What the hell is Twitter doing?
Posted by: Fidji SIMO in Blogging, Innovation, Internet/Technology
A few weeks ago I wrote an article about visualization tools where I said that these tools must either have a clear artistic purpose or must be really useful by improving understanding. Twitter blocks is none of them. I tried to understand the basic principles of this visualization, and it appears that it only allows you to see the timeline of the friends who have updated their Twitter feed recently. I didn’t even understand why some blocks are higher than others.
So why? With all the improvements that need to be done on Twitter, and the limited resources they have, why choose to develop a useless visualization tool, which brings nothing more to the core use of Twitter and which could have been developed by some artists via Twitter API?
The list of things to do is long enough: create groups to send direct messages (done by Twitter group but should be integrated to Twitter), create some tabs for different groups of people you are following, improve their people search engine…
Any idea what this visual app brings to Twitter? Did I miss something?
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Don’t forget that this is not the only new feature recently introduced on twitter. The other noteworthy one was the people-finder, which was very much needed.
Take these two together and Twitter is clearly just trying to increase its user-base, for whatever reason. It could be that they want to launch new services that make money per user, or increase the valuation of the business to sell it off.
Hi Vince,
I totally understand your point, but especially since the people finder was just released, I think that they should have focused in improving this great tool rather than launching Twitter blocks.
I don’t know if the latter was really time consuming, but if it was I just say that they should have focused on something else, because I don’t think that the buzz around Twitter blocks will be sufficient to attract new users. Especially since these users will probably be disappointed by this visualization tool.
Well they hired the guy who did the digg labs visualisations, so I have faith that more will come on that front.
Oh really? I didn’t know that. Digg tools are great, so I hope the next to come will be better.
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