Category Archives: twitter

Twitter’s Balancing Act

While its counterparts (FB, Instagram etc) have been able to ride the growth waves to the fullest, the ride for Twitter hasn’t been exactly a breeze.

Flat Growth in Twitter’s MAU


As visible from the image above, Twitter’s Net New Active User Growth (New Active Users – Lost Users) was “-One Million MAUs”. Amidst, the fake account cleaning activity underway, the company expects this -ve growth trend in MAU to continue and the MAUs to drop further by ‘mid-single-digit millions’ in the next quarter.

While the MAU growth has been rather Flatish, the DAUs and Revenue numbers show some signs of growth

People are using Twitter more often

Twitter is making some money

For now Twitter claims to be prioritising ‘Health’ over ‘Growth’ by undergoing a massive cleanup (Apparently, the company’s health problem also costed them an acquisition offer from Disney).

However, in middle of all this Jack Dorsey announced last week a new functionality, the ability to change the user feed aka timeline.

Jack’s announcement about changes to timeline


A lot of Power users felt a collective sigh of relief. A few features have been on the wish list of a lot of users namely

  1. Abuse control (Stopping accounts that spread hate/harass others, bots)
  2. Ability to Edit a Tweet
  3. Reverse Chronological Timeline (Raw user feed)

Not sure about others, but I found this update rather interesting. Though I initially (and to some extent later) felt how the Twitter timeline experience had sorta deteriorated, but it never bothered me that much. 

In fact, I think for most people the value Twitter provides in terms of ‘staying in the know’ (along with one’s network) is much more than any bad changes to timeline.

A quick look at Twitter’s Timeline/User feed

Starting 2015 (Jack’s Return), Twitter started making changes to the user timeline to offer a better experience (and better monetisation?).  Prior to this the timeline was simply in reverse chronological order.

The Twitter Algo (pre-recent changes) via Buffer


‘Ranked Tweets’ are tweets recommended for each user by Twitter’s algo on the basis of

How Twitter’s Algo works


Apart from ‘Ranked Tweets’ and ‘In Case You Missed It’, Twitter also started ‘Seeding Tweets by accounts they don’t follow’ into users timeline

Via Quartz


While this last move definitely annoyed a lot of users from both timeline intrusive and also their own privacy POV, it apparently worked wonderfully well for Twitter.

From Twitter’s Q2-2016 Letter to Shareholders


As for me, I was finding more interesting tweets and new people to follow due to the ‘A, B and C liked this’ feature. I remember stumbling upon new content and users regularly and thus ended up interacting with that content and also following up more people.

It’s been a week since I reverted back to original timeline, while there is no meaningful difference in the quality of my timeline, the discoverability of new content/people have definitely gone down. I don’t remember starting to follow anyone in the last week or so.

Twitter for as long as I can remember has had a concentration of power users.

Median Twitter User has only 1 follower, as compared to Median FB User that has 100 friends


As Felix Salmon writes in Wired
“Twitter is becoming increasingly concentrated on a tiny core of power users. It’s less and less a distributed mode of many-to-many communication, and more and more a broadcasting hub for the elite—a highly unequal place where their least-considered, Ambien-addled opinions get amplified to a global audience of millions.”

Power users are at core of every product and one must count them lucky to have lots of them, however defining your product roadmap on the basis of what power users want isn’t necessarily the best thing. Given the tricky spot in which Twitter finds itself in (chasing profits via monetising eyeballs and keeping power users happy) they have to make changes to the product that makes their revenue targets met without compromising the user experience much and without bloating the product with hundreds of settings.

PS: Snapchat is another example of challenges a company faces on being the other side of Power User dynamics. 

When products are at mercy of power users

Delhi Tweetup 2018: A Trip Down The Memory Lane

The last time I met folks from Twitter was around 8-9 years ago. After a long gap the so called “Tweetup” happened again when a bunch of Twitter users met at a quaint restro-bar ‘Chateau De Pondicherry’, in Delhi on Saturday, 8th September.

The idea behind having a ‘Tweetup – Twitter User Meetup’ was to meet and get to know people in real that you interact with on Twitter and also to meet some new folks who are also Twitter users.

