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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.
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.
It's that mobile thingy where you sign up to be astroturfed by celebrities and big brands.
" 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'
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I don't know *why* twitter is.
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!
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.
Simply not true: I have some very fact-heavy exchanges with people who know what they are talking about, spiced with suitable links.
I find Twitter useful in the way that specialist parts of USENET used to be: people who know things sharing them concisely, without needing to have egos stroked.
I know that's not what everyone uses Twitter for, and the odd cat video *may* have snuck through my timeline, but...
Rgds
Damon
http://m.earth.org.uk/
If the way that Milo guy is portrayed in the article is in any way accurate, he doesn't appear to espouse any viewpoints at all. He just enjoys trolling, including trolling people into believing that what he writes are actually his viewpoints.
Of course Twitter may, like Facebook, help/hurt/hide/quash certain trending topics etc, but I don't think this person's case a particularly good example of how it's ruled by some kind of elite that does not like any dissent.
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Well for me and many others who don't really tweet anything ourselves, Twitter is effectively just a replacement for RSS. I follow a bunch of news and tech sites etc. and when they post an article, they tweet it, and I click to take a look. I rarely use it to see people's textual tweets/opinions ... it's basically just a feed of interesting URLs brought together into one list that I can browse and click if I want.
Why not just use RSS? No real reason ... this just seems to work well for me, particularly on mobile.
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.
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!