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This article was published on January 29, 2015

Jack Dorsey’s first tweetstorm shows Twitter listens when it’s convenient


Jack Dorsey’s first tweetstorm shows Twitter listens when it’s convenient

If you were on Twitter this morning, you may have seen Twitter co-founder and chairman of the board, Jack Dorsey do his very first tweetstorm. That is, a bunch of tweets in a row with labels, sort of like what a blog is supposed to be.

Dorsey’s first tweetstorm appears to be his way of showing support for Twitter CEO, Dick Costolo. Investors have been calling for Costolo to be pushed out of the company, but Dorsey’s backing is a powerful one.

Not only was it the most boring tweetstorm ever, it yet again highlighted that the company seems to only care about listening to the community when it’s convenient. Twitter is the world’s consciousness right now, but it’s in danger of ruining that for itself.

Twitter got itself in hot water when it changed the blocking policy out of the blue and ultimately had to go reverse the change (they fixed it properly later). Another change added new ads that made it look like users were following brands they don’t. Then, the company started messing with the last safe ground: the main timeline firehose.

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Is anyone listening up there? The timeline’s the one thing users should have control over.

Tweetstorms and screenshorts were invented by the community as fun ways around the character limit, but how about some more interesting official ways to alleviate the character limit issue? Like excluding a single link or usernames from the character count.

I wrote late last year that Twitter isn’t about the users anymore and seemingly doesn’t have any sort of future direction for itself other than adapting features invented by the community when it works for them. Otherwise, it often seem like it simply throws in more ads or new growth tools that can’t be turned off that are oriented around new users.

Video and Group DMs are the coolest things to come to the service in a long time, which indicates perhaps there’s finally a good change in direction. But, what the service really needs is some strong direction, better discovery of what’s going on and leadership that fights hard for those that already use the service.

It’s great that Twitter is good for discussing what’s happening in the world in real time, but it’s still near impossible to actually find out what’s going on with Twitter’s trending topics within the clutter. Twitter promised late last year that it’s working on something in this area, and it’s sorely needed.

I truly love Twitter; I’ve met many of my good friends via the service and have spent the better part of seven years there now. I just hope they don’t stuff it up.

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