Joshua Nguyen

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Showing 17 posts tagged twitter

Why I love Twitter and barely tolerate Facebook

I’m optimistic and delighted every time I open up Twitter on my browser, while Facebook is something I only click on once or twice a day and always with a small sense of dread. This week I sat down to think about why that is.

This post nails it.

This post has gotten some traction from a lot of tech folks and not surprisingly (and deservedly) there’s a lot of agreement about what makes Twitter good (immediacy, interest-based) vs Facebook (history, profile-based). But one thing that nags at me is the primacy placed — even praise heaped upon — Twitter’s focus on real-timeliness and current events and the now. The observation is that Twitter is “good” because it doesn’t have an archive of your past tweets.

So the focus on just the stream of jabbers and thoughts and humor and ideas flowing pass at a blistering pace is a good thing?

I would argue that this is not a good at all. Without history, without remembrance, there can be no context, no basis for reflection and therefore no interpretation and learning that is on any level but the superficial.

That’s the most worrisome trend of digital media today — the productization of everything into a stream and everything into micro-posts has reduced the value of conversation and analysis. Instead of complementing our offline activities and encourage us to be more vertical, the current transient state of online media stretches us horizontally — we like and favorite and retweet at an ever more furious pace, but this isn’t really conversation, it’s just the ever faster consumption of digital sugary snacks.

Sure, Twitter is probably more interesting than Facebook’s Timeline, but that’s because Twitter’s farther along in the my-online-identiy-is-who-I-aspire-to-be vs who-I-really-am than Facebook; Twitter provides quick sugary jolts of interestingness vs Facebook’s plodding reminders of who you were. In the end, who you are is a combination of what you have done and what you intend to do, the compendium of actions and will to actions — but it’s safe to say that without a look back from time to time, all we’re doing is creating a lot of noise.

TL;DR version: I like the idea of archives (hi Tumblr!) and think there’s tons to innovate around this feature and the slow media space (hi Medium!). Facebook isn’t bad/boring because it’s focused on your past, but perhaps your past is not as interesting as your hoped for online identity?

(via emergentfutures)

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First Contact by CMGW Photography on Flickr.

Reminder to myself: If all the products I work on could have this moment [user is the girl? the viewer? the manatee? ;)].

What are Twitter Cards, exactly?

In effect, they are the technology behind expanded, multimedia-rich tweets. With the addition of a few lines of code, publishers, brands and developers can create better tweets showcasing their content inside of the Twitter stream.

- The Future of Twitter’s Platform is All in the Cards

The rest of the article is really interesting. It may be part conjecture, but I can see how Twitter wants to move towards a walled garden approach and enforce visual consistency to its platform

The majority of usage comes from twitter.com and its official apps anyways so pissing off developers won’t affect its bottom line much. And — reorienting the concept of a tweet from 140 characters to 140 characters + photos OR videos OR snippets can only help with monetization. It may appeal less to the technorati and the old school users who long for the simplicity of Twitter’s SMS roots, but I see this as Twitter making it’s move from a communications app to a media/consumption portal. (I wonder if that’s the path to all consumer content companies on the web?)

Historically, the ratio of users who tweet vs consuming tweets have been crazy lopsided, so the cards feature is just a natural product recognition of the user behavior. (Side note on whether product design should lead or follow users is for another time.)

Oh and the concept of ‘cards’ feels very much like the Tumblr Dashboard to me, if only more complicated philosophically.

Twitter bought Posterous

dbreunig:

Huh.

Posterous Spaces will remain up and running without disruption. We’ll give users ample notice if we make any changes to the service. For users who would like to back up their content or move to another service, we’ll share clear instructions for doing so in the coming weeks.

That doesn’t seem very firm.

HUH.

Don’t Give Your Users Shit Work

Zack Holman had a good piece on why Twitter Lists and Google+ Circles don’t really work — they’re “shit work” for users. Who wants to maintain changing lists when they could actually be interacting and expressing themselves?

This is why I was never fascinated by Google+ and its concept of Circles. You have to go through entire sub-communities of your friends and drop them into arbitrary groupings. That sounds like shit work to me.

The post spurred me to think about why all products tend to get overcomplicated at some point, and, echoing Zack’s thoughts here: Users think they like levels of control - “Oooh, if I can only organize my network into lists!”, but really, they don’t really want to maintain and keep up with the chore. On the other hand, how do you solve a lot of the signal-to-noise problems that plague a lot of networks? And then how do you not become heavy handed if you do rely on the app to figure the subtleties of different relationships and discovery needs? And by having lists and groups and things to manage, you’re implicitly denying the fluidity of how people, content and objects move between categorizations.

Oh, and did anyone ever used Apple’s On-the-go playlist feature? I remember using it a lot on my original iPod but never much after that.

