Recently I’ve been asking “is Twitter ‘mainstream’ yet?“
I appreciate the subjective nature of this word, and also how much this comes down to perception as much as metrics. However, nobody would argue that Facebook aren’t mainstream, so how far behind are Twitter really?
I asked attendees of DevNest to do a quick poll to gauge opinion, and was surprised to see that the majority (at time of writing) thought Twitter is already mainstream.
My own perception is that Twitter isn’t mainstream, at least not within my wider demographic (i.e. my ‘normal’ friends). But regardless of whether there’s any real way to quantify this, certain things are clear to me and need addressing
Twitter’s publishing of user statistics is insufficient;
Third party research is largely flawed;
There is a bias that only users that send lots of tweets are important;
We need to better understand the dollar value of all twitter users.
I discussed what Twitter is doing about entering the ‘mainstream’ and the implications these changes have for developers and business owners working on the platform.
I intend to break these topics down into a series of short blog posts, so check back for more. In the mean time, see below for the slides; minus my scintillating commentary.
For whatever reason, it’s clear that Twitter want you to use ‘new’ style retweets. They are better for analytics and data-mining, and lower the barriers to participation for unseasoned users.
However, if you’re like me and prefer old school retweets you may be annoyed that the so-called #NewTwitter makes this rather hard. If you want to quote someone’s tweet and add your own anecdote, you’ll have to copy and paste the tweet and then type out the “RT @username” part. It annoyed me enough to make a JavaScript bookmarklet to solve the problem.
UPDATE: Please look at the date of this post. The information here is out of date and will become more out of date as time goes by. Twitter have addressed some of the issues I mention here, but the post will stay up and the DM cleaner tool still works.
Direct messaging is one of Twitter’s weakest features. On a platform that is fundamentally about public conversation, this is a one-to-one private messaging system – except it isn’t private – it’s just direct. The new Twitter has improved the messaging interface, but this is only superficial improvement; DMs are a flawed feature at a much lower level.
In descending order of interestingness and importance, here are a few things you may not know about Twitter DMs.
All third party applications you authorize can read your DMs *
Deleting a DM you’ve sent or received also deletes it from the other person’s account;
Deleting DMs sends some Twitter clients into a confused frenzy;
DMs don’t have a ‘reply to’ ID, so they can’t be threaded properly;
The new Twitter interface only loads your most recent 100 messages;
I’ve written a tool for backing up and deleting all your DMs – imaginatively titled DM Cleaner.
Last night Twitter announced a new version of their main website, quickly dubbed #NewTwitter.
I’ve not seen the interface first hand as yet, it will be rolled out over the usual undefined period of time. As with previous features, such as “who to follow”, it may even flick on and off – who knows. There are a number of features I’m curious to see, such as whether they’ve added full geo support, i.e. adding of ‘places’.
But I digress; these new features and all the whooping over slick new interfaces are not what this post is about. What interests me is what Twitter are doing with their brand, how it affects the developer ecosystem and why the hell anyone would attempt to base a business on the Twitter platform.
Another Twitter app launched itself to momentary viral stardom this morning by using a practice that seems to irritate more-or-less everyone. I refer to the mandatory auto-tweet posted from your own account saying something like “I just scored X% using suchandsuch app” – you know the type. This particular app was the sneaky, (or misguided) type that gives no warning, and no way of opting out.
Anyhow, this isn’t the first time I’ve been annoyed by auto-tweeting, I’ve written about it before. It’s happened more times than I care to remember, so I won’t go into the details of today’s particular example, except to say that its author has [sort of] apologised. It’s already been blogged anyway if you’re curious.
What I will harp on about though, is the fact that this is nothing short of spam – Twitter needs to agree, and needs to make it easier to report badly behaved apps. Continue reading…
I joked yesterday about writing one omnibus tweet per week. But actually, that’s not a bad idea at my current blogging rate. So here goes, my week in the Twittersphere –
I woke up this morning to the apparent viral spread of the TweetCloud app that unoriginally, but very nicely displays your most tweeted words of the year, or month, or .. you get the idea. Here’s mine ->
The warning of another Twitter scam that typically exploits the layman‘s inability to spot a fake URL.
Facebook and Twitter both offer authentication services arguably known as “single sign-on”. Facebook Connect is a proprietary system, and Twitter offers a system based on the OAuth standard. These services do something quite marvellous – They allow you to authenticate with a another website without the third party ever seeing your password. What’s makes it even more handy is that you’re probably already signed in to these popular services, so you may not need to enter your password at all. The problem is when you do.
