Dear TwitterSince I made my Twitter account last March, Twitter has helped me a thousand times over. From meeting tons of people to figuring out what…
Since I made my Twitter account last March, Twitter has helped me a thousand times over. From meeting tons of people to figuring out what is going on in the world, there are so many opportunities to learn and be inspired on the platform. It is a place to learn about the now, and hear transparent and authentic perspectives from people’s mind.
For those reasons, plus so much more, I think that a world with Twitter is better than one without. I hope that it stays that way.
To maintain its presence as a social media behemoth, competing for the attention of the masses, Twitter will have to do much more than cater to the likes of the “tech community.” It will have to find ways to build a culture that experiments more. Invents new things. And stays true to Twitter’s mission.
Surely, there are lots of ideas out there for how Twitter can improve. Everyone has ideas. What is most important, and the task for Twitter’s team, is to be able to filter and prioritize. What is the most important feature? What comes next? Why this and not the other one?
These are really hard questions with answers only the public seems to know.
Though the Twitter team did not ask, I thought to write my thoughts on what they should do next — from the perspective of a college student, who likes tech, and sports, and traveling, and food.
If you go to Twitter’s homepage, you see one thing clear: “Happening Now.”
It is the phrase and mission of Twitter.
I think they have failed to deliver on this promise and there is so much opportunity here.
“What’s happening” now is no longer limited to tweets of what is going on around. People want to see videos. They want to hear audio clips. They want to be transported across the globe.
Twitter’s discovery/explore tab needs to be a way to see whatever is going on anywhere in the world, in real time. They need to be better than Snapchat maps — and they can be — if they do a better job curating the information coming into and about different locations. Hashtags are great, but people care more about tracking location and live events.
This will change Twitter. It will become a place for really what is happening now. There will be room on the screen for all sorts of media — live video ,video, audio, images, gifs, tweets, etc.
No platform has this.
Twitter will.
Originally published at gonen.blog.
By jordangonen on July 3, 2017.
Exported from Medium on February 17, 2018.