Tweetups were a rage globally in 2007-08 and continued to be popular for a few more years. Back then, power users (and later by companies & social media agencies) used to organise the events and promote them heavily online. Since Twitter was also gaining attention among media folks , such events also used to get coverage in Print media which further helped spread the word on Twitter.

Image result for delhi tweetup
A Tweetup I attended while at Slideshare


It’s always great to meet folks you’ve only interacted with online, in person and make friends. The fact that such events are organised organically by the community is fascinating.

User Communities are a powerful force. In case of Twitter, one can argue that it’s because of users love for the platform and the powerful connections/networks that user built on it that Twitter could survive the 2007-2008 ‘fail whale’ days.

Twitter’s Error Message (Now Discontinued)


For the unfamiliar, Twitter was having massive issues in scaling their service between the end of 2007 and 2008. The service used to be give a lot of errors frequently and the error message (show above) was a common sight. Apparently a user ‘Nick Quaranto’ coined a term for this error message ‘Fail Whale’ that quickly caught on. You can read more about the history of ‘Fail Whale’ here 

Among a few others, we also tried to leverage this situation to promote a product called Kwippy that we were building. A remarkable thing (Growth-Hack?) that we did to quickly gather attention was let Kwippy users send a Direct Message to their Twitter contacts inviting them to Kwippy. This worked beautifully well and we acquired thousands of users in a month 

Kwippy Invite sent as a DM to Twitter Users


Here’s a short Tweetstorm I did on How Twitter used to Look in 2007 and how it has evolved since

On a closing note, Twitter has been one of my favourite products on the web. I’ve met some really nice people via Twitter, made great friends and have learned a lot of interesting stuff. 

How Twitter Looked In 2007


Some Pics from Yesterday’s Tweetup

‘The Early Comers’ Lot
‘The Mid-Time’ Lot
‘The Last To Leave’ Lot


PS: If you attended the tweet-up and maintain a blog, ping me and I’ll link to it

Twitter Android App: Beauty is in the detail

I’ve been a Twitter user for about 6+ years and have started accessing Twitter via their Android app a few months back. Not surprisingly my usage of Twitter has grown manyfold since I’ve moved from Tweetdeck to Android app, and frankly the reasons are obvious.

1) Great app
2) Continuous availability/access

The android app for twitter is one of the most beautifully (think usability) designed apps. It has just the right buttons at the desired places, most intuitive functionality and easy on the eye. Here’s a little example of the nifty app’s detailing

Twitter Android App - Timeline

As you can see, the timeline view has app the possible things a user would want to do

General – Most Used (Excluding replies, discovery etc)

  1. Compose a tweet
  2. Search
  3. Follow someone

Pertaining to a tweet in Timeline

  1. Reply to a tweet
  2. Retweet a tweet
  3. Favourite a tweet

Now all these are great but an extra case comes for Retweets. Not only would I want to interact with the tweet but I might also want to follow the person whose tweets are being RTed

Timeline

Yes, that little highlighted icon is what caught my attention. Here ‘Chris Messina’ who I follow, RTed a tweet from Samantha (whom I don’t follow). and Twitter’s app cleverly shows a tiny icon along these tweets which lets users follow the person whose tweets are being RTed. A quick click on this and you are done

Follow the RTed person

That’s a nice example of putting relevant features beautifully without affecting the user experience. I’d love to talk more about the app sometime.

Understanding Twitter’s Discovery Problem

I like many of you, am an internet junkie i.e I spend more waking hours of my day on it than off. I started using Twitter in 2007, a few months after it’s launch and have happened to stuck with it for FIVE long years with steady unswerving loyalty. Not just this, thanks to the tweetdeck (a twitter client) I have it open on my system all the time. Among other things Tweetdeck allows me to manage multiple accounts(my personal acc @mayankdhingra and the @dialabook account), track keywords/hashtags among other things.

So via these 2 accounts I follow close to 2,000 people and have access to at least 3 keywords which I track. As you can imagine, it makes for enormous amount of data in my TL’s (Twitter Timelines) and as expected it gets overwhelming at times. But, that’s not the worst part for me. The worst part is that I like some other information/content junkie can’t have enough of sites/blogposts/news etc and thus I feel bad about not being able to fish out interesting/useful content from my timeline.

Yesterday after coming back home at  3:30 AM or so when I logged on twitter and tried to skim the TL, I found this interesting(thought not much useful yet) website  for tracking multiple couriers, given my business it will come in quite handy. Similarly while checking TL of someone I found this gem for indian indie music.

