Slashdot Mirror
How To Fix Twitter
An anonymous reader writes: Dustin Curtis succinctly breaks down Twitter's biggest problems, and how they can be fixed. Some of the problems are technological — they way they've decided to handle multimedia objects is arbitrary and annoying, and their inclusion of third-party modules is inconsistent and behind the times. Other problems are more central to what Twitter is about: "[F]or normal users, Twitter feels too much like a one-way broadcast system. ... Twitter responses are difficult to read on the website–with that weird accordion expansion UI that only shows 5 responses and makes it impossible to follow a coherent conversation."
The biggest problem is in Twitter's utility for browsing real-time information, which should be its strength: "When I open Twitter during a major debate in the U.S., or when a bomb has exploded in Bangkok, there should be a huge f@$%&#g banner at the top that says 'follow this breaking event.' It shouldn't just search for a hashtag–it should use intelligent algorithms to show me all of the relevant content about that event.
The biggest problem is in Twitter's utility for browsing real-time information, which should be its strength: "When I open Twitter during a major debate in the U.S., or when a bomb has exploded in Bangkok, there should be a huge f@$%&#g banner at the top that says 'follow this breaking event.' It shouldn't just search for a hashtag–it should use intelligent algorithms to show me all of the relevant content about that event.
The more productive change to twitter would be to change their terms of service to allow free scraping of data without restriction or shaping, and to allow third party clients to present the data in any form they choose rather than a twitter-like experience as mandated by the terms of service.
The biggest problem with Twitter is censorship.
This one's been frustrating me a lot: I apparently cannot search my own TL or my own tweets for that nugget of info / chart / URL that I need again.
Maybe we deserve this world ?
A couple of years ago, I was involved in the recruitment of somebody for a high-profile and politically sensitive job. Twitter was the number-one means by which candidates managed to exclude themselves. Bear in mind we're talking here about late-career professionals with, at the least, six-figure salaries, not about teenagers.
The nature of the job meant that anybody who had demonstrated poor judgement in public communications could be considered for it (the press would have torn them to shreds). Surprise, surprise, almost everybody who had used twitter had demonstrated (very) poor judgement at some point, usually on multiple occasions and sometimes over a span of several years.
The rapid-fire nature of twitter and the tight character limit encourage flamebait, knee-jerk responses and escalating incivility. It is the ultimate career-limitation tool and nobody who aspires to be regarded as "serious" should have a personal twitter account.
A friend's wife works as a recruitment consultant and tells similar stories; countless people whose angry twitter exchanges, viewable by the general public and posted with their real name, have created such an impression of poor judgement that employers don't want to touch them.