Forum Moderators: rogerd
Twitter will unveil a new main homepage next week at Twitter.com, said co-founder Biz Stone, in order “to better show who we are.”In an interview with BoomTown this afternoon, Stone said the current page is essentially confusing to the masses of people who come to it, made aware of the microblogging service by the massive media hype it has received over the last year.
People arriving at the new main homepage will be greeted by a search box, information on Twitter trends and a panoply of more specific information about how they can use Twitter.
It's now showing trending topics, today's trends, and this week's trends.
Share and discover what’s happening right now, anywhere in the world
My first two thoughts were "no" and "why?". I mean, I could try to discover what's happening in Japan I suppose but I wouldn't be able to read a single word... i'm not Japanese.
Ahh well.
I guess I still don't know how to use Twitter . . BUT I can SEE how Twitter can be used to market, promote, spam, . . . AND the new interface offers some really prime promotional real estate to target.
Sign me up!? :(
[edited by: engine at 5:54 pm (utc) on July 29, 2009]
Here is my latest search for "Maytag washers":
1. Spam - some laundry company that keeps tweeting about it great service
2. Some post about maytag washer are racist, but the dryers are open-minded.
That's it. Two results. No value.
Unfortunately that is all the time most users are going to give a new search tool before moving on... They are trying to be more than a marketing tool, and I am not sure they have the data for it.
edit: whoa, after testing out the search to see if even adult words are being filtered (they aren't) I logged into my account. Upon logging in ALL of my recent tweets are filled with adult words. I though everyone on my list had fallen off their rocker for a moment until I realized the search results are somehow stuck to my home page too.
Twitter is over capacity.
Too many tweets! Please wait a moment and try again.
People I talk to, like the idea but don't really understand the entire interface.
They don't grasp where to use # and @. It isn't obvious. The tutorials on the web dwell on the obvious which needs no explaination.
Common questions are left unanswered like how to I find people to follow within a category and a location; how do I unfollow people etc.
Once people get comfortable with twitter it will be as pervasive as blogs.
I could try to discover what's happening in Japan I suppose but I wouldn't be able to read a single word... i'm not Japanese.
That's right! Because there are no Americans, Canadians, Irish, Scottish, Welsh, English, South Africans, Australians, New Zealanders, Gibraltarians (need I go on?) living or working anywhere in Japan. There are no English language newspapers in Japan. It is impossible to encounter anything at all in the English language anywhere in Japan. No books. No metro signs. Nothing. Also no-one English speaking ever goes on holiday to Japan and no English language news networks ever send reporters to Japan or have correspondents based there.
Come on. You know better than that. It's the 21st century. There is information in English on the Tokyo Subway just as surely as there is information in Japanese on the London Underground. You know this. I know you know this.</offtopic>
I rather like the new Twitter front page.
Thank heavens they got rid of that "What are you doing?" - that never should have been pushed as one of the top uses of Twitter.
That's the problem. Any niche that has money in it basically infests twitter with repetitive tweets containing links to pages. How do you fix this? Some have said by according authority to those with more followers. But that's nonsense when there are social media marketers who can get you five hundred new followers every few days for a sum.
In twitter I am reading someone's post to a another person that I am following. He has choosen to get the post from that person by following them. Here I am talking about public messages and not direct messages.
Spam as I understand it is a commercial message that a person gets that he does not want.
It could be spam or not but can only be labeled spam by the person the message was sent to. He may chose to unfollow that person. Are the followers of that person entitled to label someone else's messages as spam?
Consider a job boards send me a job listing. I am out of work and want to get the messages. I am following #job #jobs and #hiring. For the sake of the arguement, a hundred employed people are reading my messages (following me).
Is this message spam? Or, would those people calling it spam really just be trying to control the correspondence between two people?
That sounds logical to me and I agree.
However, that still doesn't address how twitter search can make it seem less spammy to individuals who are looking for genuine tweets, versus marketing tweets.
