Archive of posts with tag 'Twitter'

How to Blow Up a Timeline →

July 17, 2023 • #

I miss Eugene Wei’s epic tech analyses. His latest serves as a sort of eulogy for Twitter. He’s of the opinion that “peak Twitter” is in the rear view, and the platform seems to be on a continuous decline over the past year, for the reasons I’m sure you suspect even if you don’t agree.

He makes some interesting points on the failings of Elon and the directional changes in culture and resourcing. While the product was obviously stagnant and incredibly slow at innovation, there have been some, let’s say questionable major changes in the last 12 months. Shipping is great. But shipping for shipping’s sake? Maybe not so much. Many of the changes when viewed from the outside — the yoyo-ing around with Twitter Blue subscriptions, the mind-bending rate limiting decisions, blocking whole domains from being linked to, then unblocking them — we’ve got a nice little list of bizarre experiments that seem unmoored from its success as a business.

No one has been able to explain exactly how Twitter could grow continuously (though slower than your typical unicorn startup) for the past 15 years, especially with so little in the way of new capabilities of the product. 15 years is multiple lifetimes in the tech universe.

I think the key observation is that Twitter found generational product-market fit over a decade ago, but hasn’t been able to explain or understand how that PMF exactly works. What ingredients and magic alchemy came together to create such an unkillable product? As the newfound czar of the product, Elon hasn’t decoded it either. Tinkering with the timeline algorithm has made it demonstrably worse, as I’m sure most power users agree. I like how Eugene puts it:

The changes to the Twitter algorithm bulldozed over a decade’s worth of Chesterton fences in a few months.

It’s not that the old algo was perfect. But something about its particular tuning methodology was clearly desirable, which we appreciated once it was taken away.

Here’s Eugene again, in summary:

For this reason, Twitter won’t ever fully vanish unless management pulls the plug. None of the contenders to replace Twitter has come close to replicating its vibe of professional and amateur intellectuals and jesters engaged in verbal jousting in a public global tavern, even as most have lifted its interface almost verbatim. Social networks aren’t just the interface, or the algorithm, they’re also about the people in them. When I wrote “The Network’s the Thing” I meant it; the graph is inextricable from the identity of a social media service. Change the inputs of such a system and you change the system itself.

I’m not going anywhere. Threads is uninteresting to me. Twitter is mostly still fine. And Farcaster is my second home and exit strategy.

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Twemex

December 28, 2020 • #

As little as Twitter has moved as a product in the last several years, the amount of time I spend on it clearly demonstrates that there’s gold there that no other product can replace.

If you curate your following list well, the quality level of the interactions you can have and people you can meet are incredible. I haven’t found another social network as good at finding interesting ideas.

A limiting aspect of Twitter is how biased toward “now” it is¹. It’s inherently an ordered timeline. Algorithmic recommendations surface some recent things, but not from beyond a day or so. Much goodness is bound up in the Twitter archives, but it’s nearly undiscoverable. If you find an interesting new person to follow, you only get this extremely recent window into their interests.

I saw this new project from developer Geoffrey Litt, something he calls Twemex: a memex for Twitter. It shows promise to resolve this problem. It’s a simple Chrome extension that layers in some missing features for exposing the historical gems embedded in peoples’ timelines. I’ve been using it for a couple weeks and it’s an excellent addition to the product.

I'm building an extension that makes Twitter a better memex:

⭐️ Highlights: see someone's best tweets, not just most recent
📆 On This Day: revisit past tweets for inspiration
🔍 Search: find tweets to quote, w/ shortcuts for useful filters

DM me if you want to try the beta! pic.twitter.com/8dzJg00CyS
— Geoffrey Litt (@geoffreylitt) December 13, 2020

It adds a persistent sidebar for all of the pages on Twitter, which includes different things depending on context.

