Marco Arment on the latest ridiculous addition to the official Twitter client for iPhone:
It’s a news ticker limited to one-word items, lacking any context, broadcasting mostly topics that I don’t understand, recognize, or care about. It’s nonsensical. At worst, it can offend. At best, it…
Twitter is struggling hard to define itself and its value to society. It’s a difficult problem, and a pressing one: the global perception of twitter is still that it’s a way for vain, boring people to bother each other with inane status updates. It can be that, or it can be way, way more.
Promoting Trends can only make this worse. There’s literally no gold to be mined there, no catchy, appealing, cash-drawing pitch for the service. The average of everyone’s everything is destined to be profoundly uninteresting.
I don’t know what Twitter should focus on instead, and it doesn’t look like they do, either.
I didn’t install the dickbar until the current version, so I had an easier time learning to ignore it right away. But it seems that the simple concept of targeted trends and promotions might be the thing that easily fixes this.
Twitter has already demonstrated an impressive ability to make connections within each of our networks (seeing who you and I follow and are followed by in common is one of the more useful pieces of information they’ve offered recently), so I’d think they can probably suss out with some margin of accuracy what trends and things are relevant to my social circle, so I’ll never again miss a #White People Stink buried in a swamp of sports mania.
I’d hazard a guess that this is all on the roadmap, indelibly etched on a whiteboard somewhere at Twitter HQ.
Targeted. It’s the way of the future (of 2006, but still, the future).
Targeted trends was the first place my brain went when I read Marco’s article as well.
Then I started to think about the problems that are begining to emerge as the “social graph” (shudder) interposes itself between individuals and the big wide world. Iron blinders are being built into our search tools as they learn what our interests are.
Sense advertising drives the revenue models of search and social networking companies, targeting helps them more than it helps the end user. It helps those companies serve up content that keeps users eyeballs glued and ads they are likely to interact with.
What these models don’t lend themselves to is discovery of content outside of the user’s social graph (double shudder, I hate the term, but it is useful here). Instead of exploring new frontiers of communication, the ad driven model is driving new media to adopt the worst tendencies of the old: pandering to the audience.
[Which isn’t to say that the dickbar necessarily broadens horizons either.]
(Source: marco)
