Twitter introduce the Follow Button | Hacker News Reader

Twitter introduce the Follow Button

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72 pointswlll26 comments

I think this means Twitter has peaked. As in now they're trying hard to get existing users to "do more" (follow more people) because there's not many people signing up anymore. It's not like following people has been hard previously.

In exactly the same way that Facebook now doesn't have many people signing up, so instead they desperately keep shoving "People you may know!" at you, even though you've never heard of Ima Stalker before.

User acquisition will always peak at some stage for most companies (the universe being the total number of people with access to the internet), so the attempt drive more usage is not surprising.

I do believe, though, that Twitter has lost its way since end 2009 and are largely making stuff up as they go along. It is also fair to assume that they will have pressures to ramp up monetization as they run out of time to bridge the gap between potential and actual revenues. Such is the curse of an insanely high valuation.

agreed [when are the points coming back - 2600 to 1600 is a pretty clear vote]

It was a poll, not a vote. pg is going to do what he wants.

Facebook has recently hit 700m users. How do they not have "many people signing up"?

I should have said "as many" - the stampede they had isn't there anymore.

How is this different than the follow button used on @Anywhere? http://dev.twitter.com/anywhere/begin

EDIT - It seems the flow is a little different. The user doesn't have to connect to the site first; it's just a one-click thing if you're already logged in. Pretty cool, except it seems a little buggy if you have SSL enabled on your Twitter account.

I had some issues rendering the follow button with HTTPS only enabled too. After a couple of page refreshes it seemed to start working.

This will be nice for those of us who use twitter as simply a news stream rather than a social tool. If I like a blog, I'd rather click the follow button on the blog itself rather than looking up the username and doing it through the twitter profile page.

What advantages are there for using twitter rather than RSS for this purpose?

Nobody uses RSS. I know because I struggled for months to build a more understandable feedreader (http://readwarp.com).

Oh come on. We've had this discussion about RSS before (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2060298 was the last big one), and plenty of people are using it in some capacity.

Perhaps I should have rephrased: few people use RSS. Orders of magnitude fewer than those using twitter. Do you agree?

An order of magnitude fewer people use RSS than use Twitter, but fewer people use Twitter for the use case that RSS serves than use RSS for that purpose.

I disagree. I think more people get their news from Twitter by following people they want to receive news from. What's more, the number of such people grows everyday, far faster than for RSS.

I know what's your point, but I do use rss constantly and I don't find your page very usable, so maybe that's not the problem with your app.

Yeah it was intended for people who don't understand RSS (or who, like me, subscribe to 800 feeds. The problems are the same at both ends of the spectrum).

And yes I'm sure there's lots wrong with it. I built a recommendation system, but I stopped hacking on it when I realized that people liked a story more if I lied that their friend shared it. That's what twitter has: social proof.

what I wanted to say is, your app needs a designer's touch. f.ex. http://goodnoows.com/ has a nice feeeling (although I don't use it, partly because I even can't import my netvibes opml in there)

Yeah that's valid, thanks for the opinion.

I also built http://hackerstream.com, so this is a more general problem with my design skills.

I don't have opml import either, but if you mail me your opml I'll set you up with an account (email in profile; let me know what username you want)

I've found that many companies use RSS as an organizational format behind-the-scenes, but no consumers actually use it.

The Follow button uses Twitter's "web intents" that have been available for a while now (http://dev.twitter.com/pages/intents).

You can also use web intents to do things like compose, reply, retweet, or favorite a tweet.

It's a little slicker than intents since it's one click when you're logged in. It dumps you to the normal intent page when not logged in, though.

Weird that they have an option to choose a language rather than just detecting the language of the browser and automatically translating the button.

I think it makes more sense to have the button match the language of the page content. It would be a bit jarring to see a single Japanese button on an otherwise English page.

Also, different button sizes can destroy layouts. Consider Facebook: "Like" in German becomes "Gefällt mir"...

It's just a button, is this really worth the hoopla? I find it funny how Twitter can make the deal out of the most ordinary thing, like Fail Whale and of course the "Follow Button".

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