Slashdot Mirror
Twitter, a 10-Year-Old Company, Is Still Explaining What Twitter Is (theverge.com)
Twitter investors have long expressed their concerns about the rate at which Twitter is growing. The social networking website has seen platforms such as Instagram and Snapchat born into existence and quickly overtake it in terms of user base and engagement level. One of the reasons why Twitter hasn't grown as rapidly is because of a confusion among many -- including what we can say, Twitter itself -- about what exactly is this platform for. The Verge reports: Twitter came into our lives in 2006, and after a decade of existence, most people still have no idea what Twitter even is. Ninety percent of respondents to a Twitter-organized questionnaire say they recognize the brand, but most "didn't know or simply misunderstood" what it was for. Most people also thought having an account meant they had to tweet every day. As Twitter said in a blog post about these findings: "We realized we had some explaining and clarifying to do!" Over the years, Twitter has changed the way it acknowledges itself before people. It was once known as a social networking website, but not long ago the company marketed itself as a "news" service. Vanity Fair adds: The campaign, which launches today, is all about what's happening -- what's trending, what games are going on, what news events are breaking, what are people talking about, live, right now. A video at the center of the campaign cycles through footage of Black Lives Matters protests, athletes competing in the Olympics and a woman playing Pokemon Go, Lin-Manuel Miranda on stage at Hamilton, and Donald Trump stumping at a campaign rally. "We see it as a focus and an emphasis on what Twitter has always been about," Leslie Berland, Twitter's chief marketing officer, told The Hive. "We can see what's happening as it's happening, with all the live commentary that makes Twitter so special."
Twitter was inspired by the realization that nobody has any good ideas, so we might as well get all the bad ideas out of the way faster.
'nough said
#freemilo
I donno, they seem to have gotten the news-media hooked on it, they will repeat whatever any C-lister or above says on shows like Entertainment Tonight, and if it catches enough attention there then it ends up making the actual news.
From a publicity point of view it's golden, doesn't cost anything and can increase exposure.
Why people care is what I don't quite get, but I've never really entirely understood why some things become popular anyway.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Twitter is just another extension of the DNC controlled media. No need for complicated explanations.
Trump investors have long expressed their concerns about the rate at which Trump is growing. The trump networking website has seen platforms such as Instatrump and Snaptrump born into existence and quickly overtake it in terms of user base and engagement level. One of the reasons why Trump hasn't grown as rapidly is because of a confusion among many -- including what we can say, Trump itself -- about what exactly is this platform for.
The Verge reports:
Trump came into our lives in 2006, and after a decade of existence, most people still have no idea what Trump even is. Ninety percent of respondents to a Trump-organized questionnaire say they recognize the brand, but most "didn't know or simply misunderstood" what it was for. Most people also thought having an account meant they had to tweet every day. As Trump said in a blog post about these findings: "We realized we had some explaining and clarifying to do!"
Over the years, Trump has changed the way it acknowledges itself before people. It was once known as a social networking website, but not long ago the company marketed itself as a "news" service.
Vanity Fair adds:
The campaign, which launches today, is all about what's happening -- what's trumping, what games are going on, what news events are breaking, what are people talking about, live, right now. A video at the center of the campaign cycles through footage of Black Trump Matters protests, athletes competing in the Olympics and a woman playing Poketrump Go, Lin-Manuel Miranda on stage at Hamilton, and Donald Twitter trumping at a campaign rally. "We see it as a focus and an emphasis on what Trump has always been about," Leslie Bertrump, Trump's chief marketing officer, told The Hive. "We can see what's happening as it's happening, with all the live commentary that makes Trump so special."
Most people also thought having an account meant they had to tweet every day.
This isn't a problem with Twitter, this is a problem with "most people." Most people are fucking stupid. Think of how dumb the average person is, and then understand that statistically, half of them are even dumber than that.
It's that mobile thingy where you sign up to be astroturfed by celebrities and big brands.
With the dubious bonus that they get sent to a lot of people at the same time.
It's no use to anyone who didn't already need RSS to distribute updates, but its much more convenient for users since it centralizes all of that traffic in one place and doesn't require a wacky email client add-in to access.
If you have to explain a joke, there is no joke.
The same here. If you have to explain what Twitter is, there is nothing there.
Investors might (finally) be waking up to this reality.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
" One of the reasons why Twitter hasn't grown as rapidly is because of a confusion among many" is a very dubious statement. While I don't doubt many are confused, it is the confusion of indifference not the confusion of 'I really want to use it but I am too confused'
This posting is provided 'AS IS' without warranty of any kind, implied or otherwise.