Firstly it has overhauled search. Since it lives in the Twemex sidebar view, you can live search while you’re drafting a thread, finding similar ideas (and filtering down to your past tweets or people you follow) to quickly link into past thoughts.

Second, there’s a fun “On This Day” feature that shows on the main timeline feed that resurfaces your own tweets from the same day in years past. Always fun to see what you were into. Sometimes it might even provoke you to revisit old ideas.

And third (my favorite), when you visit a user’s Twitter profile, you get a “Best Of” selection of their past posts. At a quick glance it gives you a sense of previous ideas, links, and material a user posts, which helps you select and curate your following lists better. I follow a lot of people on Twitter, but always first peruse timelines to determine if they’re worthy of a follow.

Geoffrey shows searching of likes and bookmarks, highlight curation, and profile notes (to let you annotate why you followed someone). All excellent additions that’ll make Twitter so much more useful. It’s still in private beta at the moment, but I’m sure will be available as a public extension early next year. Follow Geoffrey on Twitter to see its development.

Sometimes you run across extensions or add-ons like this that should just be native product features. Twemex should just be the “Twitter Sidebar.”

Also, as it happens, one of its advantages. Twitter is the best representation of a global water cooler you can find ↩

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Weekend Reading: The Anti Portfolio, Downlink 2, and nucoll

February 1, 2020 • #

📂 The Anti-Portfolio

Bessemer maintains this page of companies they passed investing on. I like the idea of publicly acknowledging your big misses or errors as an organizational accountability tool. Some big names here like eBay, Airbnb, Google, and FedEx.

🌏 Downlink 2.0

Almost a year ago I shared a link to the first version of Downlink. The main feature added here is you can create your own custom views by putting a bounding box around your area of interest. Then you’ll get a live look at the Earth as your desktop background.

🐦 nucoll

A collection tool for retrieving and analyzing Twitter data. I’ve seen some neat social network analyses shared from folks that have used this to map degree relationships between Twitter accounts.

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How Big is Twitter Moments? →

November 25, 2019 • #

A post from Balaji Srinivasan from a couple years back on Twitter Moments. He had some interesting points on the likely traffic and comps to other news outlets. Twitter is still huge in the timely news space. I liked this point on the opportunity here (especially for Twitter, which has done little with the platform for 5+ years):

Whenever we see a technology with empirical traction whose importance is neglected or even derided, it’s a useful signal of an investment or entrepreneurship opportunity. Good examples that I’ve been personally involved with include Soylent and Bitcoin, where skepticism, mockery, and outright hostility was eventually followed by huge returns for those who bet against the crowd.

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Twitter Lists

May 7, 2019 • #

Like many in the Twitterverse, I love the platform. It provides my main interface to following what’s happening, along with staying connected to interests both personal and professional.

Jumping off something James wrote yesterday, I’ve felt similar about Twitter’s utility the last year or so. It feels like I’m experiencing some sort of content creep — probably a function of an increasing number of accounts I follow and the neighboring universe of likes and retweets from that expanding footprint, which generates a massive amount of noise in the algorithmic feed.

I don’t spend a ton of time on Twitter anymore, but I do look at it multiple times a day. Unlike some, I actually like the algorithmic feed. The idea of seeing things adjacent to the folks I follow is an attractive one, but it’s gotten to be overwhelming with toxic content, topics I personally don’t want to see on Twitter (or at all), and can be overwhelming echo chamber on some topics when high profile events happen. I need to make the time (as James did) to purge the follow count down of the unnecessary. I did also discover muting topics recently, which has helped tone down the stuff I don’t care about — not via Twitter, at least.

Twitter’s had its Lists feature since 2009, but I barely got into using it before abandoning it and never going back. The process for adding and removing from lists and general list consumption has always been terrible, as if Twitter is likely to kill the feature at some point. James’s recommendation of TweetDeck definitely makes consuming the list feeds more manageable. I’m going to give that a try and set up a couple of topic-based lists to see how that works.

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