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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.
I thought Twitter's biggest problem was vitriol.
CAPTCHA: alarmed
It would be great to see it gone. Who knows, journalists might resort to doing actual investigation once again instead of simply regurgitating what shows up on their twitter machine
You have to admit, it's a very efficient way for people to ruin their lives.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
An even better fix would be to decouple Twitter the protocol from Twitter the company. Just like nobody owns e-mail, nobody should own Twitter the protocol. (I realize that it's not in Twitter-the-company's interest to do this.)
If you reply, do so only to what I explicitly wrote. If I didn't write it, don't assume or infer it.
Works great for keeping up on news headlines as well. It's like a modernized RSS reader.
You can sort of use it like RSS.
What I don't understand is the 'modernized' bit ...
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.
And the very first poor judgement was getting a Twitter account in the first place. For all the reasons you noted.
This is really something that ends up killing a service. It's th tragedy of the commons.
An example was how usenet was destroyed. As a couple examples, A couple newsgroups I paid attention to were an antenna newsgroup, and an amateur radio policy group.
The antenna group at one time had a number of world class designers who were happy to share their knowledge with the rest of us. But the kooks moved in, people with miracle antenna and fringy physics, and ill manners to boot.
Well, on the internet, a world renowned expert is on equal footing with someone who designs dummy load antennas based on physics only a perpetual motion advocate could love, and doesn't hesitate to go nuts if challenged.
So the usefull people go away, and the crazy dude wins. for aweek or two.
The policy group was taken over by some kooks from West Virginia whith sever psycho sexual problems. Now no content, and since pissing off people who were there for a valid purpose was part of the fun, the kooks end up leaving.
Its just how those things evolve.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.