Dick Costolo is out at Twitter. I thought it would have been sooner. But here we are.
Like a thousand other commentators, let me start this Jeremiad about things that Twitter might do going forward with this proviso: I’ve used Twitter a long time, and use it every day. But my experience with the tool does not mean that I haven’t wished for more. I do. I have. In fact I have written dozens of posts about things that Twitter might do. I won’t link to them here, although you can find them easily. Let me just recap a few of the things I believe Twitter might do at this point to make the tool more usable:
- Drop the 140 character limitation everywhere, not just in Direct Messages – Why be limited based on old-timey SMS restrictions? The restriction is not a benefit, it’s a pain in the ass. Don’t give me that old saw that limitations liberate, like haiku. Bullshit.
- Start treating hashtags as first-class metadata, and take them out of the text – Note that Tumblr and hundreds of other tools support tags, but they don’t keep them in text fields with your content. Twitter has yanked out RT, @, URLs, and other microsyntax, and they should do so with hashtags. Yes, and that means we can retire the hash sign, too.
- Start curating topics implied by hashtags and other phrases – I don’t want to see every single tweet about ‘Saw Jurassic World’ or #jurassicworld, I’d like to see the most interesting and informative dozen.
- Create a ‘Twitter for Work’ product – DMs alone are not enough. People use Twitter to share about breaking events, things they are reading, watching, or doing, and that goes on in business just as much as in our public lives.
I’m sure we’ll be reading more about advertising and media in Twitter’s future – like Chris Sacca’s magnum opus, What Twitter Can Be – but I will remain selfishly focused on personal user experience.
A few additional thoughts about Twitter’s foundational design principles:
- Reverse chronological – RC may be only one of a set of interesting ways to see the tweetstream. What about social network analysis, so that tweets from my closest friends are more prominent (perhaps displayed in a larger font?), and perhaps those would move down the stream more slowly?
- Better display of conversations – still has a long way to go, and if Twitter is beefing up DMs, it will be competing with other messaging apps, not its own history.
- The fact that I use Flipboard to view my incoming stream instead of the torrent on Twitter says a lot. A combination of human and ‘bot curation is absolutely essential.
That last point – curation – brings up the largest toe stub in Twitter history: the closing down of the ecosystem. When Twitter decided to tell third parties that they were no longer welcome, and that Twitter was going to do everything immediately adjacent to the core Twitter functionality, that meant Twitter had become a tool, and was no longer a platform. Perhaps a new far-sighted CEO will come along, Nadella-style, and break with that orthodoxy, and make Twitter a platform again.
We’ll see.
from Stowe Boyd http://stoweboyd.com/post/121343725647
