[BonsaiDen]

Most of my friends actually use it as a async, direct and realtime communications channel, pretty much like Whatsapp, just with more "social integration" (read: the whole internet).

They don't use Facebook because its algorithmic "timeline" isn't realtime in any sense of the word and they consider themselves more than capable enough to decide on their own what's worth their time or not, they don't want to be fed things / advertisments somebody else wants them to see.

They'll probably all switch to the next best thing available once Twitter's rumoured algorithmic timeline is to be introduced.

Personally, I left the whole Twittersphere way back when the alienated their third party devs, for me that was more than enough indication of the way they were heading. Nowadays they have nobody left who could actually come up with the Next Big Thing (tm) for Twitter, because all of their engineers are mostlikely busy trying to figure out how to commercialize the platform in the shortest amount of time in order to satisfy their shareholders.

[varjag]

> ..they don't want to be fed things / advertisments somebody else wants them to see.

Good that they use AdBlock then, cause Twitter puts ads in your feed.

[BonsaiDen]

Yes, they use AdBlock, but there's still a difference here, right now they're seeing the tweets of their peers in-order, with ads intermixed - which makes the ads trivial to filter out (bad for twitter, good for my friends).

In the future they might see whatever Twitter thinks is important to them, which might still be ads, but in the form of other peoples / companies tweets which just "happen" to end up in their "timelines".

Now, of course they can start blocking just about every company/user they don't care / like on twitter, but the effort might not be worth the gains at some point. And who knows, maybe you won't event be able to block some things from their algorithmic timeline, because that might defeat their monetization goals.

And yes, I realize that I might be reading a lot into Twitter's actions at the moment, but given how they treated their platform in the past year(s), all I'm seeing is that they want monetize it at all costs.

[interpol_p]

Not in most third party clients (e.g., Tweetbot for OS X). I've hardly used the web site for Twitter and don't really like it. I can't imagine the service without a good native client.