Thoughts on Twitter
Posted by knorby on March 3, 2009 under media, twitter | 
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Recently, I have noticed quickly accelerate its rise into the mainstream, which I have mostly found annoying. It is a simple idea; the main achievement of twitter is to gain a rather large user base and make and maintain a fair number of contracts for sms; too much credit is given to it. Here are my thoughts on it:
- The media needs to shut the hell up about it. Facebook too. I have seen/heard far too many stories where some reporter is just utterly fascinated by it (really, there is nothing there) or they just spout gibberish, highlighting their ignorance. Just shut up! This isn’t news. If you want to use it, use it. Otherwise don’t.
- Twitter is 140 characters so you can fit in both a username and message in an SMS message. There isn’t much difference between writing tweets and an SMS message. So shut up about it.
- Please, set up a twitter account if you have a business or are someone famous and awesome, but I care more about what my friends are saying than your tweets, so keep the traffic low. If you hired an intern to do nothing but tweet, they should focus on replies, or you will lose followers. Seriously.
- If you want to livetweet, get a separate account for it, for the reason I named above. Maybe your twitter client can filter, but most can’t, and it is just really annoying to have to go too far back in my friend’s timeline to see anything of worth.
- Don’t use twitters for polls, media. You get like 30 responses and publish the results anyway. That is a sure sign that no one cares. I haven’t seen these in anything worthwhile (the chicago red eye for example), so I guess I can’t be too surprised.
- Twitter seriously needs to get its shit together. I don’t understand why they are so content to get VC and make no attempts to make money, since it would be so simple to just put google ads up. I don’t think anyone would care.
- Spend some time on the damn website. I don’t think there is any twitter software now that doesn’t beat the website, which is just stupid. Even something like the twitter gadget (google widget, so you can use it in gmail) has plenty more features than the standard site now. Hash tags have been around for a while, but there isn’t any clear support for them, beyond the standard search. I don’t think twitter even bothers to convert links to tinyurl or similar services anymore, which should have always been better anyway. Filtering should be added in, etc… If twitter wanted to add in ads down the line, they would have a hard time getting people to use the web interface. When I started using it, the service was much more feature rich, and those have been removed over time (fucking fail whale). Just get your damn act together.
I might write up some more in the future.