Twitter lost a decent chunk of its ecosystem and its users when imposing ridiculous API limits for 3rd party clients and killing them off.
Also, they arbitrarily told Instagram to fuck off by only banning their image embeds, which pissed off even more users.
Now I'm just praying that their new "while you have been away" crap doesn't get default (or if it does, make it opt out). I'm fairly capable of reading an entire day worth of backlog (though, again, provided it is not more than 800 tweets, once again a pointless API limit).
Getting new users all right, do whatever the fuck you want, but do not drive away even more of the most hardcore users unless you want to have a Twitter filled with brainless 12y kids and #cut4bieber/#cut4dagibee and similar junk.
> "We wanted to make sure we direct users to where the content lives originally, so they get the full Instagram experience," Instagram CEO Kevin System said, "It's just about where do you go to interact with that image? We want that to be on Instagram.com because it has a better user experience currently."
> Now I'm just praying that their new "while you have been away" crap doesn't get default (or if it does, make it opt out).
This is actually the first thing they've added that really bothers me. Not the feature itself (I'm sure this is incredibly useful for many people), but that there's no way to disable it for people (like you and me) that don't find it the least bit helpful.
Most people (I think) follow very many accounts (many of which are quite "noisy") and probably miss most of the tweets of those they follow - but I don't follow many accounts (and only a handful that tweet more than say a few times a day) so whenever I open Twitter (several times a day) I scroll down to where I left off and read up.
Funny enough, this is a recent feature that I value significantly. I've fallen behind on culling my following list, so I frequently see things in the "while you have been away" list that I value but which I would have otherwise missed. I hope it never replaces the strictly chronological feed, but as long as it's there and clearly marked, I'm quite happy.
I follow a few (and definitely have rules about quality over quantity), but I kind of actually don't care about anything on Twitter that happened more than a few hours ago. I have always seen the inability to keep up with the stream as a "feature" of sorts. Twitter has let me connect with people who have made things I've truly loved, and I think that is in no small part because it's about living and responding in the moment, not being strictly a completionary consumer.
Twitter has actually recently started placing notifications on my phone's lockscreen containing partial text of tweets from people that I don't even follow.
APIs are great when you want to drive numbers to your business, but at the end of the day, if you want to generate revenue, you either charge for API access or you closely control your ecosystem.
Unfettered Twitter API access would be analogous to Best Buy allowing third party vendors to sell refurbished electronic products in front of their properties..
> brainless 12y kids and #cut4bieber/#cut4dagibee and similar junk.
That's a growing abyss of demographic, not shrinking. There will always be lots and lots of twee teen, shitty bots, and corporate slurry. #titterWillBeFine
Much as I respect Thompson's insights (his Stratechery newsletter is worth subscribing to), I think that he's off base with this analysis. Moments seems to be one of those products that media-watchers like, but that actual users don't really care for. I wrote a post on the reasons why I think Moments will fail (or at least not contribute meaningfully to user acquisition) [1], the main points being that Twitter users are not interested in curation, they are interested in sharing real-time information; and the tweet format is not good for curation -- it's designed for real-time information, not for the past. Curation implies context, and there's little context in 140 characters. In defending Moments others have said it's like Circa. The only problem with that argument is that Circa failed. Twitter needs to concentrate on product extensions that work with the real-time nature of the content.
I agree. Curation isn't going to be that interesting to a large portion of users, I think. At least, it's not interesting to me.
It might be more interesting if users are permitted to create and share their own curation "playlists" with others.
Thompson's comments towards the end about how they should fix conversations and embedding are spot-on, though. I don't know why they didn't fix these things many years ago.
I'm somewhere between a power user and a newbie and I can't get even slightly interested in moments. Just not even close to what I'm looking for on Twitter.
It isn't just Moments, Twitter is failing on a lot of fronts.
* Spam bots that are way obviously spam still make it through, and some days constitute the majority of my new followers. (These are not subtle spam bots, but rather accounts that come in groups of 4 or 5 all using the same strange URL shortener.)