Think about it, if I weren’t to go and proactively check out past tweets, I wouldn’t have been able to find these, not in the near future at least and this is what pains me.

Discovery(content or otherwise) can happen in two ways

  1. Planned  (Organized/Structured)
  2. Accidental (Random)

If I log onto a particular blog/site everyday for news it is a planned way to discover content (applicable offline too), if I have subscribed to a newsletter it’s planned discovery. However, if someone whom I follow on twitter, RT’s an interesting link and I am online and it appears in my TL it is accidental or random. The major reason I have stuck on twitter despite all the weird ADSD people and their antics is Content and Twitter is by far the best place to get the content dope.

While we all try our best to plan to get the content we’d like to read, it’s the accidental discovery that interests me more. Though by nature this is random and in a way that’s it’s beauty. Out of nowhere you get something that could have an impact. For sake of perspective

  1. Scope for Planned Discovery:
    Source : 1- 100 (upper limit) blogs/sites
    Average Posts/Day on these sources: 5-20(upper limit)
    Total posts/stories accessible: 2,000

  2. Scope for Unplanned Discovery:
    Number of people I follow(from my personal account): 500 or so
    Number of people they follow: 300 or so
    Number of weblinks that a person shares in a day: 5
    Total posts/stories accessible: 500*300*5 = 75,00,00

Depending on my usage(or active usage) of Twitter, I discover less than 0.01% of all content available (Think of the stuff I am missing while I type this sentence)

However, like in other aspects of life I want to be able to control this discovery and try to  bring some method to the madness. I mean, why should I miss really interesting stuff just because I wasn’t scanning my TL and writing this blogpost when somebody tweeted it or how can I increase my chances of finding out stuff about my areas of interest? This is precisely the  Twitter’s Discovery Problem  I am talking about. It’s like a river stream in which I can swim anytime and come out anytime, but what happens when I am not swimming or even when I am there.

How does the relevant content find you and not the other way around?

One of the ideas which a Tarun had was to have an app that rates various links being shared in one’s Timeline based on the number of RT’s it got, so that we get to see what’s popular (weblinks) in our TL’s. Interestingly, before he could find time to built the app, twitter started doing this themselves in their daily newsletters

The problem is twin fold

  1. How to get access to a bigger source of content
  2. How to filter the content for quality and personal preferences

Some top of the head ideas

  1. Further simplify the process of sharing content both on and off twitter. I see a post on iPhone app design and I know 5 people in my network would love it but how to share this with them?  (Think email, think tagging,
    think hashtagging etc)
  2. Sticky tweets: I find something interesting and want most people who read my tweets to be able to see it not just when I tweeted but also for the entire day. How about having that tweet appear on top of my TL and not get hidden in my stream. Sometweets could also appear differently visually/design wise
  3. A hashtag discovery engine: There are tonnes of hashtags people create daily, a smaller subset of this happens in our timelines too. What if people were to use hashtags more and then there’s a page which has a hashtag cloud. The most popular hashtags appear BIGGER AND BOLDERwhile less popular ones  not so. That’s a brand new way to discover content based on how people in my network(or otherwise) tag it.PS: No, this is not the same as twitter trends you genius.
  4. Favorite Tweets: This is undeniably one of the most underused and undervalued feature of twitter, what if we could also share stuff people favourite more prominently? If 50 people in my TL have favourited I might as well would want to check it out

These are just some of the ideas I could think of while writing this blog post but I am sure there’s a lot of value that can be unlocked here.

You could have just missed this post, had it not been for accidental/random discovery. Think about it…

