Saturday, February 13, 2016

A few words about Twitter

Twitter made a tons of headlines during the past week. The reason: The shrinking user count and the idea of changing the order of the tweets depending on relevance for the user.

It's an amount of 320 million users but if you compare with Facebook it looks like nothing. Especially when these numbers don't increase unlike other networks. It seems that the successful period of Twitter was a long time ago.

Controversial changes on it's way?

And now they're trying to apply new ideas which are changing the uniqueness of this network. First, they considered an idea of removing the restriction of 140 characters. In my view it's the reason I like Twitter in the first place: A few lines, maybe an additional link or media file and that's it. It makes it what it is. 

Second, the latest optional addition to use an alternate way of the timeline: 'Show me the best tweets first.' Even if it's only optional, people fear it could be a basic setting in the future and complained by using the hashtag #RIPTwitter. The Twitter boss reassured it won't be like that.

That's an even more important thing to remain the same - else it would be like Facebook. That's what Twitter is about: To see everything from the people you follow and in the chronological order! And
that's how it should be like. Even to see the less important tweets.

Other new features

Interestingly, Twitter has included other interesting features during the last year: The possiblity to not only favourite a tweet - also to 'like' a tweet with the icon of a heart. Some people love, some people hate this feature, but I think it's a good addition.

Also, they added the opportunity to start a poll. It's a good way to get some answers quickly (maybe something for WhatsApp in the future?!). And for someone who has a huge amount of followers - not a bad idea.

The future?

The future is a tough question. They don't think about solutions to make Twitter more attractive to users only because it's all fine. On the other hand I recently read an article that the problem of shrinking users doesn't count for every country: In Japan the Twitter user are even gradually increasing. Half of their social media activities are on the blue bird network.

But why? The reason could be the anonymity of the user accounts which is the exact opposite to Facebook. In other countries people got used to represent themselves with their full name in the internet. And some people even do that on Twitter...

They may need a trailblazing idea to remain in the future, but it shouldn't change the entire system.
Maybe other small steps help: Like adding a wished feature to be able to edit a tweet.

On the other hand we need to keep waiting - I mean it's not like 320 million users is nothing. And it's not like nobody uses it. It'll continue. Don't panic.

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