If Twitter’s value is telling you what’s happening 10 to 15 minutes before everyone else, why isn’t the feature that does that best at the front and center of the app?
Two major news events unfolded this week with the kind of incremental and quickly evolving updates that made Twitter an ideal place to follow both. On Wednesday, a group of congressional Democrats staged a sit-in on the House floor to protest gun violence. And on Thursday, Britain voted to leave the European Union. Throughout both, informed insiders tweeted bits of news and information you simply couldn’t find elsewhere. But unless you were already following those people, or saw a retweet, their updates may as well not have existed; they were trees falling in empty forests. It doesn’t have to be that way.
Twitter is built on a follow model, which is great for some use cases, but also means you’re going to miss a lot of great stuff from people you don’t follow. Unless you followed certain Democratic lawmakers, you likely missed lots of action from the House floor during the sit-in this week. But there’s a solution to that: A Twitter that temporarily inserts relevant tweets from the right people at the right moment into your timeline would be a much more useful Twitter. Amazingly, this Twitter already exists but is buried puzzlingly deep within the platform’s user interface.
Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey is fond of pitching his service as the place you go to see what’s happening 10 to 15 minutes before anywhere else. And it’s true — possessing this information is what’s helped grow Twitter to over 310 million active users. But the company has struggled to grow beyond that, largely because the information Dorsey references is very, very difficult to unearth.
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