| Twitter, in its current state, is a platform for power users. Twitter is a field you put some stuff in, and that stuff displays to everyone who follows you. Disregarding scale, the premise is very, very simple. The difficulty stems from knowing who or what to follow. It takes a long time to figure out who you want to follow, and Twitter doesn't have enough information about you to solve the cold start problem. I love Twitter because I'm constantly pruning my feed (and lists), and it's pretty great. My mom joined Twitter, followed who Twitter recommended, got a bunch of generic PR accounts and celebrities, and doesn't use it anymore. Conversely, when she joined Facebook all of her friends and family started adding her. Her feed was now full of the people she loves (the value was already there), and she learned to become a fully participating user. That's why Facebook has 1.5B monthly active users (holy shit!). She figured out how to use Facebook because the value was already there. She doesn't use Twitter because it's not. It's really that simple. So Twitter goes public saying, "Look, there are all these people using Twitter already, we can fix this problem for people, then we'll grow way quickly!" They start curating for you, and it turns out it's not what you want, and no one cares. Wall Street is pissed that it's not growing quickly enough, and everyone starts freaking out. What we're seeing is the freakout. Everyone trying to figure out how to "fix" Twitter. Everybody coming up with solutions. But no one has figured out the fundamental problem behind Twitter: You have to put a lot of effort in before you get any value out. There are only so many people in the world willing to do that. It will still grow, but it may not be rocketship growth. If you're private that's OK, but if you're public and you're not growing quickly enough you're going to get a lot of shit. |
Sorry for the plug, but this is exactly how http://svven.com can help. New user tweets a couple of links - gets other people that tweeted same links - and also the other links they tweeted. How's this for a solution?