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.
3/The folks using Twitter daily created the @username, the #hashtag, and the retweet, all within the constraint of 140 characters.
— jack (@jack) January 29, 2015
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.
5/The “tweetstorm” and #/tweet syntax is a (clever) way around the 140 character constraint. Once again created by people using the service!
— jack (@jack) January 29, 2015
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.
6/I think it beautifully showcases Twitter's real strength: simple and engaging live conversation. From anywhere about anything!
— jack (@jack) January 29, 2015
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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