It's where people go who can't wait to be villified, ostracized, and have their entire life ruined for expressing a single simple thought.
I don't know *why* twitter is.
Just what the fuck does Twitter do beyond enable dumb-asses to post 140 character "comments" about every bubbly fart emanating from some "celebrity"?
It's a communications platform for people with the ability to be concise (or the inability to come up with a response longer than 144 characters long).
"Murphy was an optimist" - O'Toole's commentary on Murphy's Law
Its a massively disruptive company that is only relevant for few to actually interact with. Their problem is that their market is quite small, but their importance is so high.
What is Twitter? A news / information filter bubble generator which rapidly bubbles discrete information into relevance quite quickly using the network effect as well as social bonds. This is essentially what Google news and anything on Facebook is desperately trying to do algorithmically by scanning through how people interact with the incoming information. I'd personally say they are failing badly in producing relevant content in themselves.
Twitter gets it for free. Why can't most people 'get' twitter? One, as described above, its a information dissemination engine. Most people can't know or even care about being a part of the information, so they're almost entirely consumers. The consumers of twitter then take relevant information already rung through the twitter world to refine them into a narrative for their already captive audience. The audience doesn't care which hashtag that's trending or why (largely), but rather information relating to their already established interests, like stories that make political candidate X look like an idiot, or a crook, or paid shill, etc.. So the tip of the filter bubble are those sites / tv / etc.. extracting from the engine to disseminate further.
So why don't these taste makers / king makers use other platforms? I suppose its largely about being established as 'the' place to disseminate information. It helps immensely that Twitter doesn't fuck around with curation and 'hot' lists nearly as much as the others. For better or worse, when people talk about Twitter, its 'a platform' aka infrastructure (a very valuable one), whereas the other services are 'services' to consume at least from a broad audience perspective.
There's no confusion in Twitter in terms of what they're good at. They know what their platform is good for. They just can't find a way to sell the platform to the outside world, because they have no interest in being involved in the narrative (which is probably for the best anyway).
Bye!
That's all it can be, given their 140 character limit.
It's people talking without any attempt to prove assertions. So it's Gossip.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
You must spent quite some time on twitter, may I follow you?
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
What's the issue?
Instead of following someone's blog, or RSS feed, or other social media site, you can listen to someone's textual sound bite and suddenly it is "news." (*)
/sarcasm Because obviously what the Kartrashian's have to say about politics / religion / sex provides such an eloquent and insightful commentary on today's problems. Oh wait ...
(*) Except in China
--
FazeBook, noun, a webspace with extremely low S:N due to where (almost) everyone posts their dumb shit that no one really gives a fuck about -- except you can't downvote the stupid stuff. Also known as Fadbook, Fagbook, Farcebook, Farcusbook, Fartbook, Fecesbook, Fetidbook, Foolbook, FracasBook, Fuckbook.
just another site that allows me to post on OTHER sites using Twitter's login.
Twitter is a Mobile Social Network. But it's design was for 2006, not 2016, and this is the problem. Twitter was designed to be a communications platform before smart phones. The entire platform was designed around sending/receiving text messages, and having a simple, clean, and fast web based front-end for accessing these text messages. Connectivity has expanded. Device capability has expanded. Multimedia capabilities have expanded as well. But twitter is still living in the past, in the era of simple text messages.
Also, another killer to Twitter is their web front end is now the most bloated piece of shit on the face of the earth. If I leave a twitter tab open for any length of time (sometimes even just a few minutes), the background JavaScript processing is so horrendous, that the tab literally stops responding, and requires closing it and re-opening the tab (refreshing the page isn't enough to fix the issue). This entirely kills the idea of letting twitter stay open in the background in a pinned tab for casually checking updates.
But I rarely use it because I'm not fucking 12.
Everything else is secondary.
The company loses millions and millions of dollars per quarter.
Employees are paid San Francisco wages and receive lavish perks.
Management dilutes owners by issuing additional shares as compensation. Look at the growth of outstanding shares: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=twitter+shares+outstanding
So who the hell would want to own this business? Employees and management feed at the trough and owners are left with shares whose intrinsic value continues to decline. You have to be dumb or naive to think Twitter represents a sound investment, given these facts.
In that way, Twitter is like the company formally known as Yahoo: any capital redeployed into the business is value-destructive to shareholders. There's no business there. And if there *is*, it's buried under a mountain of value-destructive bullshit.
No second tech bubble? LOL. Bring on the collapse; I want to back up the truck and buy shares of real businesses at discounted prices.
Twitter let's you send a text message to nobody in particular.
You just send it to a website, where it sits for anyone who cares to read it.
