I’ve been unlucky enough to have held the same opinion about Twitter ever since it was launched. This opinion is firmly entrenched in one basic, fundamental problem.
The problem does definitely not have anything to do with scaling; I said that my opinion had been the same, and scaling’s varied.
The problem with Twitter is not that people may write whatever they want. The problem is not that people may not care. The problem is not that it shouldn’t be more than 140 characters, nor that this breeds (short) one liners, nor that it blocks the great American novel from being published in an entirely inconvenient form factor. The problem is not that URLs are folded up into basically URL pointers. The problem is not that previous entries are mindlessly copied verbatim under the guise of “quoted for truth” without any headroom for clarifying comments (they can be added later, and this is a problem in any form of writing).
The problem is not that the briefness of the form ostensibly breeds a polarized, nuance-and-information-free variety of criticism (this is more of an issue about time constraints and a willingness to familiarize ourselves with certain points of view). The problem is not that we could do better things with our time, like complaining about how other people are writing instead of spending the time to complain about how other people are writing.
The problem is not that it or its users can’t make up its mind about whether it’s publishing or communication. The problem is not even how everyone and their fucking cat, because of that, has a new theory for how Twitter is the newest step in human evolution and communication and how this benefits you and your company.
Some of those things above are actual issues that make me shudder and may keep me away in the future. But they are not the problem.
The problem with Twitter is that it’s got a thoroughly shitty user experience.
It works reasonably fine for reading just regular tweets, reversely chronological as it may be. But because almost everything is either a node in a conversation, a node in a subject, or ripe to turn into either or both, actually following that thread turns into a wild goose chase. You have to read everything top-posted and manually unwind the conversation while glimpsing every other or third or fourth reply while doing so. And heaven forbid you want to follow a back-and-forth that’s on the third page; you’ll have to go back and push “more” twice before you can even retrace your steps.
Twitter might be one of the most inconvenient methods of following a conversation in recorded history, and I can’t understand why everyone else seem so willing to go along with it.
Some people may want to point me to Quotably. Quotably failed because if you’re trying to do something that requires you to cross-correlate everything, you better have an efficient handle on everything, and they didn’t. Some people may want to convert me to one of countless Twitter clients. I haven’t seen this problem handled ably in a Twitter client yet; I’ve had no impetus to actually download and use one because there’s been no evidence that the problem has been tackled. (If it has, you’ve got to work on your screenshots, people. Crack this one and the world is your oyster.)
Some people may want me to get an account and start keeping track of people. No. I don’t want to “follow” everyone to opt myself into a better UI, and I have no interest in publishing. What kind of bullshit is that?
So I’ll do what I’ve always done. Occasionally look up those whose opinion or writing I care about, rummaging through the rabbit droppings in a desperate search for chocolates (vivid imagery appears courtesy of Zero Punctuation), by hand. Silently fuming.
Wow. I think the same way about Twitter… Great Post! Switches back to his newsreader to get some interesting stuff. You know, the old way. Reading blogs and all that. ;)
By ChriB · 2009.10.25 20:02
What this man is looking for is a Slashdot thread when everyone else is used to picking up a conversation midstream. The idea of Twitter is that you’re not trying to follow every piece of every conversation. The idea is that you dip in, you say something interesting, you see something interesting, and then you move on.
Twitter is not a chat room. It’s not a forum. It’s a stream. It’s not thoroughly shitty. You’re just looking at it with a set of expectations it shouldn’t have.
There’s a reason why Friendfeed doesn’t have as many users as Twitter even though it offers some of the functionality you’re suggesting. It’s because it over-complicates the structure for end users.
Think about it this way. if you’re in a bar, you don’t get threaded, overly contextual conversations, either. You hear about something that somebody else said later. The world isn’t made of threaded conversations. In that regard, Twitter is MORE like the real world than what you’re asking for.
Twitter is simple. What you want is complicated. This isn’t a design flaw.
By Ernie Smith · 2009.10.25 21:58
No, what “this man wants” is to, when there are eight tweets three pages back into someone’s history talking to someone else, not want to constantly go back-and-forth, including fishing up the corresponding tweet at the other end, manually matching by timestamp when the tweet wasn’t explicitly declared to be in reply to another tweet.
That’s not an invented example in any way. I’ve done this twice just today. I’d certainly call that “complicated”. Since the use of Twitter to communicate like that is an adopted design rather than something that was thought up from the beginning, I’m loathe to call it a design flaw. But to the extent that they continue to nurture this aspect of it, they could make it easier to follow.
I recognize that the typical Twitter stream in its form is like strapping a mike and speech-to-text software to a guy as he walks through a bar, making conversation or just talking out loud. That’s some of its charm. But it stands to reason that that’s the only place you ever see conversation like that; that it’s a poor experience. “We just shouldn’t stitch the pieces together” doesn’t appear to me to be a compelling argument.
It’s amazing to see how many people I’ve shown this to think I “just don’t get” Twitter. I understand perfectly what it’s about and what the allure is. Part of listing all that stuff in the beginning of the post is to make that clear. But understanding what it is and having input into what it could be are two different axes altogether. I’m just not as satisfied with what it is as everyone else seems to be; maybe it’s because I don’t tweet myself. (And, no, I don’t plan to.)
