#activity streams

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Cloud: IBM, innovazione e sviluppo con developerWorks Open

Retweeting is a core part of Twitter. People already know how to share items that they think will interest others. Favorites have emerged as something else altogether — a way to acknowledge receiving a message, say thanks, save a link for reading later (using services like IFTTT), and more. You can see a list of tweets a user has favorited from their profile, but favoriting is inherently a private action. That idea is turned on its head with this new experiment. Beyond the effects of this update, Twitter’s continual tinkering of features that are core to its offering — remember when it tested replacing retweets themselves? – is worrying because it feels like those in charge don’t understand the basics of how the service is used. Rather than embracing new opportunities such as direct messages — which I wrote about last week — Twitter is changing its core features to make them worse.

I, however, am human and my eyes glaze over when trying to comprehend a chronological stream of equally-weighted events, a format only robots could love.

Tweets that have received more engagement will appear slightly larger, so your best content is easy to find.

With the conversation feature, Twitter trampled one of its own inviolate rules: Everything on Twitter is in reverse-chronological order. Now, replies to conversations cause the original tweets to bubble up in the timeline, knocking them out of order and contributing to chipping away at the core nature of Twitter. Conversations were implemented in order to increase the friendliness of Twitter to new users, but in the process they’re obscuring one of the things that was so good about the service, and may ironically confuse users more than help them. Chronology has a simple, primal power and it’s always been part of what makes Twitter what it is. Screwing with that is exactly what happens when you follow your nose to growth rather than examine carefully what the impact of a feature is on the product. ... Both of these features, especially when taken in aggregate, break the fundamental building blocks of Twitter, making it just one more scrollable column that looks like Facebook — just as Facebook is in the middle of efforts to attempt to make itself a place for real-time conversation like Twitter. ... Twitter itself is one of the clearest and most compelling sells in all of ‘social media.’ It’s a real-time feed of information from sources that you can interact with if you choose, or simply consume at your own pace. Releasing updates that don’t honor those powerful, simple tenets is a recipe for long-term disaster — no matter what the short-term gain.

[With Twitter,] there’s no algorithm between you and your feed.