Keyvan Nayyeri

These days it’s hard to find someone who doesn’t know about Twitter as a social networking status updating site mainly founded in 2007 with the very simple and basic idea to let people share their status on the web with 140 characters and follow others’ updates.

I was among the first group of users who appeared on Twitter and have been continually tweeting for almost three years to now, so I’ve been able to witness the progress of the site and the way it evolved.

The idea behind this service was very simple that had been tried by some other sites before, but Twitter was able to gather a reasonable number of known people to incorporate because it had a very simple and basic structure, and was founded by some of the well-known names on the web. In this while many rivals have appeared to challenge this success but none of them could go so far.

As many other people have stated already, in my opinion over half of the Twitter’s success was related to its simple idea and implementation that despite the technical issues in all these years, has helped it survive and get more users. This simple core allowed developers and other companies to build services and sites to complement the basic structure and make it suitable for specific applications, and inspire it as a general platform for content publishing for various applications; therefore, a diverse group of users benefited from the service whether for personal updates, entertaining stuff, technical matters, or anything else.

Like any other service or site, Twitter had its own progress. From a perspective, there were two waves of progress for Twitter: the first wave was the appearance of new users as individuals, companies, or authorities, and the second wave was the addition of new features by Twitter leadership to improve it or by adjunct services or client applications to simplify a task for the users. Most of the features added to the core service/site were inspired from these third party tools and projects that could gain a widespread popularity among users.

Both these waves had a good progress and quickly took Twitter from a very lower point to somewhere that is now a de facto standard of online communication among many individuals, colleagues, companies, media, and politicians. I can exemplify this by pointing to the main role of Twitter in post-election events in Iran or its usage for communication between the American nation during the last presidential election. Likewise, it’s used widely to share the news, opinions, and interesting updates about some events such as Microsoft, Apple, or Google conferences.

On the other hand, as I had written before, Twitter and micro-blogging came to challenge blogging and had their obvious impact on the frequency and quality of blogging and online publishing for almost everybody around the world.

However, despite all these matters, recently I came to the conclusion that Twitter has begun to worsen, and is slowly losing its active role on the web, and that’s the reason for me to write this blog post.

I think that there are three main threats challenging the future success of Twitter:

• Development of the service and appearance of more users, specifically ordinary people, on the site without considering a good mechanism to maintain the privacy and quality.
• Leaving the simple nature of the service by implementing some new features by Twitter leadership/developers.
• The advent of Twitter spammers and spamming on the site specifically in the trending topics.

The Number of Users - A Double-Edged Sword

The first and foremost threat for Twitter is the number of users! With almost no exception all the social networking sites founded during the Web 2.0 era had a similar progress starting from a lower point, evolving with a good speed by adding good features and attracting users, and stopping at a higher point, then slowly losing the quality. The only exception that I can note is Facebook and I’ll explain why.

Apparently the number of users is a very important factor in the success of a social networking site (even though I personally consider the level of education and sophistication of the users as the primary factor), so all these social networking sites compete to get more and more users on board. This isn’t necessarily bad because it brings a wider community of people to contribute and improve the level of communication and information sharing. But if not handled in a good way, this also has its own drawbacks that even can drive the whole community to a bad point.

Usually social networking sites begin with a small group of users that are often technical people and community leaders. These users are innovative, sophisticated, and well-aware of the culture of online life, so they communicate wisely and take the site to a better point. When new users, that are mostly more ordinary people, come to such sites, less or more, they lack that level of sophistication and awareness and it can have a huge impact on the quality of the content. If the site administrators don’t handle this wisely, it can cause the growth of mushroom-like groups of users who disturb the site. I think that everybody can notice this on many of the social networking sites such as the first-wave sites like Orkut or middle-wave communities like MySpace.

I believe that the best way to prevent such issues on a social networking site is to isolate users to some degree, so they let each other communicate if and only if they’re interested to do so. In other words, a powerful privacy management mechanism can maintain the independence of users on a site, so even if someone is bothersome, he or she bothers his or her friends/contacts only. I believe that this is the main reason for Facebook that has let it continue its growth and success. Facebook allows all users to have full control on their privacy settings and share certain information with their friends.

