Why Twitter is not interesting to me anymore? – or, may be I should be more specific – Why Twitter Stream is not interesting to me anymore?. It is not because I’m following boring people in Twitter. The people I follow are in someway related to my work/friends and they tweet pretty interesting messages. But the Twitter stream does not deliver those interesting messages to me in a way I want.
First and foremost, Twitter is a live feed. i.e. I need to be online with my followers to see their tweets live. Off course, the tweets are archived and I can always come back and see them later. But I lose the interaction part here, because of my time zone (India) and the time zone of people I follow (mostly not in India) are totally different. It is something like a television broadcasting system. If you are not sitting in front of the TV, you miss the action. Period. So, what I need here is a better record-and-playback later mechanism for twitter messages.
Secondly, I use Twitter to interact with people. i.e. I reply to their message, by clicking on the ‘reply’ icon in Twitter stream. When the person I tagged (using @person) in my message, sees my tweet he should be able to understand that the tweet is actually a reply to his earlier tweet. He should be able to see a link to get the full context (like a thread) of the interaction. I remember a twitter app has this feature (but couldn’t remember that app name, plz comment if you know one). If Twitter has this feature built-in then it’ll be more usable.
Third, I need a rating system for twitter messages where I can rate and recommend a twitter message to my followers. Wait..wait..its not a Twitdigg application, even though the concept is similar. When I rate a tweet and when others also rate the same tweet, it’s popularity goes higher. I should be able to see what twitter message is so popular amongst my followers/the people I follow. Come on, Facebook has this (like), FriendFeed has this (Best of Day), why not Twitter!?
Fourth, ban Justin Bieber! 
(OK, I was just kidding!).
{ 11 comments… read them below or add one }
hehe.. These seem to be rants..
Btw, try favstar.fm
1. Twitter is a live streaming and that itself makes it interesting, no?
2. Twitter has a ‘in_reply_to’ field for tweets to keep track of replies. Dabr tries to display these tweets in a conversational style, try it.
3. I don’t think Twitter will come up with a rating system for now. But retweet is one way of measuring popularity. Favorites can also be one way of tracking popular tweet but there aren’t any useful API for that
4. Yes, twitter should remove Justin from trending topics!
//Twitter is a live streaming and that itself makes it interesting, no?//
the live streaming part is interesting. But sometimes I tend to miss the live stream because of the timezone different or lack of time to follow the twitter stream. So, it would be good to some mechanism where in important twitter messages can be displayed (in the sense, I don’t need to scroll pages after pages. those tweets should be displayed above-the-fold!)
I think if twitter has a rating system then my first point would be addressed.
Twitterfall has the ability to view a ‘conversation’ behind a tweet as you describe: http://twitterfall.com/featurepage.html#conversation%20viewing
Quite a few other apps do it as well now, including Seesmic Web (and so presumably Seesmic Desktop?).
(Disclosure: I work at Twitterfall)
thanks for the link Jalada. Your application and its features are all seems really interesting! Good work. Especially I love the way the application shows the action menus (DM, ReTweet, etc). Cool.
Thanks for the feedback
I read this article with great interest, because I am one of the developers working on quippd, a platform that is meant to address some of these limitations in twitter.
For example, the lack of context/conversational abilities in twitter. While twitter has been likened to a large IRC channel, it seems like you (and others like you) really want a threaded forum type system — while there may be third party applications that provide that, they aren’t part of the core experience, and it ends up making conversations on twitter a painful experience.
Rating systems built into twitter would be very nice — we have implemented this as a simple “upvote”, a la digg, which we think works pretty well. Upvoting a link also spreads it virally to your followers, which we think is a pretty nice win.
The record and playback mechanism is not an issue I really understand, but I would be happy to chat with you about this further, since it does seem interesting.
Hi Asif,
it is good to hear that your developers are already taking care of the issues I mentioned here. Now I’m eager to use quippd once it’s live.
btw, will send you my thoughts on the record-and-playback in a separate email.
If you follow boring people stop following them!
And twitter doesn’t really interest me due to constancy, making a point in 144 characters means it’s near impossible to properly convey a big idea. Yes you can convey launched x or eaten blah, however find to get across a big idea you need more then 144.
Cheers
in that case we go for a blog entry!
I dont have hard feelings for the bird. The annoying thing of Twitter for me is RTs and posting hell of links. I really like to follow those people who make interesting tweets about their stuff. I also noticed that I am not following people any more.
But the thing Twitter is built to tell. Its almost good to do its job. Except infrastructure issues. And for the limitations of Twitter. There is an opportunity for us to come up the application. And make it popular. Its true. If people are gathered there, lets tell them that we brought some thing that Twitter does not have.
Gud read!