This signature is false.
I think this /. thread will have much more relevance afterwards.
People seem to send messages to multiple channels (Indicated by the # sign) and just type what ever enters their mind.
And like an IRC channel with thousands of users at the same time, the discussion is about as good.
Look at how many hashtags have filled with hate: It's a platform for the progressive ("my way is better") personality to preach without punishment, thus turning them into a libertine ("I'll do what I like") personality.
Twitter wants to keep defining what it is and how it's users should use it, do this is building in the platform's failure.
In fact, some people want to be heard so much that they create a dozen new accounts.
Case in point: If you can squeeze a thought into a Slashdot signature, you can squeeze one into a tweet.
Modern day equivalent to "May I subscribe to your newsletter?" ;-)
Device capability has expanded.
Capability to enter text on a 5" touch screen hasn't expanded much. With phone makers abandoning physical QWERTY keyboards, it's hard to type anything longer than 140 characters accurately.
eh.. it's an internet text pager, basically.
I rarely use Twitter... but when I do it's because there is something going on *right now* and I want to gauge what the "normal" person thinks about it.
Most often: it's something I'm watching live on TV. Be it a baseball game, football game, news broadcast, etc.
You can see the instantaneous response of thousands of people to events...
You don't get that with any other service out there.
You're thinking of tumblr. Twitter makes it much easier to encounter people with different viewpoints. It's basically an arena where SJW garbage and Nazis with shitty anime avatars eternally bite each others' filthy dicks for everyone else's amusement.
"testicles the size of blueberries and a cock the shape of a little acorn" - I didn't know Donald Trump posted on slashdot..
I don't know why there is any confusion. Twitter is a platform that allows users of early 2000-era mobile phones to submit brief, 140-character messages via SMS and for others to subscribe to and see those messages.
Twitter was already way behind technologically when it launched, and now is just a joke. SMS is dead. The notion of these arbitrary character limitations make no sense in 2016. I hope more than anything to see Twitter go bankrupt very soon. The fact that so-called "journalists" treat Twitter as an actual source of news is downright shameful. Our technology has advanced so far beyond this that there is absolutely no excuse for it in this day and age.
Good bye Twitter, and good riddance!
It's the digital equivalent of "having a go" at someone by talking in a raised voice while being afraid to look directly in their direction. Eg Well I never... Some people have never heard of queues have they Millie?
I'm kidding, I don't actually know the answer.
hipster beards, undefined sexuality, testicles the size of blueberries and a cock the shape of a little acorn,
I'll bet you don't have a hairy enough back to be a real man. Move on sissy-boy.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Ahaha.
My back is quite hairy but I have blonde hair so the effect is lost.
I've never "tweeted" except through my stereo speakers, and often wondered what am I missing, but never cared enough to investigate. What can Twitter give me that I'm not already getting elsewhere?
And just a comment on the verbage. Maybe it's me, but Tweeting sounds a bit too metro-sexual for my liking. Additionally, I've never been a follower, why would anyone want to follow the trivial postings of anyone? Are there significant things we're missing?
Just another day in Paradise
My back is quite hairy but I have blonde hair so the effect is lost.
Then you're not manly enough to deserve the title.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
What about this one?
So WTF Twitter is
Over a decade ago; I got talked into beta testing a new social media phenomenon.
Ok, first I objected to having to load ANOTHER' client on my computer to test out this "twitter" thing. The first iterations really were a memory hog of a TSR program. And, why do you want to know what everyone on your contact list tweets regardless of subject? Yep, the first iterations hadn't included hashtags yet. With the 252 character limit on tweets the first beta had; the system was worthless for carrying on a conversation and everyone on your contacts was inundated with your conversation and only one sided if they weren't subscribed to both parties.
The current climate of Twitter seems to be the way to comment via smartphone... often snidely. I flip through my twitter feed every once in a while when bored. Occasionally I run across a topic that actually deserves some research.
NRRPT/RCT
Are you suggesting that blonde people cannot be manly? That's both sexist and racist. You should be on Twitter.
Are you suggesting that blonde people cannot be manly?
If you're blonde then yes.
That's both sexist
WTF?
and racist.
There are non blonde people of all races.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Investors my not be able understand why growth would stall, but the the sheer number of existing users makes it clear people understand what it is. It isn't growing exponentially because everyone who gives a shit already has it. The one thing I value that Twitter does well is offer a communication channel that is a little unique. I've had a TV show read a Tweet on air live 5 seconds after I sent it. There isn't another platform that would have that kind of immediacy in interaction. The value of Twitter comes from the social construct around it, not the technology platform.