In my experience (that is easily provable by reviewing the history of social networking sites) the number of users is a double-edged sword that if controlled and managed, can help a site succeed, otherwise, it becomes the main weapon against the site, itself!

Unfortunately, Twitter lacks a good mechanism to allow its users to maintain their privacy. While I’m a big advocate of simplicity in the core service and site (as I’ll explain in a moment), I strongly believe that the privacy is the only area that mandates a lot of features even complex features. Being able to make something public or private/protected is not enough! Here I note that obviously the type of privacy settings would be different from Facebook or other sites. For instance, I always wanted to be able to hide certain people that I’m following from the public eye to prevent some people from stalking (thank to Steven Smith for introducing me to this term).

Recently I protected my own Twitter account and removed many of my followers for this specific reason. Since then I’ve been rejecting most of the follower requests to keep a small but active group of followers for myself who aren’t possibly a threat to my privacy.

Complexity - Back to 90’s

In the introduction text I stated that simplicity was the key factor for the growth and success of Twitter but in the past couple of months they have forgotten this principle and have been adding some unnecessary features (in my opinion these features are redundant for the main site) with a very bad implementation. Two notable features are the Lists and the Retweet button. Not only these features aren’t necessary for the site, but also they’re implemented in a very ambiguous and complex way, so still I have difficulties in understanding which is which with each feature. In my honest opinion Twitter hasn’t made things complex. It has taken an step further and has returned to 90’s days of poor user experience needing a guide to teach each and every user what to do!

I’d like Twitter to be as simple as it was before, with a textbox that lets me write 140 characters of text only, and I’d like this service to be complemented by a rich API that allows me to expand this basic idea for anything I need. If I want to Retweet, then I can go and download from hundreds of clients that have much simpler and richer Retweeting features. If I want to categorize my contacts, I can go and use one of those clients or online services.

Basically, it doesn’t make sense to see Twitter leadership focusing on these redundant features while there isn’t a single day that all users don’t  see those funny errors. Why don’t they concentrate on scaling up the service to handle all the requests rather than adding new features? Isn’t it obvious that the former one has more priority?

Spamming - The Old Enemy of Content

The last main threat to the success of Twitter is our old friend, spamming. This one is the natural cause of this type of content publishing. There are various types of spam and tweeting has its own spam as short text messaging does. On Twitter there are two general types of spamming: one that follows many users to receive some mutual followers to publish advertisements for them, and another that uses the popular trending topics to promote something in front of thousands of eyes. These spam updates are slowly growing and disturbing the relevance of content.

The problem with Twitter is that it still doesn’t have a very effective mechanism to block these spammers and filter the content and solely relies on user reports. Of course, one technical difficulty is the length of Twitter messages that are short enough to prevent automated anti-spam methods from filtering them.

Conclusion

All in all, I haven’t liked Twitter recently as I used to in the past. Different people have different expectations from the people they follow and from the general content. Some people are interested in technical discussions, while some others are interested to read technical news and links. There are some users who like to see personal status updates, but there are others who like a combination of different types. There are even people who just want entertaining images, videos, and jokes!

I’m not very interested in those personal status updates even though I don’t reject them all, but there are some users who salt it!

Besides, in my understanding the usefulness of live event reports is lowered on Twitter as there are more people who repeat something over and over. One instance was this recent PDC09 event where I was witnessing something repeated by many people. Believe me, it becomes boring at some degree! I’m lucky to follow a very limited group of community leaders only!

To summarize my discussion I have to say that Twitter needs to revisit its new strategies, otherwise I can’t imagine a better future for this site. You, as dear reader, may argue this and oppose to my statements here but usually such predictions rely on experience, and only time can prove what is right and what is wrong.

As of my own Twitter account, I’ve been thinking about stopping it and continuing everything on my Facebook profile where I’ve been so active recently. I think that tweeting doesn’t have much value for this world while I and many other people can save our time and effort to use them for more beneficial tasks.