Do this, Twitter

Twitter is not beyond repair. Many of us would love to work with what they’ve got — 300M users, a market cap in the many billions and the world’s attention is nothing to shake a stick at. What they’ve built and the impact it’s had is nothing short of tremendous, but the opportunity ahead is even bigger. As Twitter struggles to realize that opportunity, it presents just the kind of problem product people like to think about. “What would you do?” is how it goes, and you can learn a lot about a person’s approach from her answers, even if it’s infinitely easier said than done. Here are some of my own loose thoughts — I started to opine on Facebook (which I use far more than Twitter) in response to something else, then decided to bring it here. It’s not a detailed prescription and it’s not complete — just some higher-level thoughts.

Approach

There’s what I think Twitter should do, and then what I think Twitter should do once I’ve studied relevant metrics and considered user feedback and weighed development time against current business objectives and more. The latter is the right way to execute — the former is subjective, of course, and may run Twitter into the ground. But when responsible for a product, you absolutely need to incorporate your own ideas and intuition and vision. Have an opinion, then rigorously test your assumptions through minimum viable experiments. Prove things, then roll them out widely. Rinse and repeat, at a healthy clip. I’m not Jack, though, and I don’t have all the information his team does. I’m not an informed product manager at Twitter doing a full analysis — just sharing my opinions, mostly unvalidated.

Basic UX

I like the little tweaks Twitter has been making (like the various cards in your stream now, the simplifying of .@mentions, not counting media in the 140) — they are starting to add up and make a difference, but we need to see more and faster. There is so much to do with basic UX and I (seriously) think it should become more like Facebook in that regard — renaming Favorite to Like was long overdue but other little things like space between cards in the feed, make it easier to comment inline, reduce the button clutter, add labels like “Share” instead of an arcane RT icon, kill the repeating mail icon, etc.

> 140

I’d like the option to go beyond 140 — the brevity is more important for media than for consumers I think (as you can mitigate effects of longer posts for people with improvements to Twitter and signal-to-noise features) but it can be preserved by encouraging a <= 140 title or teaser.

Nuzzel

Twitter should buy Nuzzel. Or at least take some cues and incorporate some of their great ideas (most popular news amongst your friends or from specific influencers, auto-curated newsletters). Why should Twitter be just a pipe and let everyone else create value on top of it?

Channels

As for the big change: Facebook needs channels, where I can easily drop in and see the best of sports, fashion, tech or what have you — I’m glad to see Twitter doing more of this recently (look at a “stream” like this for example) but they need to do much more, e.g. extract the most popular stories (like Nuzzel!) rather than just show a bunch of tweets.

You could even extract other kinds of content like videos, and that would open up vertical opportunities like a videos-only section (like their Vine property, but integrated and broader), or using Twitter to find (and eventually register for?) events, or a live video section (integrate Periscope and call it Twitter Live). Curation and integration are beautiful things.

More channels

Beyond generic, machine-curated topic channels, allow human-curated channels. Let several Twitter influencers band together in a read-only channel. For example, the VC community could curate their own channel, which would include tweets (with “top tweets” and the like still applied) from their VC peers who have joined this channel. At first, maybe there’s one admin of the channel, and later some way to vote on who’s in or out.

This also means that later I could choose which channel(s) to send one of my tweets to. My followers might always see it in their main stream, and they’d see that it was shared to the specific channel, which they may already be in or perhaps now care to follow (read-only) or join (write to the channel). But folks following the specific channel would see it , whether they follow me or not — either eventually in a “top tweets” area on the channel’s page, or in the tab with the running live view of all tweets.

Channel admins and participants would all play a role in curating things, so there’s more of your relevant stuff in the channel, and less of what you had for breakfast: admins could remove off-topic content and ban repeat offenders, and the algorithm could help detect off-topic content via NLP and ML but also consider standard things like likes and flagged content. We could also give more weight to certain people in the context of certain channels, so that tweets from a certain chef who has a history of posting well-received stuff to the Cooking channel would be prioritized.

Richer profiles

Eventually, that chef becomes the third most influential in the Cooking channel, and we can learn that from her profile where we learn about her other interests too — for example she’s also influential in Seattle Cycling. People love displaying (most of) their interests and the causes they care about, and it’s an incentive to share too: “I just made made it to the top 5% in the cooking channel!”. With channels, I might add, we start to care less about total followers (does anyone count how many friends people have on Facebook?) and more about channels I’m most influential in. There’s also the incentive to not just broadcast to the world (most useful for the Trumps and Kardashians of the world, but not so much for the masses which is one reason Twitter is struggling with adoption), but actually contribute to a space where there’s a more intimate culture and context and etiquette.

Messaging

Done right, there’d soon be awesome channels that people want to share, even with their non-Twitter friends. Places where you can watch, and in some cases join, [authors, cooks, folks in your city who really love cycling, people who care about yoga] as they share and talk. But pulling together everyone’s tweets can still feel disjointed — most people don’t know that where Twitter gets really magical is in the ensuing conversations, the replies, especially between people you find really interesting.

So take a cue from messaging and Facebook comments and let the replies be mini-chatrooms where there’s some threading and structure but it’s live and in-context. Some channels are read-only so I can’t participate in that chatter, and some are open. Sure, something awesome about Twitter is that I can reply to Obama’s tweet just the same as anyone else, but let’s be realistic: it’s mostly an incoherent jumble. Let me tap on a tweet and see a conversation unfold, maybe participate in it, with the ability to see top comments or just a live running view. Here too, let it go >140, but creatively show <=140 to incentivize shorter comments even if they introduce a longer one.

Thinking further down the line, bots can be useful agents in-conversation. As Twitter evolves to feel like a more accessible, structured realtime messaging space, bots can be added to channels to do things like fetch some definition or sports scores or whatever. Lots more to that, but I digress.

Monetize

Channels also of course help Twitter monetize more effectively — to advertise to VCs and their followers, or celebrities and their followers, just target specific channels, or channels that self-identified within certain umbrella categories. Sure beats a hashtag, or trying to identify and target specific people or generic categories, like Twitter Ads currently offers.

With these improvements, Twitter is easier to grok and derive value from, and we can expect to increase new sign ups and engagement which ultimately leads to more revenue opportunities.

Rejoice

Grow up and become a bigger platform. There’s no shame in being like Facebook, that platform used by 1.6B people, where it makes sense, and don’t worry — it won’t become a Facebook. Facebook is still very much centered around friends and family, and Twitter still has a huge opportunity to be the place for your interests in a way that is accessible to many more people and that can be monetized far more effectively.

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