Twitter: Functional or Foolish?
Saturday, 08. 22. 2009 – Category: Technology
When I first jumped on the Twitter bandwagon in January, I couldn’t help but question its place among the wide array of other social networking sites across the web. Perhaps my biggest issue was Twitter’s apparent overlap with Facebook’s “status” feature. Given that most of my friends were already on Facebook, it made sense to post my status where it would be read by my friends. But this was just one of many gripes that I soon built up against the social networking giant.Back in January when I was a brand new Twitter user, the site was still in its infancy, despite boasting millions of users. For example, simple features such as search and “trending topics” which today we take for granted were nowhere to be found. Several other missing features still stand between Twitter and its functionality.
Twitter as a Communication Tool
Somehow, Twitter slowly transformed from merely a place to answer the question “What are you doing right now?” to a medium for personal communication. With the introduction of @replies, users could now send a message to a friend or celebrity the same way in which he or she updated his or her status, completely overshadowing the more acceptable “direct message” tool. The @reply feature quickly proves to be more annoying than useful for the following reasons:
- Since you have to begin the message with the @username of the person whom the message is directed towards, you need to remember his or her username when not replying to a specific post
- There is no collective view of all @replies to a post
- A list of the people whom you are following cannot be sorted; users are displayed in the order in which they were added, making it difficult to find a particular user on the list
- On the Twitter website, there is no notification system to inform you that you have received an @reply from another user
- Restricted to 140 characters (even less when taking into consideration the size of the user’s @username)
Twitter as a Media Sharing Tool
Leaving aside the argument that a majority of my friends only have accounts on Facebook, Twitter still falls short as a media sharing medium. My first issue with sharing media via Twitter is the site’s text-based nature. It is naturally acceptable to share text this way, but what about photos and videos? To work around this problem feature, Twitter users post photo and other media in the form of short URLs, using services such as Twitpic and yfrog. To then view a posted photo or video, users must navigate outside of the Twitter webpage to wherever the photo or video is hosted. In other words, Twitter provides a text-based experience which forces the end user to rely on third-party sites and applications to make full use of Twitter’s services. In my opinion, users deserve a better, more streamlined experience when sharing media, such as embedded photos and videos which can be previewed without having to navigate away from the website on which they were shared.
Although Twitter continues to grow and expand, it still lacks many essential features, which inhibits its place as a meaningful member of the social media family. For the simple reason that Facebook has such a large user base, it remains the most logical communication tool on the web. As for sharing media, Tumblr is a very promising site with some fantastic features and a stunning layout. Stay tuned for a follow-up post with more on Tumblr.
Categories
- No public Twitter messages.