[icefox]

I wonder how many people bounce from the twitter signup page. Every combination of my name is already taken on twitter and every few months I would go to sign up, but can't find a name that isn't taken. The impression they give you is that the name is very important and you can only pick it once. I also barely ever use facebook, but as I can just use my email I signed up long ago.

[diego]

Does Twitter suggest an alternative username? Even if they do, the problem with Twitter growth is that nobody will follow a new user unless they know you in real life. I have the impression that for new users it's mostly s feed reader with ads and Foursquare checkins.

[mhurron]

> I have the impression that for new users it's mostly s feed reader with ads and Foursquare checkins

There's another way to use it? Seriously, I don't get how to use Twitter. If I follow someone, how do I comment on what they said? Does everyone see that? What exactly is Twitter trying to do? I have never 'got' it.

It's looks to me like an IM service crossed with RSS, except I can't figure out how to do any messaging.

(Not that this is really a problem, I have nothing to say and am not social, but it's irritating not understanding something.)

[jmathai]

The rules...

1. Every tweet on public profiles are ... public. Anyone can read them but not all your followers see all your tweets (more later).

2. If your tweet starts with an @mention (as in, the first character of the tweet) then only the user you @mention will see the tweet in their feed (as well as anyone else you @mention in the tweet). It does not display on your followers feeds. That is, unless, you both have mutual followers.

It's a hack and many people don't understand it.

[recursive]

This is exactly my experience with Twitter and I thought I was the only one.

[jeremyjh]

I'm so glad its not just me.

[codva]

When I joined Twitter back in the relatively early days of the service every tweet I did would generate replies and lead to conversations. I met some people locally and made new friends. That hasn't happened in about 3 years now. Unless you are a celebrity of some sort nobody but your real life friends will care about your updates these days. And they will also see the same info when you put it on Facebook. When something happens in the world Twitter is the first place I look for breaking news. But I'm quickly losing interest in creating content for Twitter because there is virtually no engagement.

[icefox]

The user name suggestion's were less than stellar. On the home page it looks like they append a random letter to your name as a suggestion. :\ This problem would be a perfect case for a genetic algorithm where the fitness function is the user. It could present a handful of options, but if you don't want one of them you could select one to be "similar" which would cause it to spawn off new names that you might like.

[ghurlman]

You can change it later, and it keeps all your followers following after the change. 3rd party apps are supposed to track you by ID and not name, but god only knows who really does what.