Twitter as a tool, not network

Let me move away a bit from the fact whether twitter is a network or not. I like classify twitter in the same group as Del.icio.us, IFTTT and Github, as opposed to Facebook, Linkedin and Instagram.

The former are more of tools, and their users need to have some ability to hack into the system to get them work the way they want. Facebook organises the news in your timeline based on your interest, while twitter gives you Search and Hashtags to click on to find out the news you are looking for. Facebook and Instagram works best with someone passively spending time on consuming content, while twitter does require users to be active and treating it as a tool they can use however they want to satisfy their information needs.

Having that said, does it mean that one group of the two is better than the other. Well, I believe the latter is more scalable, is used by everyone and easier to monetise, a passive users will rarely do anything to circumvent ads, while active users may find her way to us her tools away from ads. Yet, still, twitter realised it is there to serve Journalists and maybe other areas in the future like the Internet of Things or so, yet, they didn’t do any valuable innovations in that direction for many years. All they do, is that they try to make the content there more similar to the content on Facebook, embedded images, cards, promoted tweets, etc. On the other hand, they are not embracing their tool nature enough, they make dealing with their API harder. I expected twitter to acquire Storify, or develop something similar where you can aggregate tweets about the same topic together, but they never did. I have never seen them working with the likes of NYT and the Guardian to develop new ways for twitter to be used by them, and by other journalists later on. We favourite stuff on twitter, then forget them. That’s because they had the feature, never though how to develop it further. Noway to search within your favourites, put labels on them or organise them by any mean.

I guess, twitter needs to either go back to its geeky roots or move on to become another Facebook, but now, it is neither this nor that.