Now that Jack Dorsey has returned, it’s time to knuckle down and fix Twitter’s problems for new and old users alike. Photograph: Eric Thayer/Reuters Samuel Gibbs, Alex Hern and Jonathan Haynes
1. Decide what Twitter is and what it isn’t, and whether 140 characters is still enough
Twitter’s character limit dates back to the days of SMS messaging: it’s long enough to include the whole message, an 18 character username, one colon and one space per 160 character text. Now Twitter offers pictures, videos, and links, and is barely used over text message at all. As a result, users have taken to screenshotting large paragraphs of text to tweet longer missives. The company has to decide whether it’s going to attempt to stay a fast and brief messaging service or become a slower, richer social media site – and there are suggestions that the new chief executive Jack Dorsey may be backing the biggest change in the site’s history.
2. Fix the onboarding experience
People who use Twitter and love it have painstakingly found hundreds or even thousands of interesting, informative, smart and funny people to follow around the world. People who are just signing up to the service haven’t. And so the out-of-the-box experience for the service is poor. Compare it to Facebook, where at least a new user is prompted to follow a few people they know from real life, and promptly get pictures and stories shared by their friends and family filling up their feed. With Twitter, a new user is prompted to follow a smattering of celebrities and news accounts, and usually ends up feeling lost at sea.
3. Make it better for people who don’t even have an account
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Twitter’s former CEO Dick Costolo admitted the company had failed in dealing with trolls. Can Jack Dorsey reverse the tide of hate? Photograph: Sebastien Nogier/EPA
In its results, Twitter has emphasised that many visitors to the website don’t even have an account there. But most onlookers have taken that as a mealy-mouthed excuse for why the company hasn’t actually succeeded in growing its monthly active users, the most common metric for success of a social network. If Twitter means it, it should focus on improving the experience for users who don’t have accounts on the site, letting them easily experience the best of Twitter to encourage them to sign up for an account in the future.
4. Deal with abuse
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Former CEO Dick Costolo admitted that the company “sucked” at dealing with trolls and abuse, and said he’d personally intervene to tackle it. Six months on, the company has made huge progress, but it’s still a big problem that is causing some of the site’s most dedicated users to flee. Many of the bigger names have stopped engaging due to threats and hate, as well as numerous regular users who put their heads above the parapet only to get anonymously shouted down. Worse still, Twitter has failed to to even prevent its own paid tools from being used to spread abuse, with people taking advantage of the system of promoted tweets to spread graphic images and hate speech. Be it through verification of users or content filtering, something urgently needs to be done.
5. Cull spam accounts
There are loads of them, filling up the notifications of anyone who dares to tweet a few monitored words such as “followers” or “iPhone”. And, despite efforts to tackle spam, the numbers seem not to be dented at all. Could one reason be that the uncountably huge quantity of spam accounts inflate the site’s active user numbers?
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Could the Jack effect help Instagram and Twitter kiss and make up? Photograph: Thomas Coex/AFP/Getty Images
6. Kiss and make up with Instagram
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Greater integration breeds greater engagement and it’s about time that Twitter buried the hatchet with Facebook. In 2012, Twitter blocked access to Instagram, preventing it from hooking up with the service to let users import their contacts from one to the other. In response, Instagram removed its own support for Twitter cards, requiring Twitterers to click through to see posted pics. The end result has been worse for both services – but ultimately, Twitter’s been hurt more than Instagram. But Twitter loves cutting off its nose to spite its face: in the early days, third-party apps did the Twitter experience better than the company’s in-house products (which initially didn’t even include an app), and ever since it clamped down on these, innovation has stalled.
7. Bring back gif avatars
Twitter allowed animated gif avatars before it was cool. Then, they turned them off (although some people who haven’t changed them since still have them). But gifs are back! Even Facebook is getting in on the act with its animated profile pics. It’s time for Twitter to flick the switch, too.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Returning Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey’s in-tray is looking pretty packed. Photograph: Scott Olson/Getty Images
8. Improve threaded conversations
It was a step forward to start threading conversations, but even less helpful than threadless replies in a news feed are partially threaded ones. The company has made steady improvements to the feature, but it’s still a mess. It works differently depending on whether you’re on a phone or desktop, and nowhere is it a good experience.
9. Allow opt-outs for spoilers
Twitter wants to be the go-to place for live events. That’s great if you’re following along with the social network as a second screen, but not so good if you’re trying to avoid spoilers til you can catch up later. Call it a PR stunt, but the network needs a system to stop tweets with spoilers from ending up in the feeds of users who don’t want to see them. It’s already begun mining the content of tweets to suggest a dedicated timeline for users who want to read more on the topic; all it needs to do is the reverse to provide a good opt-out for users who don’t want to be spoiled. Let a user mute “Formula One”, and it could filter out associated keywords such as F1, drivers’ names, tracks and teams. And as a bonus, it would let those who don’t care avoid the topic entirely.
10. Bring back a desktop app (that isn’t a web app)
Once, there was Tweetie for Mac. It was excellent. Then, Twitter bought Tweetie, and Tweetie for Mac became Twitter for Mac. Then: nothing. The app hasn’t been updated for years, and there’s never been an official app for Windows other than Tweetdeck, the beefed-up web app for power-users. The company should bring something like Twitter for Mac back and make one for Windows that doesn’t rely on the awful Adobe Air framework. Twitter has a lot of power users, and it needs to help them help itself.
11. Convince shareholders Twitter doesn’t have to be Facebook Facebook has more than a billion users. Twitter doesn’t. That’s OK! Ending the relentless focus on growth, and doubling down on the product could help Twitter become better than ever. And who knows: maybe making something that people love could actually help the company grow organically better than copying Facebook?