* Moments seems to be what was previously codenamed "Lightning" if that's the case, I'm super disappointed. Not even close to the "game-changer" I had heard about.
* The direct message limit was raised, thankfully, but honestly a little late. I've actually had DMs like "Hey let's switch to GChat" because it was just to communicate and use their site for more than anything tiny.
* People in this thread are already talking about stale content on Moments. The last few times I've logged into Vine, it still highlights the VMAs—which happened in August.
* I used to be OK with the Ads in my Twitter feed, but they've gotten to be too often and too out of touch
Put another way, Paul Graham once mentioned that a mark of something great was when you can't imagine the world without it anymore. The example he gave was with HelloFax. If Twitter went away tomorrow, I'd say, "meh," and move on.
On the day Moments was released, I followed the "Moment" of the Astros-Royals Wild Card (baseball) game. I loved it - it pulled relevant tweets into my timeline and let me follow the game with people doing the same thing around the world. When the game was over, those tweets (and users) were gone from my feed. It was perfect.
Then, the next night, I wanted to do the same thing for the Cubs-Pirates Wild Card (baseball) game, only it was never a "live" moment on Twitter.
Right now, the Blue Jays are playing the Rangers in a "win or go home" situation, but again it's not even a live event for me to follow.
I love Moments from a product perspective, but I can't help but think this was rushed out too soon - right now, there are only two "live" moments. And because it's been rushed out, I can't help but think it's going to cause the same problem Twitter has been trying to fix - that users are going to try it, not get it, and never come back.
Moments should be about _live_ content. It seems focused on things that were a moment earlier in the day or week.
I knew Moments was doomed when I opened it for the first time and the top card was Astros beat Yankees. I don't think I've ever tweeted about sports, why on earth would you show me this?
I'm not sure I get why "Moments" are any different than putting a hashtag into the search box and hitting "Live". The only difference I can tell is there are a bunch of auto-looping 3 second video thumbnails when I view "Moments" on Twitter.com
So for me, it's another swing and miss. I'm in the Android beta so I get early access to new stuff and the past 2-3 new features haven't interested me at all: the "While you were away" just gets in my way as I try to scroll, the weird lockscreen "Highlights" tweets are poorly done and unwanted.
The only new thing I've liked is that one twitter account that you follow and it DMs you when a bunch of people you follow all share a tweet or follow a new account; that is actually okay and feels like I'm being summoned to check something out that I'll actually care about.
So far "Moments" has only served to remind me how much I miss the "Discover" section. That at least tended to serve up some interesting stuff. "Monents" is filled with nothing but the sort of generic stories I don't really need to see a bunch of tweets about.
I'm sceptical about Moments, but maybe if they start tailoring it per-user it could work.
What I would like to see is a relaxation of the 140-character limit and the addition of threaded replies. This would make it actually reasonable to have discussions on Twitter and would surely greatly increase engagement.
Another useful change would be the addition of tweet categories for each account. For instance, I might be interested in someone's tweets about science, but not like or care about their tweets on sport or politics. If users could categorize their tweets, other users could choose which category or categories of tweets they want to follow. This would not only be good for followers but also good for tweeters, since tweeters would no longer need to worry about alienating followers by posting many tweets that most of their followers aren't interested in.
> That diminished stock price undoes rather nicely the golden handcuffs that are vesting stock grants, [when VCs are] circling Twitter looking to poach the employees most capable of turning Twitter around
There are widespread well publicized rumors from the press that Twitter will be announcing layoffs[0]. That can't help with keeping people around that they'll need. I actually was scheduled to interview at Twitter a few years ago and cancelled when I got another job instead. I'm kind of glad now. :O
I'm not the biggest fan of Moments from a product perspective. It feels too much like Facebook Paper; while I'm sure there are people who want to use their social networks as a general news aggregation feed, I'm not one of them.
Still, it does give me faith that Twitter is focusing more on the "What matters?" side of their product, rather than the "What's happening?" side -- a dichotomy brought up by Thompson two years ago in a post worth reading as a companion piece to this one:
>As far as I can tell, the primary reason none of this has been implemented is that no one at Twitter has had the authority to tamper with the sacred 140-character limit
This is a very perceptive comment and reminds me of Steve Huffman recently making the kind of changes at Reddit that only a founder would have the guts to do.
