Twitter is doing 5 things horribly

This is just a rant on how I would want to use twitter more but I keep getting roadblocked. The final straw was trying to message someone on twitter after his e-mail address bounced and then finding DMs aren’t possible because of celebrities.

1. Search is awful #

A. Can’t search on a non-desktop device #

There are people like me who prefer using twitter within their mobile browser. It’s just faster to do everything in a browser and not to mention there are innumerable benefits of not installing an additional app.
I go on twitter.com/search and enter some term and only manage to get top tweets.There is no button for all tweets, as it will crash your puny lightweight device. With all that big data, it’s so big that it’s bigger than a whale

Most of the time I am more interested in all tweets and not top tweets as diverse people have interesting opinions.
Maybe they disabled it because of screen size you wonder?. Try doing it on an Ipad. Apparently the screen size still doesn’t cut it.
No guesses on how much I bother to open search on a non-desktop device.

B. Duppplicaatee posts #

Is it seriously that hard to block duplicate posts? Or do they want us to appreciate every bot that posts, as we get one step closer to artificial intelligence.
People posting aren’t any better. Twitter, you do provide a search engine and do you think Google wouldn’t get laughed at, if 3 out of the top 10 were duplicates?

C. Classifying competing #hashtags on a topic into a common group or trying to assist people with what they actually want to search about #

Do they do this? I didn’t notice this when I was busy trying to search the latest rumors on who becomes which cabinet minister as India was in a post-election frenzy. This was a problem because every TV station had their own #hashtag for people to give their views.

I suspect they need human involvement for this just like Google outsources humans to help improve their search algorithms and get valuable feedback.

D. Offer option to geographically limit search results #

Yes we are a connected world but sometimes you want to read things more relevant to you or a specific region. Say you want to follow Crimea/Ukraine crisis or Senkaku Islands / Diaoyudao Islands saga or a football match between two nations. It would be useful if you could first read the collective opinion of one group instead of playing the game below with posts

  1. Who wrote this? by noticing the name.
  2. Where is the person from? try guessing surname but then expats man.. they always trick u.
  3. Where does their loyalty lie? have to read past messages as there’s no profile, remember?

I noticed and I don’t know from when but at least they made local trends appear so you no longer have to figure out who the Turkish musician or the Latin footballer is.
Maybe have top trends in each country accessible to everyone?

2.Twitter as a messaging service #

There’s more to twitter than celebrities and fans who follow them.
Hey twitter, there are ordinary people too, who sometimes would want to connect with someone half way across the world.

Not everyone is a celebrity who gets inundated with DMs and then subsequently has a twitter breakdown. And then finally vows to never use twitter again or even heaven forbid delete their account (many kittens were killed). IMG could manage twitter better than its current management as at least they know their core job and how to do it.

“We got that covered”, Twitter would reply, “just use a @ and the person would get an email notifying him”. Oh the email you mean that gets thrown into the social tab of gmail. Great, but at least we are now at a stage where we can communicate using a superior product (gmail) as it recognizes the worth of an inferior product.

At least offer people the option to Direct Message each other instead.
Did they remove this?
I couldn’t find the option under account profile nor in any other tab in my profile.

Guess it’s back to listening to the more valuable communication from bots in search results than human one on one.

3.The new signup wizard #

Twitter had the easiest signup process, which made sense when they were a start up. Now they have a much better one … except till you get to twitter.com/welcome/recommendations.

There is no next button. There’s just an ominous “Start by following 5 people” and most likely they are all celebrities. Celebrities aren’t all bad and say you like “heavy metal musicians”, so lets type that in and see what twitter has to offer … uh oh all twitter has is Lady Gaga (I kid you not). Now type heavy metal musicians in Google, there’s someone with the same taste of music you are looking for. If someone were to brand twitter as a celebrity fan club management software it would be as accurate as calling it a social networking site.

Why is this bad you say? It’s just proof that you cant create a twitter account without performing obligatory celebrity worship. Maybe a kitten is killed every time someone signs up without adding more followers to the demigods or its just a stock market capitalization management thing with followers being a valuation metric.

4. Picture of clouds > Profile section of users #

Facebook had one brilliant idea, which was sharing people’s interests as part of their profile so that they could either connect with like-minded individuals or better understand human beings.

On twitter, we have clouds to the left and clouds to the right and a bird at top center (only when you login ).
Sounds like a song I heard from Reservoir Dogs
Stealers Wheels - Stuck In The Middle With You
This could perhaps also serve as Twitter’s theme song.
Or just a plain slogan, a more apt Dune reference - The bird must fly

5. News #

Twitter has all the top news sources on it. It’s great all you need to do is follow your favorite source ( signup wizard helps 1/6th of the time) and you get a tweet every time a story breaks.
This is so amazingly real-time almost nothing could ever be better. Well live updates on a reddit thread in a special news situation (boston bombings coverage?) were way better in my experience

But I don’t use twitter for news. If I want to read news, I hop on to Google news because they group news under the same topic.

Say I am a Kim Kardashian fan, if I search for her on twitter, I get all these demeaning opinions about her when all I want to know is what is she upto. Whereas if I perform the same search on Google news you hit JACKPOT! That’s the reason I will have a Google alert set to her, Imagine doing that on twitter, and dealing with all that negative energy from people.

So there is no way of searching in twitter just for news. Grouping topics together is so 2000late for twitter, let’s not go there yet.
Great random things pop up up if you search “china news” on twitter’s great search facility. It would take someone with enormous mental prowess to quickly find the news he’s looking for without reading through the posts he doesn’t need.

TL;DR Twitter doesn’t care.Read out their name aloud and they aren’t afraid of who they are. Nor do they care about all these non-core features I speak of.
Hey their core function/USP is overthrowing governments and let’s admit it they do that better than anyone else in the world.

Dont sell your $TWTR stocks, Putin could always do a hostile takeover.

 
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