Twitter seems to be repositioning itself as a rolling news operation. That’s not a surprise exactly, but it’s a shame.
Its new ‘Moments’ feature, so far only available in the US, seems to be a digest of the most tweeted about stories of the day. A bit like a Twitter version of Flipboard or Google’s Play Newsstand. (Being UK-based I’m sorry if that’s not a fair description of a feature I’ve not used. But that’s definitely what it sounds like.)
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| Twitter's 'Moments' feature |
As a new direction it seems like an admission of defeat from
the company – they’re giving up on trying to persuade more people to interact
with each other and want to be yet another online news source.
It’s not a surprise though.
Despite the large amount of accounts out there, there’s a significant
proportion of people who have never really used it at all. And daily use is on the wane with a lot of
people who to check it every minute, let alone daily. Meanwhile, Facebook continues to thrive. As an experiment, post exactly the same thing
on Twitter and Facebook – a random bit of silliness, a link to a news article,
whatever you like. I am willing to bet
that in most cases the level of interaction and debate with other people will
be much larger (and faster) on Facebook than on Twitter.
For most casual users of Twitter, if just one person replies
to your tweet these days, I’d say you’d be doing very well indeed.
That’s a shame. It’s
a company that used to thrive on millions of strangers interacting with each
other, discussing common interests with people from all around the world. It felt like a threat to Facebook at one
point. It was certainly cooler and
trendier than Facebook, which was yesterday’s news. (I’m aware that using words like cool and
trendy makes me look like last week’s
news. I’m in my mid-30s with a baby on
the way. Sue me.)
The Twitter experience has changed a lot since I
joined. It seems a lot less irreverent
and amusing, for instance. The balance
between humour and silliness/current affairs and politics is a lot less
balanced, on my timeline at any rate.
It’s news, famous people, journalists, more news, interspersed by the
odd lonely and ignored tweet from a ‘normal’ user, sitting there forlornly
unretweeted and unfavourited. I suppose
I could change my experience by unfollowing some people and finding some new
followers. But the novelty’s worn off
now and that feels like it would be a chore I haven’t got the time for.
Twitter nowadays feels more corporate, more adult.
That’s because it is. A lot of teenagers
have moved on to things like Snapchat and other things that parents and
politicians don’t use. The journalist
Grace Dent said that when your boss follows you on Twitter, Twitter is over for
you. Well if you’re a teenager and your
parents sign up I expect this is even more accurate.
But leaving that to one side, the democratic feel of Twitter
vanished when a Twitterstocracy emerged.
There was at some point a distinct drift to the dominance of power users
(a mix of already famous journos, celebs, comedians and politicians with a
handful of early adopters who gained prominence through heavy use and controversial/witty
tweeting). People stopped following new
people as much and settled for the groups they already had. (If you are a casual user, ie not using
Twitter to promote your business, when was the last time you gained a load of
followers who weren’t real life friends or spam?)
New users joining after this point would realise quickly
they weren’t going to get followers very quickly without putting in a lot of
effort. Their voices just weren’t going to be heard unless they turned into
attention seeking controversy machines or were a company that could employ
dedicated social media experts to create an online presence.
Even people who have been on Twitter for quite some time find
that their tweets will be read by a relatively small amount of people if by
anyone at all. More and more people have become passive users, reading but not interacting,
not creating, sometimes only
promoting. And even at promotion,
without a lot of followers it’s not actually that great. For instance, I have always posted links to
this blog on Twitter and I can tell from my stats that I don’t get any traffic
from Twitter anymore. I used to, but not
anymore, nothing. I get more from Google
+ for God’s sake! Whether that’s because
I don’t tweet enough on Twitter to have a presence on it I don’t know, but it’s
not really encouraging me to continue to use it as a promotional tool.
It feels like the glory days of Twitter being a fun place to
natter and chatter have gone, except perhaps when there’s a live television
event. As a company it is being
steered towards having a serious
purpose, which isn’t as fun.
Loads of my freemium apps have started getting adverts
telling me to use Twitter for all the latest news. This morning I had a Twitter
alert about some “latest news” being retweeted.
I opened the link which went to a 2007 Guardian article about Martin
Amis’ comments on Islam. Hmm. Might not be using Twitter for all the latest
news just yet…
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