6 posts tagged Twitter

Twitter recently introduced Local Trending Topics to tap into the pulse of your city.  It’s a step in the right direction for curating and displaying information that’s relevant on a local scale.  However, if you browse through the different local options, you’ll notice that the trending topics don’t change much.  They also don’t provide much insight or relevancy to their respective cities. For instance, the New York City trending topics don’t really tell me anything unique about NYC, and they’re remarkably similar to those of San Francisco and Chicago.  (Obviously Apple’s iPad announcement yesterday is helping drive these similarities - #itampon appears in every local trending topic.)

Twitter does a great job on tapping the pulse of the nation, but it’s difficult to tap the pulse of a specific geographic region.  Right now all trending topics are national and global issues: Haiti, the iPad, State of the Union, celebrity deaths, etc.  When there are enough tweets to create a trending topic, chances are they’re focused on a larger-than-local topic.

I think there are several actions Twitter can take to help local trending topics become useful:

• Achieve greater scale (duh) and focus on its active user base - the more information the better
• Local curation - it wouldn’t hurt to add an editorial and curated component to help organize local trending topics
• Better algorithms that skim off the popular national and global trending topics and hone in on local-specific data

Local has presented itself as the internet’s next frontier.  There’s a gradual shift from focusing on the general “What’s happening” to the more relevant “What’s happening that’s important to me.”  Twitter has proven to be valuable for breaking news, but they clearly have work to do in breaking local news. They’ve got the momentum and they’re clearly thinking about it.  I think it’s only a matter of time and effort before they figure out the right equation.

Two big things happened today in Twitter land: the Retweet feature was implemented across the site, and their call to action was downsized from “What are you doing?” to “What’s happening?”  Here’s my take on the matter…

The new Retweet feature needs some work.  People don’t like changing something they’re comfortable with, and the Retweet button is far off from the original user-developed Retweet functionality.  The fact that you can’t insert your own text into a Retweet is very discouraging.  Part of its original appeal (at least to me) was that it empowered people to put their own spin on someone else’s tweet (just like a Tumblr reblog).  I also am peeved by the influx of people I don’t follow into my dashboard.  It’s a bizarre feature, not to mention a startling invasion of my private space.  I follow the people I follow because I choose to.  I was happy with the old RT and Lists for finding new people to follow.  I don’t need them to infiltrate my dashboard without permission.

Evan Williams explains Twitter’s logic behind the new RT here.  He acknowledges that it’s a different type of RT:

People understandably have expectations of how the retweet function should work. And I want to show some of the thinking that’s gone into it. I’ve been a big proponent of this particular design internally at Twitter, because, while it won’t serve every use case, I think it offers something new and powerful.

His reasoning makes sense (it’s essentially a cleanup job intended to increase visibility around attribution), but from a user’s perspective such a drastic shift in functionality doesn’t make sense.  I think it would have been universally embraced if all it did was eliminate the copy/paste procedure by adding “RT” to the text box.  Then Twitter could iterate until they were happy with RT.   I would have been much happier with the rollout if it slowly progressed to where it is now instead of taking a giant leap.  Oh, and the RT button is Tumblr’s Reblog button rotated 90 degrees :-)  I like that.

Then there’s the shift from “What are you doing?” to “What’s happening?”  It’s not a seismic shift in functionality, but a shift in philosophy.  Biz Stone eloquently discussed the change:

The fundamentally open model of Twitter created a new kind of information network and it has long outgrown the concept of personal status updates. Twitter helps you share and discover what’s happening now among all the things, people, and events you care about. “What are you doing?” isn’t the right question anymore—starting today, we’ve shortened it by two characters. Twitter now asks, “What’s happening?”

This is much more in sync with Twitter’s “Pulse of the Planet” goal.  The new call to action won’t change the way people use Twitter, but it demonstrates a fundamental shift in the way Twitter thinks about Twitter.  It’s a movement from Twitter as a vanity tool to Twitter as a multi-purpose communication and reporting tool.  This isn’t new information, but it does mark a definitive and conscious change of focus for Twitter.

It’s been a big week for Twitter.  We’ve seen them take something the community created and change it as they saw fit, and we’ve also seen them embrace the way users utilize Twitter and let it change them as they saw fit.  It’s a prime example of understanding and adapting to user behavior.

Or better yet, maybe Twitter cracked the Jack Johnson code.  Check out how Jack Johnson is using Twitter to promote his new album.  He has created his own Twitter Page which offers people a free mp3 in exchange for a single tweet.  A tweet for a song.  Is this the future of Twitter revenue?  It’d be easy to set up a payment system for premium accounts that engage in activity like this.  It’s definitely a viable way to tap into musicians and their marketing dollars.  I think we’ll begin to see new use cases around specialized promotions and advertising in this space.  The opportunities are seemingly endless.  What happens when Ashton Kutcher will trade you an exclusive peak at a stealth trailer for his new movie in exchange for a tweet?  Or when the New York Times gives you a discount on your Weekender subscription for a promotional tweet?  Anyone with a dedicated user base can leverage a trade system like this.  It’s going to be interesting to see how this all plays out.  Musicians, celebrities, brands, and not-for-profits will soon be able to place a value on what it means to be a trending topic, or quantify the value of dedicated tweets.  Who would have thought that Jack Johnson would be the one to set the bar?