I saw an article not long ago that clarified for me what Twitter is: it's the community for journalism. It's the perfect place for journalists to quickly pick up the current vibe on a given topic, then repackage what they learn as a news story.
Lots of people fancy themselves as part-time journalists, so the community of journalists is much larger than people who have the job title. I am a Twitter community member because I see myself as a part-time journalist.
As I see it, Facebook is trying to become your daily newspaper, but I think Twitter has a better chance of achieving that goal, because differences in the way Twitter and Facebook treat privacy mean that Twitter can theoretically draw upon a much larger body of content. Twitter ought to consider using a news feed prioritization algorithm similar to Facebook, since Facebook is turning out to be rather good at showing me what I care to see and pushing down the chaff. Twitter still makes me wade through it all.
In short, I think Twitter should focus on being better at what it already is: the central gathering place for journalism.
Twitter is useful to break "news" of public relevance: be it a natural disaster, political news, celeb news etc.
Personal news like new job, birth, marriage, etc already has a network: FBK.
> the central gathering place for journalism.
An unmoderated place of journalism.
The difficulty lies in the interesting development of news outlets increasingly moderating their boards or disabling them completely for certain posts to combat abuse by trolls, racists, etc, the very problem Twitter has not been seen to do much to counter.
The difficulty, of course, is reducing the amount of abuse against people without reducing the amount of discourse. Twitter is having serious issues figuring that out.
Here is what journalists are learning now about Twitter: https://multimedia.journalism.berkeley.edu/tutorials/twitter...
Lots of people fancy themselves as part-time journalists, so the community of journalists is much larger than people who have the job title. I am a Twitter community member because I see myself as a part-time journalist.
As I see it, Facebook is trying to become your daily newspaper, but I think Twitter has a better chance of achieving that goal, because differences in the way Twitter and Facebook treat privacy mean that Twitter can theoretically draw upon a much larger body of content. Twitter ought to consider using a news feed prioritization algorithm similar to Facebook, since Facebook is turning out to be rather good at showing me what I care to see and pushing down the chaff. Twitter still makes me wade through it all.
In short, I think Twitter should focus on being better at what it already is: the central gathering place for journalism.