I don't have facebook; too many social pressures & awkwardness with friends/family would occur if I did. Twitter is the place to be for me. I've always liked it and I like moments. But, in general, I like knowing what people are up to outside of the tech-world. I find moments, especially the videos, to be really good and drawing me into whatever is happening. I've also heavily used Twitter's Periscope app to follow HedKandi's Ocean Beach Ibiza event this past summer and it was great.
I think Twitter's services are fantastic, it's just too bad nobody has figured out the profitability angle. I mean, clearly twitter is providing something a lot of people like and use daily. Now, just how do you get money from them, directly or indirectly? =/ I dunno, but I really hope someone solves that puzzle.
i think it's funny seeing analyses of twitter that act like the problem is that the product needs tuning. the problem is they need to make money, and as-is there's basically not much good reason to pay them for advertising over facebook, who offer much better targeting.
I agree with Ben Thompson's previous sentiment about Twitter although I take it perhaps slightly further than he would which in my own words is this:
At one point years ago, perhaps for the first time in history, a single company (Twitter) had the opportunity for it's privately owned HTTP API to become a ubiquitous defacto Internet Protocol for a particular type of global communication (the notification message) potentially replacing email. (tweet + privmsg could have threatened email)
If they would have stepped into this integrative role, by keeping the API access open and available as a building block for third party developers then I think this may be precipitated quite naturally.
Just as a small example of what I mean by procotol.. the entire "Internet of things" could likely be running on top of Twitter with the twitter @name serving as the defacto way for your refrigerator to claim it's unique global identity and to route messages to your toaster.
In addition to kitchen appliances Twitter could largely be serving as the messaging backbone for hundreds of the most popular apps and games if it had opted to embrace the Open Web. Sure serving as a messaging backbone for the whole world would have put additional burden on their server infrastructure, and it would have allowed third parties to monetize tweets, but it also widens Twitter's on-boarding funnel dramatically because it locks myriad diverse products, games, and services into their API.
More importantly I think Twitter would have become the defacto Internet Protocol for both notifications and Identity / Reputation. It would have meant that new systems wouldn't have been able to afford to not integrate with Twitter which contrasts greatly with today's situation where none of them can integrate with because of the onerous legal restrictions outlined in the terms.
Instead Twitter chose to lock down their API and focus instead on monetizing what traffic they had already captured. They turned it into an content discovery portal when it could have been a content discovery portal *and* the defacto Internet architecture primitive powering diverse social communities and integrated into just about every network-enabled device on Earth. After all even the TV news networks were embracing both the @name and the #hashtag. But then the executives at Twitter somehow decided to dig a moat around the platform, and then a swamp, and then fill it with alligators I mean lawyers, and now in 2015 Twitter has of all things a growth problem.
I believe that the true hidden potential of the platform lies in Twitter's potential role as the world's ubiquitous identity and reputation broker.. In other words the @name was more valuable than the tweet.
I think that if somehow the iron fist is relaxed so that the tweets flow open and free then the world at large would learn to embrace the @name as their preferred way to establish digital identity & reputation in place of the fragmented email+linkedin+website that people use today.
I believe that in order to achieve this Twitter should optimize for SCALE rather than revenue. Restrictive terms are massive friction for scale because they dramatically limit the number of vectors through which any individual can discover the product and engage with it.
Also, they arbitrarily told Instagram to fuck off by only banning their image embeds, which pissed off even more users.
Now I'm just praying that their new "while you have been away" crap doesn't get default (or if it does, make it opt out). I'm fairly capable of reading an entire day worth of backlog (though, again, provided it is not more than 800 tweets, once again a pointless API limit).
Getting new users all right, do whatever the fuck you want, but do not drive away even more of the most hardcore users unless you want to have a Twitter filled with brainless 12y kids and #cut4bieber/#cut4dagibee and similar junk.