BOOTING UP ON TWITTER:
VINE OF THE TIMES
Twitter snatched defeat from the jaws of victory as it dumped its once-celebrated video-creation app Vine yesterday — and the same epic failure to thrive by a major innovator is a fate that threatens Twitter itself if it doesn’t make key changes soon.
At a time when mobile video is currency, it’s astonishing that an app that had such a lasting impact could meet with such a quick demise. But three years after its founding, Vine is due to be shuttered within months, Twitter announced yesterday. It’s a stunning downfall considering how Vine’s six-second video loops brought about a new movement of stop-motion videography on social media. That time limit turned out to be genius, forcing users to work creatively, transforming social media’s use of video.
But rather than capitalizing on that promising change, Twitter was slow to invest in Vine. It never became the great social media destination it should have been.
That same lack of long-term vision and inertia plagues the pioneering micro blogging platform itself and is threatening it with a similar demise. But it’s not too late to change. Here are five strategic changes that could help save the flailing Silicon Valley platform if implemented soon:
• Add a “viral” tag to tweets that have exceptional engagement, and have a heavier hand in general about promoting good tweets and witty users. For too long, Twitter has had a hands-off approach. There’s no real rewards system to incentivize going viral, especially because going viral doesn’t necessarily lead to having more followers anymore. This laissezfaire approach has resulted in potentially viral content failing to surface.
• Approach talented users more like YouTube does — sponsoring the best-loved amateurs and turning them into must-read VIPs. I can think of a few incisive and hilarious users on my timeline that have a lower following than they would if Twitter was good at surfacing the right content for the right people. But with the current level of clutter, noise and content you’ve seen elsewhere, Twitter needs to act like a talent scout and promote the right prospects to the major leagues.
• Admit that hashtags are not categories. Twitter made hashtags a part of our culture, and that’s great. But they’re not a good way of categorizing tweets. That’s why Twitter needs an option to check off a box that places the tweet you’re about to send into a relevant virtual bucket. Users can start to see the content on Twitter categorized more by what it’s about than which user has said it and which hashtag it includes. Hashtags are now a way to be witty and funny, and not reliable for categorization. This might help Twitter’s “Moments” section to be more of a curation of commentary by regular people, instead of reading like just another a digital newspaper.
• Replace notifications with something more interesting than retweets and likes. Notify me that someone I know has a tweet that has gone viral, or that a tweet I sent yesterday has been viewed more times than anything I’ve ever posted before. As it stands, the notifications system is boring and broken. One example: I still get notifications about a tweet that I sent months ago (about failed former GOP presidential candidate Ben Carson) being retweeted. As nice as it is to know people are engaging with an old tweet, it’s simply not relevant to me anymore.
• Play matchmaker. Twitter now has reams of information about users’ likes, dislikes and habits. Time to use that information to find their mental doppelgangers. Why doesn’t Twitter suggest tweets for me to retweet, and introduce me to like-minded people who are interested in the same topics that I am? Along those lines, Twitter could curate debates among informed users with opposing viewpoints, and reward those users for cordial debate. That would go a long way toward elevating the level of discourse that Twitter trolls have notoriously tainted. And it would help Twitter dig itself out of a hole of limited trust and plateauing users.