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Haven’t seen this in a while. Good to see Twitter kept the classic.

Marco.org: Dickbar: March 6, 2011 – March 31, 2011

marco:

It’s dead:

Rather than continue to make changes to the QuickBar as it exists, we removed the bar from the update appearing in the App Store today. We believe there are still significant benefits to increasing awareness of what’s happening outside the home timeline. Evidence of the incredibly…

Short version: They messed up, admitted it (bravo) with tons of spin (boo).

Dickbar is gone from Twitter

Why hello, Jack. It sure is interesting to have you back.

“While Mr. Williams has been away from the office, Mr. Dorsey and Mr. Costolo forged a close relationship and suggested to the board that Mr. Dorsey return. Mr. Dorsey declined to comment, but privately he has said that he has regretted not being a part of Twitter’s recent growth and that Twitter has made some mistakes in designing the simplest product and not listening enough to what its users wanted.”

Eeeenteresting. It has been a bit surprising that Twitter’s most recent features have revolved around jiggering the product to support ads, trends and whatnot vs a focus on making the communication tools dead simple.

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Good effort thus far… but: Something is slightly off with this new Twitter profile view. The secondary panel is not that terribly useful.. and somewhat redundant. Wonder what their thoughts are.. especially if they’re gunning for Facebook.

subcreation:

Hilarious spoof of The Social Network trailer with Twitter transposed for Facebook.

(via gilgul)

“On Twitter or Facebook you’re trying to express something real about who you are,” she explained. “But because you’re also creating something for others’ consumption, you find yourself imagining and playing to your audience more and more. So those moments in which you’re supposed to be showing your true self become a performance. Your psychology becomes a performance.”

(via Shanan)

How did the Old Spice viral campaign affect Twitter?

By now, the Old Spice 2 day marketing blitz has received a lot of attention. Two points:

How did Facebook compare to Twitter as a distribution channel? I’d say worse.
If Old Spice can have this kind of success without being a part of Twitter’s ‘promoted tweets’, how should Twitter evolve it’s monetization strategy to benefit from the way that social advertising campaigns will (most likely) be accomplished in the future?

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1) I didn’t use Blackbird Pie for this since Tumblr doesn’t generate the embed code properly.

2) Embeddable tweets - hard to mess up but somehow Twitter has made it pretty hard for me to do.

3) Kellan has an awesome sense of humor.

Nooks and Crannies

Where do I get my news? Apart from the NYTimes, BBC, blogs, etc. — I also get it from a basketball BBS that I’ve been a member of since 1997. Case in point, the recent revolution in Kyrgyzstan has been covered by the media and blogs well, but I’m also reading posts from a BBS member who’s currently hunkered down in Bishek. Real life, real moments, a side of the events that I can’t get elsewhere.

The Internet is an amazing thing, full of awesome nooks and crannies with goodies. For all the transformative powers of Twitter and Facebook, this is a reminder to me that the Internet is like the real world in some ways.. not everything is accessed via freeways and runways, sometimes you have to walk on dirt paths and bike through side roads to get a whole other experience.

we are holded up a bit further from the city center but still close enough to hear the fighting/looting/etc that is going on. we are staying with some us embassy friends at their apartment and we are all taking turns manning the ‘panic button’ which will call in troops if an embassy apartment gets attacked. troops is a bit of a loose term as the embassy here only has four marines - typically this is a very safe post. that is why all of this revolution has caught us with our pants down around our ankles.

information is hard to come by. or i should say that reliable information is hard to come by. our landlady’s cousin is a major opposition leader and word is that she is going to be named the provisional president of the new government. such a small country… only 5 million people it seems like everyone knows someone. the problem with that is that we don’t know what to believe. word currently is that tonight is going to be even worse than last night. no violence against the government but wide spread looting. calls have gone out on the radio and tv all day asking for volunteers to come and protect the remaining non-looted stores and government buildings. so this could lead to more fighting. also - the disposed president is in the south of the country supposedly arming his supporters and marching to bishkek. mind you it is a 10 day march on foot over three mountain passes! got to love central asia…

still getting mixed news on what is going on here (it is night now). police stations being stormed (people trying to get guns) and the major department store tsum supposedly is being looted right now. my friend nelson and i helped another friend make it into the apartment compound where my family is now staying. once we went outside (to let him in the gate with his car) we found was being guarded by seven guys with guns… and vodka. our friends had to drive around block a couple of times due to crowds in the streets. tense moments. still hearing random gun fire and getting reports of ‘rich’ homes being looted and people being murdered. everything is hearsay at this point.

we are hunkered down and safe… although it doesn’t feel safe because of the uncertainty. safety in numbers.

thanks for the encouraging words. we are staying safe. inside. in the dark. and unlike all the people on the street… very, very sober.

Image via Big Picture.