Recently, much has been made about Twitter seemingly
looking like Facebook or about the ability to
tag people in photos in Twitter like Facebook. Twitter offers a delightful
experience especially the random walk to discovery and the serendipity of
you-never-know what's-going-to-pop-up-next in your feed (especially if you
follow a diverse set of people and entities).
For broader appeal, the company is addressing the right priority of mainstream
relevance and adoption in its stated intent to " ...By
bringing the content of Twitter forward and pushing the scaffolding of the
language of Twitter to the background..."
However, to do that, I
think Twitter needs to reach into its own strengths and yes, from there, draw
some inspiration from others. I offer a
couple of thoughts for Twitter to amplify its appeal to the broader masses.
First, no doubt a simplified view but the ideal social media
network contains (among other things)
the narcissism of Facebook, the serendipity of Twitter and the utility of a
LinkedIn.
Narcissism is an underlying behavioral trait of mainstream
media use. The name Myspace says it all or witness the viral distribution of
the Facebook 10th anniversary "Look Back" self-video which saw 'hundreds
of millions of movies rendered'. On narcissism, Twitter is highly skewed
towards the celebrity. As a Twitter mainstream user remarked to me once,
"I'm just going to take my 200 Twitter followers and go the (fill-in-the-blank)
home". What Twitter needs to do is to make it more democratic for the
masses so that they feel they have a shot at a moment of fame. Their time in
the sun. Some ways to achieve that are editorial curation of non-celebrity
Tweets through mechanisms such as "Tweet of the Day", "Notable
Tweets", "Editor's Choice", "Rising Star"etc. an
example being Blogger's Top
Contributors. Another example, fostering
and encouraging forums like CNBC's Squawk on the Street where tweets of
non-celebrity people are highlighted on the network for their creativity. Twitter needs to find a way to harness all
these outlets and more to make Twitter more gratifying to the masses.
On serendipity, one of the delightful aspects of Twitter is
trends and breaking news. Currently, Twitter's notifications are along the
lines of follow more people i.e. "People like XYZ" even if you are
already following 100+ people. The masses don't have time for more information
streams. But, they crave being the first to know. They fear missing out. So,
the notifications should be, based on your interests, here is what news broke
on Twitter, here is what you missed, your
interests XYZ is trending now etc.
Finally, just an Facebook adopted hashtags and celebrity
following through Subscribe, there is one small thing that Twitter can draw
inspiration from Facebook. Namely, the addictive, eye-catching, urgency
inducing Red colored Notification icon for notifications. Twitter's blue on
blue is too subtle for the mainstream. Red on Blue works - Look at the native
apps on iPhone like the default mail icon, the phone icon etc.
