Note: this was originally posted on Medium. I'm reposting it here. If you like it, go to the Medium post and click "Recommend" at the bottom so others can see it.
I’m a fan of Twitter. I use it to keep track of news, communicate with friends, and interact with companies large and small. I use Twitter daily and post at least a few times a week. Like most daily users, I don’t mind the hashtags and at-replies, and I work around the 140 character limit. However, there’s one problem with Twitter that I’m finding increasingly hard to stomach and that I’m glad Twitter is finally looking at addressing with things like While You Were Away and the upcoming Project Lightning:
The endless, chronological, mixed-topic feed.
One feed to rule no one
A feed is a simple, predictable concept for consuming Twitter’s content. At the top, you have the most recent posts from those you follow. As you scroll down, you have posts or retweets that were made previous to the top item. Each tweet is very likely about a different topic than the prior tweet. And, with few exceptions (such as promoted tweets and the occasional conversation view), that’s basically it.
Simple and predictable. But the use cases of Twitter have significantly outgrown this concept, and Twitter hasn’t done enough to keep up.
Here’s a few scenarios. Note: I pulled these examples quite a while ago. Despite their age, the points remain the same:
I want to see what’s going on with a particular event, such as the Winter Olympics. If I’m not following accounts that post about the Winter Olympics, or I don’t see them at the top of my feed, I have to execute a search. A search for “Winter Olympics” defaults to “Top” results that includes these wonderfully irrelevant tweets:
Let’s see: an Auburn joke, a comment about The Walking Dead’s ratings, and a joke about porn. All of these were in the first 2 pages of results for the query “Winter Olympics”.
Granted, the search results did also yield some accounts for me to click-through to or follow. But I don’t want to necessarily follow a bunch of people or read their tweets individually. I want the gestalt of the Olympics today (scores, standings, photos, etc.)
I want to see what people of a particular group are tweeting about. Yes, I know about Twitter Lists. And, I don’t want to (nor should I have to) create and maintain lists just to view a subset of people on my feed (tech journalists, co-workers, people I went to school with, musicians, companies). Instead, I encounter sequential posts in my feed as follows:
Let’s see: a post by a former Microsoftie-turned-author-and-speaker, followed by local news, followed by an uncaptioned picture, followed by an amusing pic by George Takei. If I want an unfocused, relatively random stream of content to wash over me, this is great. But if I want to actually focus in on, say, local news or tech news or stuff about what authors think or funny memes, how do I view posts relating to just these topics, preferrably one topic at a time?
I want to contribute to the conversation about a topic or event. Let’s say I want to post a comment about the closing ceremonies of the Sochi Winter Olympics. Hashtags are currently the best way to add metadata to my post in order to include it in others’ searches and filters, including those that don’t follow me. But which is the righthashtag to use? Here’s the recommendations I get when I start typing:
- #Sochi -> #Sochi2014, #SochiProblems, #Sochi, #SochiFail
- #Olympic -> #Olympics2014, #Olympics, #OlympicHockey, #OlympicPickupLines
Which one do I use? My post can only contain 140 characters, allowing for one or at most two tags.
Discover and Activity: variations on the same theme
Twitter put forth a design change in their iOS app that included a Discover and Activity feed, next to the default Home feed. They’ve since reverted these changes, but it’s worth exploring what they were.
While these feeds did attempt to boost relevance by showing content that is not necessarily in chronological order, they still fall into the mixed-topic trap.
Discover was a mish-mash of various different content types: trending topics, tweets from people your followers follow, people one of your followers follows, and some promoted tweets thrown in. The best scenario I can articulate for this feed is “I have no idea what I want to see, and I want to be showered with a mixture of tweets, topics, and accounts.” Where else do customers want this level of information overload and heterogeny, besides when their attention span is particularly short?
Activity showed tweets that your followers were marking as favorites. Some tweets were from those you follow, but many were not. This feed also included some sprinklings of who your followers follow. Presumably this was all an attempt to get you to follow more people. However, there was very little if anything to tell you why you should follow someone, such as a sample of what they typically tweet about. This feed also felt random and unfocused.
Follow, follow, follow
Twitter cares a lot about getting you to follow people. The more people you follow, the more varied your feed will be and (hopefully) the stickier the experience will be in order to serve you more advertisements. Following people on Twitter is a one-tap operation, and suggestions of who to follow are everywhere on Twitter’s apps and in the emails sent to you every few days. Twitter generates a reverse-chronological feed from the posts of those you are following.
The trouble with this approach is three-fold:
- The topics you care about are tweeted by both people you follow and people you don’t follow.
- The people you follow tweet about multiple topics.
- The people you follow don’t tweet about the same topic at the same time.
Twitter tries to solve the first problem by suggesting more people to follow. Retweets aid this by letting followers advertise posts from people they like. However, following new people can exacerbate the other two problems.
Twitter tries to address problems two and three with trending topics, hashtags, and search. These solutions are noisy at best, and demand quite a bit of labor on the part of the user to hone in on the information they care about. Often, the result is yet another unfocused set of tweets that you have to flip through and mentally filter out noise from signal.
Topics >> People
While following people is great, the real thing Twitter should let me do isfollow topics. And, when presenting me information, it should let meexplore and dive into topics I care about.
Let me take you on a time machine back to when these things called “newspapers”. These printed sources of information divided their content into sections. If you cared about the stock market, you would go to the Finance section. If you wanted to see the score from the baseball game last night, you would pull out the Sports pages. Within those section’s pages you could be reasonably guaranteed that the articles would be about the topic in question.
I follow people on Twitter because I care about what they have to say. But the reason I come back again and again is to read information on various topics I’m interested in.
Project Lightning appears to be headed in this direction, but I would say Twitter needs to go beyond trending stories to showing me topic-centered categories of stories.
Changing the model
Fortunately for Twitter, they have copious amounts of content, millions of engaged users, and passionate investors. They also have efforts that seem to be finally heading in the right direction. I hope they continue. Twitter is too important not to.
