Comment by nhstanley | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nhstanley | Hacker News Reader

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Yea, I know it's a really tired subject, but twitter really needs a major overhaul from a usability perspective. I think they should keep the 140 characters as a limit for what is shown in peoples feeds, but the character limit should be much higher. This is particularly important when you get into a conversation with many people, and the handles start taking up most of your 140 characters (as Marc Andreessen recently pointed out). It's also really hard to follow conversations, and they get separated somewhat arbitrarily. You might scoff and say that this would basically facebook-ize twitter, but honestly I don't think that's a bad thing. Facebook is moving into twitter's space, so twitter shouldn't be be so slow to act or it will get eaten, IMHO.

Also, I use twitter to keep up to date on some of the industries I'm interested in, and while it's a great tool it's still frustrating sometimes, since there is a flood of info throughout the day. TweetDeck makes it better since I can group things by interest and triage depending on how much time I have. I guess you can do that with the web interface but I have never found it as natural as with Tweetdeck.

In similar lines here are my observations as a heavy business and personal user:

1. 140chars limit had a goal and philosophy which conflicts now with image attachment flood. Most "interesting" content is typed or pictured in the attachment and the 140char limit is simply worked around

2. Twitter UI is too clunky for what it does. No progress since 7 years I'm using it.

3. Twitter mobile apps don't work properly when mobile. You can't favorite, retweet or comment properly while in an unreachable zone. My 2008 hobby Android 1.1 app has a local queue to cope with remote updates, inserts and Twitter can't implement this?

4. Families aren't on Twitter. Friends to a certain degree. Colleagues to a certain degree. Celebrities/followers yes. Gamers no. Protestors yes.

5. Facebook, LinkedIn implemented the "follow" feature quite successfully.

6. Notifications work, Discover not much.

> Twitter UI is too clunky for what it does. No progress since 7 years I'm using it.

This. A million times this. I don't understand Twitter. I don't get what the hell they're thinking of, when they release (for example) the horrific design that is the Twitter desktop and Mobile apps. An incredibly common use case is to have more than one twitter account and switch between them. Go try it.

A bunch of people brought out superior apps, and Twitter just killed them.

If this is representative of the thinking going on at Twitter, they are (deservedly) doomed.

Tweetbot has a good implementation of multiple accounts. Both on the Mac and iPhone.

I use Tweetbot on both platforms, but I don't think its implementation is good. Good to me would be a merged feed with tweets and mentions from all accounts, analogous to what I can do with email, IRC, instant messaging, etc.; maybe not the best for opsec, but more convenient for casual purposes than having to constantly switch between accounts.

Ah, different use cases. The way it works at the moment is what I was looking for, but I can see when it isn't suitable.

TweetDeck, which is owned by Twitter, handles it very well, too.

Twitter has what can be described as the organizational version of ADHD. They've had several changes of leadership and have had leaders who were primarily focused on other companies while guiding twitter. Jack Dorsey is an impressive person but do you think he could really give his full attention to Twitter while running Square?

The churn at the top is the best explanation I can find for some of the policy reversals we've seen (3rd party clients in, out, in again maybe sort of) and the somewhat random approach to business strategy. Twitter's core audience is a very desirable demographic but not one that's really going to react to in-stream adds at all positively. But twitter doesn't do some of the clever things it could with the firehose; and certainly doesn't use it to create secondary products that would be useful enough that businesses would pay for them.

> 140chars limit had a goal and philosophy which conflicts now with image attachment flood.

Sidenote, I always thought the goal and philosophy was invented after of the the technical limitation, which was that a tweet needed to fit into an SMS.

Agreed. I'm not a heavy Twitter user, but I'm not sure it's a good philosophy to force users to revise and revise until they get something unnaturally terse enough, after sacrificing precious space to ancillary items (at-mentions, or even hashtags) they can't necessarily control the length of.

I can see value in brevity, but when it's forced, it may actually impede communication. It gets hacked around anyways, with multi-part tweets, even by Twitter's own developer account[0]. At the least, there are tweet clusters, where each individual tweet may be a complete sentence but doesn't effectively convey the entirety of what the author meant, without reading the surrounding tweets (in reverse order, of course.) At those points, it would be saner to abandon the limit. Or maybe treat it as a one-way linkblog to other places for discussion.

[0] https://twitter.com/TwitterDev/status/530545195633618945

> Celebrities/followers yes.

Twitter is the new RSS, just less nerdy, basically.

That's a reasonable observation.

They could work on a conversation view, and to not count the @mentions in the character limit.

Counting @mentions in the limit also 'punishes' people with longer names.

But I guess if you didn't count @mentions in the limit you'd find people adding lots of people to a conversation in a spammy way. I'm not really sure how to fix that.

Perhaps there could be a meta-@mention that would include all previous recipients in a given conversation. But then how do you remove people from a conversation? Arggggh!

(Still, i've only thought about this for 2 minutes. I'm sure there's a way that makes sense if you spent more than 10 minutes working it through.)

You could treat the conversation as an endpoint that users have the option to subscribe to, and the @mentions as invitations.

From there you could also offer to exclude uninvited users from the conversation (maybe it is clearer to say, limit postings to the conversation view to people that have been @mentioned).

That's the whole point of hashtags. Just make a hashtag for your post, based on the date, originator, and serial number

>But I guess if you didn't count @mentions in the limit you'd find people adding lots of people to a conversation in a spammy way. I'm not really sure how to fix that.

Simple: cap the number of @mentions in a tweet at 5, or at 120 characters total.

Same for #tags — limit those to 5 or a total number of characters.

Yeah, that. Leading @mentions and trailing hashtags shouldn't count as part of the limit. If you still want to support SMS, just strip those, the reader doesn't need them.

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