Well articles have been going around talking about Twitter’s future, fueled by financial results , but I guess the more worrying thing is the number of active users, between stable number or declining number , the elephant is in the room as it seems.
A once giant like Yahoo after years of stumbling, shaking and disarray I think has reached tipping point and is literally about to collapse whether a self imposed collapse it will be or externally forced , does not matter, the reality is the sun is about to set on Yahoo marking an end . Is Twitter heading possibly to the same future ?
Been thinking about this for a while, and trying to figure out what could be wrong , first thing came to my mind is to try and understand or rather define what Twitter stands for, most importantly what it stands for me as a user , in no particular order I came up with the following :
- Informative in a short but sweet manner
- Right next to me, no complication to post or read
- Its casual, I can follow and un-follow no strings attached
- Its close to real time, I can find news there instantly before any other place
- Its always on, I can literally find something to read or engage in anytime of the day and night
- Multiple media mediums presented in a non-complicated manner.
Did you notice something? Its not a place where I learn about goods or services through ads! That’s the core issue…the way the timeline is built and the flow of your experience as you browse your timeline on twitter does not really give you a chance to stop and look at the ads. Yes they are there, yes we all noticed there are ads on our timelines, but the interaction is what actually counts and pays the bills for Twitter.
This actually might answer part of the story with relation to revenue from ads, is it the correct medium etc, but does not actually answer the staggered or declining number of users . So what’s with that ?
Possibly Twitter folks have many explanations on this that accurately describe the issue, cause and probably they have come up with a plan to counter this, but from a user stand point what makes people more eager to get on Facebook than on Twitter?
To start with I think that is the main problem, Twitter is a micro-blogging platform , while Facebook is a community totally different , this is a failed comparison to start with. So if we stick to the fact that Twitter is a micro-blogging platform which it is , what should I be able to do with it that I can not do today and this is where Twitter should focus to get more users on it , so here are some I thought off :
- I would like to tweet about topics at different times, but still be able to correlate them into a proper homogenous story (blog) later on. I am not talking hash tags here, but rather category, topic, story, call it whatever . The only way you do that right now is to use hash tags, which does not help the purpose of making it unique to you OR threading the tweets, but yet again your thoughts about the topic might not all come at the same time.
- Twitter needs to exploit the fact about it becoming a main source of news for many people by further enhancing the platform to be more helpful to news creators and consumers, an option would be allowing a “group” or “page” type setting for news sources where it’s a more expanded timeline, that both gives more bursts of 140 character pieces of news , but also allows a more expanded advertisement space
- Closed twitter groups , suitable for use by project groups , sport teams etc.. where they can communicate in 140 character bursts around their common topic or update about certain progress . Again the interface should allow better tracking , more expanded space for ads.
- Twitter for corporate ? possibly but that needs more thinking J
In summary , if I was a new twitter user I would need a reason to join other than it being a hype , I need to get something back, which I believe is missing at the moment specially that the hype is gone ..
