| I'm a power user and have been on Twitter since 2007. I used 3rd-party apps until they fucked them all. I'm now forced to use their glittery official app full of ads and suggestions and things I don't care about. I follow less than 50 people and use Twitter 24/7 literally. I never miss a tweet. > First, for normal users, Twitter feels too much like a one-way broadcast system. It needs to feel more like a community, with meaningful two-way interaction. Right now, a reply to Justin Bieber by a 16-year-old fangirl goes into the ether, never to be seen again. There is zero incentive in the product to interact with celebrities on Twitter, because no one will see the responses. Let's force Justin Bieber to sit down and read the thousands of replies he gets to each any of his tweets. Let's also make it so when I click on a Justin Bieber tweet, my browser downloads a webpage of 50MB with all the responses so I can read them all. > Second–and this one is obvious to almost everyone–Twitter needs to focus on realtime events. When I open Twitter during a major debate in the US, or when a bomb has exploded in Bangkok, there should be a huge fucking banner at the top that says “follow this breaking event.” No, please, please no, NOOO. Some of us are just simply not interested in real-time events and use Twitter to talk to our friends. If a bomb explodes in Bangkok, I simply don't care. If I did, I'd use the search engine. And by knowing Twitter, they would probably make the banner mandatory, or would make you dismiss it each time (along with a nice "Did you like this?"). > Third, Twitter has fucked up multimedia integration. Why the hell does adding a photo or video use up some of the 140 characters I want to use for my description? Why does it crop my photo? Why does it not show full-width images in the feed? Because Twitter is a text-only social network... Or at least that's what it was. > Fourth, let’s talk about third party payloads/integrations on Twitter. They have never felt native, and they are still–after three years–in a bizarrely dire state. Same response as before: I think media integrations should not be encouraged. > And that leads to me to the final thing I want to talk about, which is also the most important: Twitter has fucked up its platform. Twitter has turned into a place where famous people and news organizations broadcast text. That’s it. So don't follow them. Follow only humans with real feelings that are not using Twitter to earn themselves money. > The fact that automatic tweets from apps are considered rude is one of the biggest failings of Twitter’s product team–Twitter should be the place for apps to broadcast realtime information about someone. So you want to read automated tweets all day? Don't be silly, who wants to read "Johnny has favourited this vid on youtube!!" "Mike has uploaded this pic to Instagram!!" all day? You? No, nobody, that's why these integrations with automatic tweets are RUDE. If I want to know what you uploaded to Instagram I'd follow you there, jackass! There, I vented it. |