By Jesper · 2009.10.25 22:31
Maybe you should. Because to me, it sounds like you might understand why Twitter chooses not to complicate it in this fashion.
There’s a reason why things get retweeted and other things don’t – simply put, it’s sort of a natural cream-of-the-crop effect.
I find using stuff like Echofon (formerly Twitterfox) really effective for this purpose – it pops up on the bottom of your screen and it catches your eye and all of a sudden, you have a new topic to blog about.
Really, you should give it a chance and figure out why this is a good format for Twitter as opposed to trashing it wholesale.
Like I said, Friendfeed has some of this functionality you’re asking for, and Friendfeed’s user base is smaller than it could be because it’s not dead-simple.
Also, Jesper: Your explanation had the effect of burying your reason seven paragraphs in. That, my friend, is hurting your “make that clear” argument. If you wanted to make that clear, it would be in the first sentence.
Really, not trying to be critical, but you should consider tweeting to help improve your ability to criticize it. You might come up with a better approach, even. They do have an API and stuff for this reason.
By Ernie Smith · 2009.10.25 23:16
I understand that things are slightly better if one chooses to do the whole “log in, follow people” deal. But I don’t want to participate in writing, I want to participate in reading. There’s no good reason, even if they want people to get accounts, that that part of it shouldn’t be designed to make it as easy as possible to follow conversations.
There’s saying you’ve thought of these things, and there’s showing. Since I knew there’d be a host of people at my door saying “you’re just mad because you haven’t tried it”, I thought I’d go the extra mile to try to counter that.
That means “I won’t consider your criticism legitimate until you tweet”. My criticism isn’t about me tweeting, or me being able to better appreciate the form, it’s about how painful reading back-and-forth tweets currently is. I’m as experienced as I can be in this regard.
Let me be clear: I’m not interested in “following” people, I’m interested in being able to make sense of a conversation when I encounter one, be that in the context of someone I read regularly or in the context of a one-off link I see somewhere (like in someone else’s tweet; not that unusual). Implementing such functionality will not come free in any axes, but it’d deliver a lot of bang for that buck, maybe as much as @people and #tags did.
Conversely, I think you are just as likely to not “get” what I’m after. And I really just want for Twitter to improve their site. I appreciate the value of an API, but it’s not a “get out of jail free” card.
By Jesper · 2009.10.25 23:40
But you forced a bunch of readers to have to dig through SEVEN PARAGRAPHS. I come from a journalism background, and we’re taught to say what we have to say in the first sentence. You can explain all that background still, but you need to nail down your main idea immediately or risk losing your readers.
In fact, I’m surprised I dug through it. Brevity is important.
Oh, it’s completely relevant. You’re putting standards on tweets that don’t match the format. It’s like you’re saying you don’t like riding a bike because it doesn’t have a big enough engine. If you try to use Twitter like it’s a Wordpress blog or a Slashdot comment thread, you’re going to be disappointed.
It’s not that you can’t try – there’s a pretty good chat webapp called TweetChat that brings a bit of chat functionality to the format – but tweets are much less conversations and more short messages that can or cannot build off of one another. Conversations can happen, but they’re not the focus.
I stand by my comment that you should actually tweet to understand the value of this. The bar metaphor stands solid – you’re not looking back at something your buddy said two hours ago and replying to it. You’re looking at something someone said two minutes ago. And if you want to go deeper, then you have your opportunity.
I totally get what you’re asking for. I’m just saying you’re asking for someone to magically turn a bike into a car. Wordpress/Drupal/ExpressionEngine/Etc. are good cars. Twitter makes a much better bike.
By Ernie Smith · 2009.10.26 00:11
Meh, I missed a couple HTML tags apparently. Hopefully that’s still readable.
By Ernie Smith · 2009.10.26 00:13
I’m not trying to use anything. I’m trying to read what other people have written. That same information can be presented in ways that are hard and in ways that are easy; none have any bearing on what that information is.
It may be possible that the people who wrote this would have acted differently had their tool worked differently at that time. But I don’t put any judgement into that Twitter should act more or less like a chat or anything like that — I’m observing that Twitter presents the information in a lousy way for when people use it like that, which they already do, or there wouldn’t be a post for me to have this discussion with you below. And I’m not actually involved in producing that information. Once again, what would tweeting win me? Sympathy for their plight?
By Jesper · 2009.10.26 00:28
Wow, I can’t believe nobody mentioned Tweetie yet.
Double-click on a tweet and conversation is automatically reconstructed: http://emberapp.com/0xced/images/tweetie-conversation
By Cédric Luthi · 2009.10.30 09:13
Which, I believe, requires me to log in. But fair point; it’s possible, as long as you have an account, have followed these people before (and don’t mind them knowing it) and don’t want to use the site.
Which doesn’t get their site out of the hot sticky jam it’s in.
By Jesper · 2009.10.30 18:28