Twspotting

Choose Life. Choose a Job. Choose a
Career. Choose a family. Choose a
Fucking sleek handheld device. Choose
a GPRS connection. Choose a Handle.
Choose a Bio. Choose a DP. Choose
complete strangers to follow. Choose to
be followed by loser lurkers.Choose to
update every tiny fucking bit about
yourself. Choose to Twitpic. Choose to
mention. Choose to DM.Choose
Tweetdeck.  Choose Hootsuite. Choose
Twitter for iPhone,  Blackberry,
Android and Mac. Choose to  flood
other’s timelines with Pinterest,Instagram,
Foursquare updates. Choose not to
google before coming up with grade 6
questions and asking people to RT it.
Choose no  passion. Choose no sleep.
Choose followers over real friends. Choose
Follower Count. Choose tweeting over
blogging. Choose talking over listening.
Choose Klout  Score  over IQ,EQ. Choose
Mentions. Choose RTs. Choose to thank for RTs.
Choose FFs. Choose DIY and wondering who
the fuck are you on a Friday night. Choose
sitting on that couch watching mind-numbing,
spirit-crushing tweets in your TL, stuffing
fucking junk food into your mouth.
Choose Trends, Choose Hashtags. Choose an
almost-fanatical devotion to sharing,
pruning your following list, checking
every tweet made while you were away.
Choose five year old DPs that make
you look appealing. Choose to change DPs
every 2 days. Choose to suck up to
Celebs & Achievers. Choose to Follow
and then Unfollow. Choose to Block and
Report Spam.  Choose to add people to a
random list.Choose to snoop into who is
talking to whom. Choose rotting away at
the end of it all, pishing your last in a
miserable home, nothing more than an
embarrassment to the selfish, fucked up
brats you spawned to replace yourself.

Choose your future. Choose life…

But why would I want to do a thing like that?

I chose not to choose life. I chose somethin’ else.

I chose Twitter

(Inspired from Trainspotting, Adminspotting, Pyspotting and my Love and Hate for Twitter)

Get Rich or Die Tweeting!!

It’s been a long while since I last wrote a blog post and that’s precisely the reason why I am here. Suddenly realized that I(too) have a blog which despite me hating it, has been neglected for a long while. While making a comeback, what’s easier than a rant :D.

I’ve been using twitter for a fairly long time now, almost from the month(or so) it was launched. Despite being using it for that long a period and having my twitter stream open most of the day I’ve never  tweeted a lot, and by ‘a lot’ i mean excess of a dozen fairly distributed tweets a day. Different people have different definitions and clearly for some 10-12 tweets isn’t much. At times I wonder about people who tweet a lot(say 25-35 times a day or more) and mostly end up judging them(not the best thing to do but). What are they like in professional life, in real life(assuming they have one)?

I see lots of wannabe entrepreneurs using twitter heavily to network, RT others tweets, sharing links etc or asking for things which Google could answer better and faster. Then there’s a bunch of what I call “Micro Celebs”, the celebrities of the world of 140 characters whose only claim to fame is there number of followers on twitter or how many achievers or real life celebrities follow them back there. What’s amazing is that these people continue to Tweet/RT the same old things, they used to when they started an year or two back. But luckily what works for them is the fact like search traffic on the internet, there’s always enough audience for them on Twitter, which probably explains why the ones who tweet a lot tend to have more followers.

Most people in my TL who tweet a lot work for some or other company and start tweeting almost the minute they reach their office and continue till the time they head back home. I wonder if they tweet this much and this frequently, how do they get any work done at all. But then,as I’ve seen and experienced myself, you don’t need to get a lot of work done in a big MNC to survive.

Anyways I feel some people(ambitious ones at least) should spend a little less time tweeting about what they are eating/drinking/feeling and instead think how addicted they have become and the things they can get done in that time..

You Social, We Social

With more and more people from India jumping the Social Media bandwagon, local brands are not standing on the edges anymore and have slowly started to test the Social Media waters. Reliance  Mutual Fund seems to be a new kid on the block. I happened to get the following mail from them yesterday

“Accept Button”?
Curious, I tried to check out what they had to offer and here’s what how things stand. The link takes you to their MF site that has the same icons in the tiniest size possible in the most invisible place possible


And here’s what you get when you click the icons

Facebook:

Twitter:

Orkut:

These screenshots pretty much tell the Social Media story for Reliance MF, which is so typical for most companies that are trying to be there but are no where near the optimum experience. It will take them some time and effort to understand there’s more to Social Media than reposting links and hopefully they’ll get hang of things before they run into a Nestle Like crisis

Twitter and The Irony of Social Media

Amongst all this hype of Twitter and how tons of companies use it for customer service etc it never really occured to me that how Twitter isn’t doing anything noteworthy to interact with its customers and offer them support/help.

Though there is an account http://twitter.com/twitter, people using it never talk to Twitter users.