Could Twitter have done a worse job of corrupting the fundamentals of their service in the name of selling more crappy 140 character ads?
19 Responses to “New New Twitter”
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Sooooo…..I like the new design. And I want twitter around forever. If they need to sell ad space to do it, more power to them.
The design I like. The functionality I don’t. It makes less sense.
I liked the ‘new’ design - the one that’s been new for the past what month I guess?
But today I logged in and it’s all different again … and I hate it! And nobody is talking about it, what gives?
Yes, they could have done much, much worse - popups, selling your info to advertisers so they can DM you, automated tweets when someone you follow “likes” a brand, tweets that appear to be from people you know promoting brands, etc.
Of the top 20 sites on the web (at least by Alexa’s estimation), Twitter (#9) has the least obtrusive advertising and seems more interested in providing a useful service than sucking up your personal information to flog it to the highest bidder - to the point I actually worry about their long-term survival.
They’re actually kind of screwed as they’ve produced an incredibly useful service that’s proving difficult to shoehorn advertising into, as opposed to most other providers who seem to build with advertisers in mind first and users dead last.
Advertising is just one revenue stream for Twitter. They’ve always been thinking of how to monetize the service beyond traditional ads.
Twitter licenses their database of tweets to monitoring companies. They also create a profile based on your bio, tweets and who you follow for ad targeting.
It’s one social media ad service or another…
I beg to differ. I personally quite like the changes. And they have to make money somehow. They are giving us the tool for free after all.
It’s not so bad on Twitter.com. The mobile and Tweetdeck experiences are for asshats though.
I love it on Iphone4.
Tweetdeck doesn’t seem to have changed a lot. Has it?
So true; it could have been waaaaay worse.
They could have eliminated the @ and # all together.
Do you guys think Twitter is actually useful? It seems rather useless to me. I’d love to hear your thoughts.
Regards,
Shane Bellone
I would hope you have an opinion on this, seeing as your URL is socialmedia-llc.com
I was a Twitter skeptic until I signed up at a conference as it was being used as a back-channel for participants and seemed to be where half of the interesting conversations were being had.
After that I found myself going to it for breaking news, as you often get eye-witness reports a few hours before the rest of the media can release a story - eg. the bin Laden raid was documented before it started with a guy in Abbottabad who tweeted “Can’t sleep, some kind of helicopter outside…”.
It’s just a stream of data, to be manipulated and filtered in any way you want. Some people find that useful, others don’t.
Asking if Twitter is useful is like asking if the web is useful - the content is the important bit.
I like this design. Probably the best so far. Also, it’s their…not thier.. (in reference to your last sentence)
Spelling is for chumps.
Jay,
Youtube and Flickr both provide core services in addition to a secondary social functionality. This fosters deep, meaningful interaction between people who share common interests.
Facebook is built around user interaction which is stimulated by seamlessly integrated platforms.
The aforementioned sites all have a core function making them unique and useful.
On the other hand; Twitter’s main function is to constantly bombard people with useless, 140 character “tweets”. Without a secondary focus Twitter is reminiscent of an insanely antisocial invention we dubbed the beeper.
Regards,
Shane
Saying the information on Twitter is useless is like saying your comment is useless. You take the information for what it is. You receive updates front he people you think are relevant or interesting.
You’re over thinking it way too much.
At least their is not enough space for correcting others’ spelling mistakes, and too much turnover to bother fishing for a response by feigning a false (and flimsy) opinion.
While it is rather annoying that the big social networks keep changing, like Youtube, FB and Twitter, I like that they’re constantly thinking of new ideas in order to grow with the demand. While some of those ideas flop, a lot of other ideas are a huge success, so at least they’re trying.