, or Kim Kardashian need to express to people whose attention span is no greater than 140 characters.
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It is too bad Twitter does not understand nor listen their own user base. If you remove all the bots, porn, and "brand" accounts you can actually find some interesting people to follow. Longer term users know how to use Twitter and get the most out of it. That is what Twitter should concentrate on, turning users into longtimers. All these changes to grow to get new accounts for people who are not going to stick around only clog the system.
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I'm desperately rooting for Twitter, which has been for years now a key way for me to get news & opinion. I just hope that by chasing the billions of people that don't use Twitter, they don't antagonise the 300 million of us who use it, and end up with nothing. Can you grow Twitter without killing it? Tough task ahead
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Twitter drove me off. They constantly bombard you with prompts to follow people like the kardashians. Nuff said.
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I think what Twitter really needs now is to be a private company so that it can end its preoccupation with growth. Not everyone company benefits from trying to be as enormous as possible. Twitter spent over $200 million last quarter on sales and marketing. It's hard for me to believe a company like Twitter should be spending that much over the course of just three months in order to grow.
This seems like an example where going public, partly in order to let venture capital backers start to realize their returns, hasn't helped the company in the longer run.
This seems like an example where going public, partly in order to let venture capital backers start to realize their returns, hasn't helped the company in the longer run.
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I really like Twitter. It's easy to use and I have direct access to great and interesting people and their ideas. For me, Facebook is for fluff and Twitter more for substance. I doubt the changes will affect how I use it.
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Twitter solved a few problems that allowed it to become so important in our culture. Twitter had an easy user interface for hosting and posting compared with blogs. And almost instant searches through all the posts, unlike the difficulty of using RSS to search through blogs, plus RSS generally opaque to average users (try reading raw RSS, yikes). Note that Summize.com allowing instant searches of hashtags meant that Twitter could be an immediate open roundtable for anyone to join in--much better than any instant messenger system.
The problem is that as long as social media is a bunch of stove pipe solutions where hosting, posting, identifiers/handles are centralized, there is an uneasy method of consuming information. Email is basically the only decentralized system of communication, and Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, etc are all competing to keep people from leaving by holding their identity for that posting or communication. And then there is almost no way to follow everything within Twitter and other venues are better at other avenues of communication so people migrate to them.
Not sure what the answer is to help Twitter. But I hope they realize that by opening up identity and working for a better standard for communication (XMPP and SIP are ones that were at least open, and the new HTML5 WebRTC may help). What Twitter can do is allow hashtags to become universal across all communication channels and continue to be the best instant aggregator of text content.
The problem is that as long as social media is a bunch of stove pipe solutions where hosting, posting, identifiers/handles are centralized, there is an uneasy method of consuming information. Email is basically the only decentralized system of communication, and Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, etc are all competing to keep people from leaving by holding their identity for that posting or communication. And then there is almost no way to follow everything within Twitter and other venues are better at other avenues of communication so people migrate to them.
Not sure what the answer is to help Twitter. But I hope they realize that by opening up identity and working for a better standard for communication (XMPP and SIP are ones that were at least open, and the new HTML5 WebRTC may help). What Twitter can do is allow hashtags to become universal across all communication channels and continue to be the best instant aggregator of text content.
Since when is a bunch of people's opinions considered "information"? It's like calling the static on the radio "news", simply because it's heard on the radio.
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I don't see why the Times and other media cover Twitter so much. It's not that large a company. It's user base is far less than its major rivals. I realize that it's fun to watch something crack up like some aging child star, but couldn't you find more interesting stories?
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....the stock is in "play"...
Interesting? What's that anyway? Too much of everything has turned it all so boring. All these new medias have fallen victim to their presumed initial successes and are proving themselves pointless with regard to anything people really want or need. My mom used to call such things passing fads.
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I'm always baffled by these 'it's not interesting' comments under a story. Why are you even reading this? So you can comment that it's not interesting? If you can't see that the rise, stagnation, and possible fall of a company that revolutionised the way news circulates is interesting, fine, go read something else then.
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So Twitter now becomes Facebook. Someone or some computer in their office deciding what will and will not appear on your feed. This will not help them retain subscribers or attract new advertisers. I just deleted FB from my phone, just this week. You wouldn't believe how much faster my phone is now. The lag when I use a search engine is gone as well.
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