Twitter, a 10-Year-Old Company, Is Still Explaining What Twitter Is (theverge.com) 106
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."
glad you asked (Score:5, Funny)
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Why didn't they call it "Cunter" then?
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Twatter works just as well
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Actually TWITter is just a place for all the TWITS to get together online!
I thought all the TWITS gathered at TWiT.tv [twit.tv].
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Twitter is a social seismograph:
It lets people know what's shakin'.
Seems mostly like a left wing echo chamber (Score:1, Insightful)
#freemilo
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heh yeah. Days are long gone when twitter presented itself plausibly as a "free speech platform".
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#freemilo
Or maybe not, since he appears to quite enjoy [medium.com] the current situation.
Disclaimer: I had never before even heard of this "Milo" (or of the author of that article, for that matter). But maybe that's because I'm not on Twitter.
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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.
Re: Seems mostly like a left wing echo chamber (Score:2)
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The main reason he enjoys it is that it gives him attention. And personally I find it hilarious that Twitter banned him.
Twitter has been pandering to SJWs in an attempt to simply keep them from causing a problem by doing what they can best: Throwing tantrums when they don't get their way.
Now they banned the person whose picture you find in the dictionary next to tantrum as a quick reference. Plus, he is pretty good at arguing his point, too.
People, get popcorn! This is going to be good!
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Oh, the article obviously very biassed, no question about it. But I like the fact that the author doesn't try to pretend she's not biased or writing in a "balanced" way. It makes it all the more believable to me. But again: it could also be completely made up for all I know, although she's dropping a lot of names of people that were present and specifics that should make it easy to debunk things in that case.
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Milo aside, the "left wing echo chamber" part is correct.
Why would twitter grow any more? Any leftist that wants to echo is already on it? The remainder of people who aren't, aren't leftists and therefore won't join.
Twitter needs to figure out how to use ads to make money with the existing user base. They going to get any bigger.
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You must spent quite some time on twitter, may I follow you?
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Modern day equivalent to "May I subscribe to your newsletter?" ;-)
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Re: Twitter is easy to define. (Score:2)
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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.
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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.
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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.
Twitter is easy to explain. (Score:3)
It's that mobile thingy where you sign up to be astroturfed by celebrities and big brands.
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Best humorous/cynical description.
As the saying goes. . . (Score:1)
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.
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Way back before twitter was hyped on TV, before it was big, it was being talked about in the RubyOnRails community, since it was a new site that used Rails. And so I saw it before the hype, though I didn't sign up. Actually, when I first saw it, you didn't even have to sign up, it was just some sort of unannounced beta. And it wasn't "microblogging" or whatever. Instead, it posed a simple question: What are you doing right now? And you were supposed to answer in less than n characters. And everybody was lik
Dubious (Score:3)
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I know *what* twitter is (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:I know *what* twitter is (Score:5, Insightful)
Why is because people like to be heard, even if no one is listening. Quite similar to Slashdot I think...
Twitter sockpuppetry (Score:2)
In fact, some people want to be heard so much that they create a dozen new accounts [slashdot.org].
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More practically, there are non-celebrities, like developers on particular projects, that use it to communicate the direction of the project/product they're on. I still don't have and don't want an account, but it's easy to see what the appeal is for a lot of people.
OK, I'll bite (Score:2)
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E.g. enables me to announce cancellation/rescheduling etc. of my consultation hours to my students. Simple, fast, ubiquitous publish-subscribe platform for short text messages. No need to keep contact list up-to-date anymore. Just works, on any platform. Globally - no problem if e.g. the link to my country is horribly slow (like during my last trip in my hotel). Works great!
That's all I use it for. Same with some of my students, who only created an account to follow my tweets. For that one tweet every coupl
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Yes, and they still would, except this is not just easier, but simply better. It is impossible to keep an up-to-date e-mail contact list of all students that might want to visit. Active subjects are easy, students under my supervision - more dynamic, but still possible. But these are not all students that might want to know! New candidates for my supervision, students of parallel groups in a subject whose teacher is unavailable for a few days, even non-students (e.g. coworkers with a short question) etc, et
Internet group text messaging plus (Score:2)
Slashdot signatures are even shorter (Score:2)
Case in point: If you can squeeze a thought into a Slashdot signature, you can squeeze one into a tweet.
The problem with twitter (Score:5, Informative)
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).
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Well, you could describe LHC to common Joes as well to the same effect. Just because laymen don't understand, it doesn't mean it isn't important.
If I was twitter, I'd convert the core product to entirely Wikipedia-style funding to avoid the almost certain collapse when deemed fiscally inflated. For firehoses, charge a good chunk of money for the 'raw feed', but allow anyone to use it as long as the data's being aggregated as per fair reproduction terms. Add speciality feeds that cost even more per message f
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Their problem is that their market is quite small
This is the key. There's nothing inherently bad about Twitter, it simply is not a mass medium and can never have more than a limited role. And the less the platform is used the more individual tweets have value.
Re: The problem with twitter (Score:2)
Circlejerking is, like it or not, the power core at the center of political discourse.
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If by "information" you mean rumors, then I mostly agree.
Gossip network (Score:2)
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.
Re:Gossip network (Score:5, Insightful)
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
Simple = Mass Communication (Score:2)
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 [slashdot.org]
--
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
Re:Simple = Mass Communication (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Twitter is a Mobile Social Network (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
"Touch" typing (Score:2)
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.
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I have one I use it to contact IOS app developers and so I can tweet stupid crap like "Dear google if anyone asks 52369, 71354 and 067-8080-00 are all the same hydro-gear tank for a bad boy lawn mower."
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It's useful as a glorified RSS feed and to get company's attention when you have an issue with them that needs addressing. For a lot of businesses (airlines, phone companies etc.), tweeting at them or DMing them your case ID seems to be the quickest way to get real action happening. Why that is I'm not sure, but the few times I've been caught in a circle trying to get some problem resolved with a company via phone or email, I've tweeted at them and very quickly I've got someone senior that knows what they a
Pretty simple (Score:2)
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.
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Twitter let's you send a text message to nobody in particular.
How is that any different from a blog, except that it's shorter?
Massive, public IRC. (Score:2)
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.
Live Chat Room (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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Sure - like IRC that millions of people are typing into at once with the ability to filter the chatroom down to topics you're interested in.
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Sure. I didn't mean "normal" to come off as derogatory... I just meant that by watching the stream you can get an idea of the general consensus of the population.
It's easy to explain what Twitter is. (Score:3)
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!
Never Have (Score:1)
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?
Hmmm (Score:1)
I remember thinking "WHY!" (Score:1)
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 f
Still explaining, not really (Score:1)
Re:Twitter (Score:4, Insightful)
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.