#FixTwitterNotifications
Let me tell you a story. A user-story, as so many PMs love to tell. Keep track of how many times you cringe slightly.
My lovely mother uses Twitter. She doesn’t tweet much, but she wants to read the tweets from her family and friends. Over the years, thanks to Twitter’s endless suggestions about new people to follow, her timeline has become a huge pile of noise and sometimes she misses tweets from someone she really cares about.
My mother is a clever person. So what did she do? She enabled SMS notifications from 40404 for each account she truly wants to hear from. This somehow also enables “device-follow” notifications from the Twitter app.
(Definition sidebar: a “device-follow” is when you enable mobile notifications for a Twitter account so that you get a notification each time they tweet. You can enable/disable this by tapping the gear icon in someone’s profile in the app.)
My mom has enabled this for my account. Then I tweet. Then this happens:
Why would anyone enable 40404 SMS on an iPhone with the Twitter app?
Let me tell you why.
SMS Messages create a permanent, chronological record of all the tweets my mom wants to know about.
This is a pretty nice hack to keep a list of these tweets, but there are some problems here.
First, the beautiful image I tweeted shows up as a gnarly link.
Second, the link supplied with each SMS goes to the sender’s profile page on the mobile website. iOS’s Universal App Links don’t help here (as the mobile web urls aren’t registered with the app), but also even if that did work, what she really wants is to go to the tweet and not my profile.
Even if she taps the link, it leads here… and for some reason her mobile Safari was in Private mode, so she was not logged in to the site.
Once I switched it out of Private mode and into standard browsing, the link went here…
Why is my profile page so different between Private vs. Regular?
Who knows!
Is it confusing?
Very!
Why doesn’t she use the “Open in app” buttons?
Haha! I know several power-users that don’t even know about that button (and even so, it would only go to the profile, which misses the point).
Meanwhile, in the Twitter app, there is no way to create a permanent, chronological record of these device-follow tweets. Instead, there is a very broken and very frustrating way to interact with the Twitter app’s push notifications.
The Perils of Push
If you device-follow an account through the Twitter app, you will get a push notification each time that account tweets.
This seems ideal, until you realize how insanely impossible it is to close the loop on this notification flow.
Let’s say my mom needs to unlock her phone and do something else first before checking Twitter to read those tweets. Oops! Her lock screen notifications are gone, and now she can’t see them anymore.
“But wait! She has all her notifications in Notification Center!”
Right you are!
But… Notification Center is sort of a power-user thing, and not everyone knows about it or even how to access it. However, as soon as she opens even one of the Twitter notifications, the Twitter app instantly clears out all Twitter notifications from Notification Center! Poof! Gone!
Thus, she has no record or any idea of what other tweets she was going to read.
My dear, sweet mother just wants to read and fav… er, I mean, like my tweets. Is that so much to ask? Why is Twitter making this so hard?
One the one hand, the SMS trick is a pretty ingenious way to keep track of these tweets. On the other hand, it’s insane.
The Solution
There are a few potential solutions to this situation:
- Put the full link to the tweet in the SMS messages so that Universal App Links would work (not ideal because this would eat so many characters, and we still have to live in SMS land).
- Don’t clear all the Twitter notifications from Notification Center each time the app is foregrounded (also not ideal because this logic is complicated between the app and syncing between devices, and etc etc…)
But here’s the actual solution:
Put device-followed tweets in the Notifications tab of the Twitter app.
Seriously, this is the answer. I even want this for my feed. I device-follow several accounts that tweet infrequently, and I don’t want to miss them. If I see a notification and try to go back later in my home timeline to find it, good luck (and don’t even get me started on trying to navigate to someone’s profile within the app; that’s a subject for another day, but if you’re interested, I wrote a Twitter Bookmarks app to help solve this separate problem).
I get a lot of engagement on Twitter, but having these tweets in my Notifications tab would feel natural and convenient.
For my mom, who doesn’t tweet very often and gets little engagement, her Notifications tab would become a second feed of tweets that she really cares about, which is exactly what she wants.
So, Twitter, please help improve the lives of millions of your users by fixing this broken loop. Improve my life by not making me watch my frustrated mother use her phone, and improve my mother’s life by allowing her to see my beautifully image-laden tweets and give me those sweet, sweet likes.
Sincerely, — Chad, on behalf of his very tech-savvy but very frustrated mom.
P.S. If you also have this problem, share this post and tweet with the hashtag #FixTwitterNotifications — we can start a revolution!
P.P.S. I raised this issue passionately while I worked at Twitter, but nothing ever came of it. Meanwhile, each trip home is still spent trying to answer the question, “Why is Twitter so frustrating?”
P.P.P.S. Don’t even get me started on Lists. Lists are not the answer. Not only is it an abandoned feature, it wouldn’t actually solve the problem.
