Six Things Jack Dorsey Can Do To Fix Twitter
Re/Code is reporting that Twitter is expected to do company-wide layoffs next week as part of Jack Dorsey’s plan to make a leaner, more efficient platform. This news comes on the heels of Twitter’s biggest product launch in recent memory with Twitter Moments.
To a hardcore Twitter user like myself, it’s obvious that the blue bird is going through a tumultuous time. Putting aside the problems it has with Wall Street, the platform has all but turned its back on its most dedicated users in an effort to make a more user-friendly and easy to learn experience.
Jack Dorsey returning as full-time CEO gives me some hope that the initial vision of Twitter can be restored and the service that many of us have been using for years can reclaim its glory. In an effort to make Jack’s job easier, I’ve outlined some easy things that can be done right away to make Twitter great again.
- Bring Back Inline Instagram Photos
The war with Facebook is stupid; put aside the politics and stop making a crappy user experince that requires tapping a link to see an Instagram photo. Twitter photos will never overtake Instagram — just accept it and move on. - Fix the Parity Problem
Twitter has a huge issue with feature parity. Twitter Moments was rolled out to phones this week, however at the time of writing this, it’s still not on iPad. Branded emojis don’t work on Tweetdeck, “quote tweet” feature is finally making its way through Twitter’s app ecosystem after many months and the native Mac app is a stripped down joke . Get it together and give users the same experience regardless of how we access Twitter. - Stop Shunning Developers
Twitter built its following off the backs of 3rd party developers. This relationship soured when Twitter tried to push everyone onto its official platform to monetize. The problem is 3rd party developers have far superior and innovative apps than Twitter. Remove the idiotic restrictions that are stifling innovation. Find a way to incorporate your advertising revenue products into your API and there will be a win/win for Twitter, developers and users. - Don’t Remove the 140 Character Limit
There are rumors that Twitter is going to remove the 140 character limit. I remain skeptical that this is true — I think what’s more likely is certain elements like URLs won’t count against the character count. I’m okay with freeing up the limit so we have 140 actual characters to use that’s not diminished by URLs, but flat-out removing the 140 character limit will kill the core DNA of Twitter and could really alienate the most hardcore users. - Create an Actual Mute Option
Twitter’s “mute” option is pointless. As it stands, if you mute someone within Twitter’s official apps, you block all their tweets from your timeline unless you manually go in and unmute them. Anytime I want to mute a user, it’s usually for a brief time, such as a few hours or a day. Twitter needs to take a tip from the fantastic 3rd party app Tweetbot on how to do muting correctly. If you’re following someone but muting them for good, why are you even following them in the first place? - Hide the Number of Followers From Public View
I’ve long felt that the number of followers a user has should be hidden from public view. Millennials love Snapchat and one of the reasons it has exploded with this demograph is the lack of peer pressure they feel using it. Snapchat doesn’t display user’s stats publicly so it removes the pressure to get likes and followers that exists on Instagram and Twitter. No good comes from making follower information public for 90% of Twitter’s users. Keep these figures private and force people to focus on meaningful conversations and not trying to artificially inflate a meaningless number. I would also expect to see a decrease in spam accounts trying to sell fake followers as well. In fact, Twitter could create a “pro” version for that makes follower count and other engagement analytics available to marketing and communications agencies which could be a nice piece of supplemental income.
Are there any low-hanging fruit features that you’d like to see included or fixed that I missed? Let me know. Until then, I’ll see you on Twitter!
