I had envisaged that I would write something profound on the 1st December: the one year anniversary of me not posting to Twitter.
But I didn’t.
I had completely forgotten it until reading Vincent Ritter’s post about micro.blog in which he also mentions “quitting Twitter” in December last year:
I read this article arguing that Facebook should be regulated in the same way AIM was when the ill-fated AOL & Time Warner merger happened.
AOL was forced to open up the relationship data between individuals in AIM to allow third parties to interop. You could finally use your social graph in other apps.
In his Stratechery post “Twitter, Live and Luck” Ben Thompson argues that Twitter could really commoditise live by truly thinking digitally and operating in a way that is only possible thanks to the web:
They say exposure is everything on the social web and best practice advocates cross-posting to multiple platforms to gain the most exposure we can. I can’t help but have a dilemma with this.
For a number of reasons I decided to take a break from Twitter – some of you out there may moan “not again!” as I’ve taken social hiatuses before.
But, with the way 2016 has been, and things going on in my life offline, I decided to step away. So, on December 1st I stopped tweeting1, uninstalled the app from my phone and took the drastic step of deleting all 13K plus of my old tweets.
Over the years I’ve written a lot about online identity and influence but, for the average user coming to social media without an agenda, what does it actually mean?
Look at the term “social proof.”
I try to follow people that challenge me, that have different opinions to my own and different world views but there is only so far we, as individuals, tend to go when left to our own devices.
The idea that Twitter could charge a membership fee, and instantly solve its business problems, is a popular one:
@ColinWalker I'd pay it to avoid trolls and ads. Even if only 10% did that would generate $3.6B/year, which is almost 2x Twitter's revenue.
— Adam L. Penenberg (@Penenberg) October 28, 2016
@bitprophet 300m monthly users @ $1/mo. = $3.6b/yr. Not a bad biz even at half.
— Mike Maney (@the_spinmd) October 27, 2016
With even just a percentage of users paying a monthly fee to use Twitter it could still be very good business, potentially to the value of $3 billion which is more than Twitter’s current revenue per year.
Twitter’s Q3 financial results, tweet impressions and user growth were better than expected giving some slight optimism that things may be turning a corner.
They were no doubt helped (spiked?) by the US presidential campaign and debates but new avenues such as the NFL live stream deal seem to have played their part.
With it emerging that both Disney and Salesforce pulled out of an acquisition because of trolls, online bullying and corporate image is Twitter finally going to get the message about its abuse problem?
After publishing yesterday’s post news emerged that Twitter is testing a new “Explore” tab in its apps to replace and build upon Moments and existing means of content discovery.
According to the piece over at Mashable the Explore tab will be a mixture of search, trending topics and Moments harkening back to the Discover tab which preceded Moments.
I wrote recently that we could argue Twitter is too culturally important to fail because it is democratising. In fact, I am in favour of any product that levels the playing field:
A discussion earlier got me thinking about Twitter now allowing people to request verification of their accounts.
I wasn’t going to submit an application as there are more well known Colin Walkers out there – from footballer and manager to cellist – but hey, nothing ventured, nothing gained and I am verifying that I am me!
The news that Twitter will open up its Moments feature to all is a real “at last” moment (pardon the pun) for the service.
Until now most users have had to rely on third party offerings like Storify to string a number of tweets together for wider consumption. Twitter, and probably most users, would much rather this behaviour and traffic remain in-house.
Twitter lists are under-utilised, buried under multiple layers of menu, and some people don't even know they exist. It's hardly surprising as Twitter doesn't seem to like them, reducing their visibility and apparent importance over the years.
It's a serious question.
I started writing a few notes on this, looking for the right framing when Jack Dorsey said at a Twitter shareholder's meeting that "the world needs Twitter."
Dave Winer will sometimes link to the above image as both a reminder, and perhaps chastisement, that we should own our words and our creations.
But, despite what the terms and conditions on various services say, the practicalities of this are harder than ever.
The news that Twitter may soon exclude links and images from the 140 character limit has been widely greeted with cries of “it’s about time.”
Some were, however, equally disappointed when the rumoured increase to 10000 characters was rejected by the board in favour of retaining the existing flow of the stream.
When I first saw that Twitter had changed its App Store classification from social network to news my immediate reaction – no doubt like many others – was that this was an act of desperation. But the more I considered it the more I thought that the change made sense.
Is Twitter a digital, public scratch pad?
People use journals to unclutter the mind, discard the mental flotsam to free themselves to concentrate on what’s important. Yet they get called scratch pads, confused with those places that are supposed to be the birthplace of our plans and schemes.