Does Twitter Need An Intervention?

This article originally appeared on 60 Second Social.

Twitter is by far my favourite social media platform which is why this news hurts so much. Twitter seems to be in some kind of website midlife crisis and is in danger of losing that ‘magic’ that makes Twitter who it is.

Over the years Twitter has evolved, expanded and new users are joining in their droves however as that happens it can be harder to organise what you want to see. The more people you follow then the higher the chance there is you may miss a tweet.

Twitter has tried to combat this problem by introducing lists and custom timelines in order to filter different types of content you see but lets face it, many of these features are abandoned or ignored by most users.

How does Twitter solve problems like this and show us content they think we should see? Well Twitter’s CFO last week hinted that algorithms may be on their way to our Twitter feed which would strip the service of its real-time identity and instead use technology in order to surface thinks that Twitter thinks is relevant to you.

The whole magic of Twitter has been its use of real time live data and the reaction to the news of algorithms has been somewhat of a firm no in response along with comparisons to Facebook. However, could this turn out to be a smart move?

The vocal minority at present are people such as journalists who send and receive data and news in real time. Journalists like to do this on Twitter now regardless of how accurate or not the news may be and in turn this has created somewhat of an ugly aspect to the social media site.

One of Twitters inabilities has been to squash rumours and news that has been proved incorrect, instead journalists and media accounts are permitted to spout whatever they want. It has led to difficulties for Twitter being able to surface the credible tweets beneath the rubbish.

Algorithms would be able to do this, they could push the accurate tweets up to the surface and bury inaccurate tweets out of sight. Twitter is not going to copy Facebook code for code, however they realise that a purely dynamic live time experience no longer works as well as it used to.

That is not necessarily a bad thing, I still tweet…a lot…however I don’t read as much on my timeline as I used to, first thing in the morning I skip to the top of my timeline and bypass a couple of hundred tweets, Twitter knows this and wants to change that.

The question now is, ‘will the change be for the better?’

About The Author

Mark is the founder of 60 Second Social media where he provides social media news and digital marketing analysis, he is also a proud father of his bearded dragon, Lola. You can follow him on Twitter here. You can also follow 60 Second Social on Twitter here.