Quartz:
Twitter’s strength has always been hosting conversations around live events, but it’s not always easy to find them. Doing so often requires some savvy, juggling multiple tabs within Twitter’s app—not to mention knowing the right hashtags and accounts to follow.
Moments is designed to untangle some of these complexities by relying on curation to surface such conversations. Both Twitter’s staff and its partners—including NASA, Major League Baseball, the Washington Post, the New York Times, and BuzzFeed—will package tweets into collections, which will show up under a new tab called Moments.
I don’t know if I’d describe “Twitter’s strength” in that way but anything Twitter can do to make the service “less confusing” to new users is good for the company and will help keep the investor wolves from their door. Personally, I don’t find Twitter all that confusing but then again, I’ve been using it from the beginning. Am I wrong? Is Twitter confusing for new users?
No Twitter is not confusing for any one who has used it. But I suspect they figure if it’s easier to understand, more people would use it? But I’m more likely to believe people aren’t convinced it’s a good way to communicate. I don’t look at it every day. Just when I have a few minutes down time.
Twitter is very confusing to new users (I’ve been one and I’ve had the task of explaining it to newbies), and I would absolutely agree that its strength is conversation around big/live events.
Not sure this will help with the confusion aspect, but it will make it easier to follow specific conversations.
Twitter’s user retention rates should provide your answer. http://recode.net/2014/02/07/twitters-other-growth-problem-keeping-the-users-it-already-has/
Twitter still has no compelling use for me, and I understand how it works pretty well from observation.
It can’t die too soon, I think, but I’m a crotchety contrarian.
If that’s Twitter’s core strength, then they are losing to Slack. I’m sure there’s a core group of users who’ll argue with me, but I think the major failing of Twitter is the character limit. It’s far too hard to have meaningful comments in that space, particularly if you have to link to something or include an image.
Yes, you can do that across multiple tweets, but then to the average user, the tweets appear in reverse order.
Did they learn nothing from Apple’s fucked up “Moments” implementation in Photos? How can “you see small messages from people you follow” be confusing for anyone?
Asking that on a site with a tech audience is not likely to generate meaningful results. Most people here will have a clear idea what to use Twitter for, and for which purposes other platforms are the better choice.
Explaining to non-tech persons that there are different platforms for private messages, “friends” messages, public messages, photos, videos, random groups, closed groups, platforms more targeted for single atomic statements and others for conversations… And that they all have their own app with their own (mostly screwed up) GUIs, some cross-platform, some single platform, some mobile only, some desktop only etc ad inf… Will normally result in: “I can do all that with email, and I know how to use it.”
And honestly, even knowing all these things to some degree, opening up a person’s Tweets and seeing 90% replies to Tweets you can’t see, is not exactly gratifying. And that is why I stopped “following” most people. If I subscribe to e.g. a RSS-feed, I only see stuff meant for a larger audience, not individual replies to things I’ve never asked. Reading Tweets contains even more cruft than going through an inbox without spam filtering, and it eats my time with zero return.
I like the idea of this feature if it’s intent is to bring together multiple hashtags etc. sometimes folks use different ones for the same thing and yes that can be confusing for new folks. How are they to know, for example, that they need to search for both SDCC and SDCC2015, or for teamironman, teamcaptainamerica, teamironman, teamcaptain, civilwar, captainamerica2 and so on
People who say it is not confusing are only using Twitter superficially – i.e. tweet at whatever frequency; respond to whatever tweets that you happen to see; respond to responses to your own. With all due respect, this level of use is just scratching the surface.
I spent an hour last night trying to explain it to an in-law, and thinking about it, Twitter still doesn’t pass the Martian test. There’s no elevator pitch explanation of how it works, how to engage it, why it’s useful, why you’d want to bother. I think Twitter as it currently exists, is meant for 5% of the population—hyper connected and chatty culture vultures and news junkies who want to exchange ideas and mix it up intensely. For everyone else it’s just another passing social platform fad. You have to adopt this mass hallucination, like everyone has agreed to agree that it’s this wonderful thing, when to an outsider it’s this bizarre construct that’s totally obtuse. I say this and I’ve been using Twitter for 6 years. I’m eager to see Moments and whether it will make sense.
Oh, I see, so it’s a texting app like “messages.” Then why do I need that too?