Too Many Words™ on Twitter and Its Evolution

Twitter leadership had a challenging job to effectively monetize the popular service.

The emergence and initial success of Twitter was a bit of a lottery win in the first place.  Throwing something together at the right moment in history was fortuitous.  But the skills to sustain it and preserve its value did not come with the big novelty cheque.

They did a lot of things right: let the service catch on, and gradually build the advertising platform around it.  The revenues continue to grow, and the advertising options appear to appeal to many.

Indeed, the level of advertising is beginning to be a bit intrusive at times, but it's generating substantial revenues, which should ensure the service remains around for a while.  And there have been exorbitant rewards for the founders which seems appropriate as well, given that they were the ones who won that lottery. They got an application out at the right moment in history when users were ready for it, and sustained the plumbing to the point of critical mass. That's worth some reward.

But as we see Twitter leadership making, or suggesting, fundamentally bad directions forward, one gets the idea that they don't really understand the animal they've been training.

The cadre of designers and business enthusiasts that ended up with ownership of this popular microblogging site are possibly not the right ones to carry it forward.  With a slightly different landscape,  would a different team, with better long-term ideas have put together a similar short-message micro-blogging service a few months later to find themselves with the winning ticket?  Likely. But regardless of who lays a house's foundation, they don't necessarily bring the skills necessary to make the village thrive.

Capabilities emerge based on the technologies that are available. Intuitively, certain elements get combined to produce applications.  Low-cost, easy-access networking, plus an easy-to-use input means results in humans sharing things with each other.  That was a natural progression out of Usenet and bulletin board roots. Blogging and short-post sharing became big and popular not because someone 'invented' Blogger, Wordpress, Tumblr or even MySpace, Friendster or another on-ramp, but because many of us were already doing similar things the hard way, or on a precursor platform.  Gradually developers craft tools to increment the process, and make it easier. Those steps are more often about first-to-market, or occasionally best-to-market.  Sadly, often good-enough is a stand-in for "best."

In the climate of fast moving tech, any ten small teams of people "skilled in the art" (as patent lawyers say) of posting text to websites would find it obvious how to make the process easier.   You quickly end up with ten different-but-similar approaches. Given the right environment, all of them are basically functional and achieve the goal of users being able to do their thing.  The offerings remaining after a few months are determined by factors such as ease-of-use, responsiveness, and depth-of-pockets to cover the hosting/operational costs to keep the service up.

Forming another ten such teams a month later would produce other workable, and not all that different services (beyond cosmetic colours and button placement).  Indeed, in most cases there is no secret sauce, no mind-bending invention of clever design, no eureka moment of unique insight required to deliver the effective solution.

With Twitter this was the case.  Given the existence, and heavy use of blogging, and thousands of service offerings coming and going,  every variant of such a service gets explored. Every approach to inputting content and sharing it.

Input by SMS was the only mobile game in town, and a reasonable, useful and obvious approach. Indeed at that point in time, SMS was a popular, emerging on-ramp for many services. The yet-to-be-ubiquitous broadband service for mobile HTTP-based interfaces didn't exist yet.

The 140 character limit turned out to not only be 'good-enough' the experience of crafting concise messages inspired creativity and allowed certain talents to shine.  It's a well known value among creative people, that spaces with difficult boundaries are often inspire more than blank, wide-open ones.

It was most certainly not design-intent in the creation of Twitter, but rather a side-effect of the available technology, with a very positive result.  Illustrating that Twitter was not formed from a cauldron of deep, innovative genius has been the on-going handling of the product.

Don't get me wrong - there are clearly smart people doing innovative things in keeping the service up and responsive. Hard things too.  Managing the infrastructure, implementing the interfaces to the specs handed to them by the feature design people. These are hard, time-consuming jobs. These are good and valuable skills and talents, and are key to any functioning Internet-based business. And when is the last time you saw the Twitter FailWhale? There is a robust service there.

But services have requirements beyond keeping everything functioning. While on-going spotty service can erode a business, getting the direction of the ship wrong can sink it just as easily.   

At the conceptual level, some services can have a tendency to not understand the user.  And here there seems to be constant blindness to the nuanced differences between Twitter and Facebook.  Perhaps it's the pressures of a now-public company to fall into traps like looking purely at user numbers.

Those of us participating from the early days saw Facebook scurry about trying to force its rigid, closed structure into a more Twitter-like approach.  Twitter's public timelines were fundamental to a rapid uptake of and broad integration into traditional media and broadly into the customer support business. Facebook had to work hard to try to enable some part of that attention, and still lags behind in that engagement.

Twitter is continually painting themselves into a "quantity not quality" corner when they get distracted by comparing their user-numbers with other social media platforms.

The fact is, that Twitter with boundaries self-sorts.  Not everyone is capable of conveying meaningful information in 140 characters. Those able to say something concise, engaging and/or entertaining within the boundaries garner followers.  Those who cannot may not get a broad following, but can still find value within a smaller peer group, and as a consumer - rather than generator - of content.  They must focus on engaging the right kind of users, not just broad user numbers.

And some users (Twitter leadership doesn't get this) may not find value, interest or an outlet in the social-media variant that is Twitter.  That's okay.  Not everyone read the newspaper (when that was a thing).  Many people don't watch TV news, nor listen to radio news, nor write letters to their cousin, nor blog.  The service need not be all things to all people. And diluting or pandering to every perceived whim of any user does the service no favours.

Now rumours from the leadership brain trust suggest the destruction of the 140 character limit. Throwing open the doors to 10,000 chars, or no limits at all, has savvy Twitter users worried.

Savvy users understand the fundamental "less is more" nature of the service, and worry about its potential demise.

We've seen a long-standing concern regarding erosion of the chronological timeline as well.  And still many wait for responsible changes, like dealing with harassment and hate tweets are not effectively implemented.   And some well-needed simple elements like a short editing window (two minutes?) to fix typos are in high demand. (Some suggest allowing a small number of characters to be changed would provide the same value.)

Many are the epic tweets ruined by a small typo.  Deep is the shame of content creator whose thoughtful and timely tweet - with potential for much sharing - is ruined by an autospell substitution error.

Can we see thoughtful changes that invest in enhancing the quality of Twitter rather than pandering towards a Facebook-like populist, lowest common denominator?   That will take some leadership and understanding behind the platform's leadership.

It's not clear that the leaders who fortuitously found themselves with this platform are savvy users who understand what they have.

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