Is Twitter losing steam?
I think so and if you look at the traffic graph from Compete.com you will see that the statistics back up this claim. From January to April of this year, Twitter traffic went from 7 million to 20 million uniques per month. For the past three months the growth has been a flat line.
Why is this happening?
I think this can be summed up in one word:
SPAM
I did a lot of research over the last week and asked my blog readers, twitter followers and forum members from Bloggeries and Digital Point to share with me some ideas on what they change about Twitter. There were a lot of responses but the overwhelming response was STOP THE SPAM.
Here are other Things That You Would Change about Twitter
- Increase the limit of characters that you can tweet. Some people find the 140 character limit very limiting and wish they had more room to really express their thoughts. I agree and this is actually one of the suggestions my son Blogging Boy mentioned as well.
- Sampaguita from Home Affiliate Blog mentioned that he would like Twitter to increase the number of people that you can DM using their feature. He feels this would be more convenient.
- Gautam from Blog GoDown and several other people wanted to see the ability to categorize your followers and put them in groups as well as allow a person to be in more than one group (like Facebook)
- To expand on the category idea, I (Tycoon Blogger) would like to have the ability to send out bulk tweets to people in specific categories. This would be very useful as I would love to have a Family category to send out Tweets about my kids instead of sending them out everyone or just several people.
- Typhoon from Smart Bloggerz said the one thing twitter should do is that they remove the Limits which they introduced recently. Specially the 1000 followers/day limit.
- Stefan from Ducedo.com would like to see threaded comments which would make it so much easier to have a discussion.
- I would also like to see some sort of rating system. Kind of like on forums, where you know who the good community members are. This would make it very easy to know who is a valuable Twitter-er and who the Spam bots are.
Even if they considered a couple of these suggestions it would make a major difference in the user experience.
What do you think of these ideas? What ideas to do you have?
I agre with most people here. The character limit of 140 is really to short. Even a textmessage on a cellphone can have more characters.
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I think the generic web interface needs a easy re-tweet mechanism. A button or link that allows single-click re-tweeting similar to Tweetdeck.
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well i think twitter is the one of the best social media.it helps to get a lot of traffic and for link building as well.
Increasing the 140 character limit is my number 1 desire. A distant second is reducing spam.
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While Twitter makes the spread of information quick and painless (when Twitter itself isn’t acting up) it also makes the spread of false news that much easier as well.
I would like to see country-wise trends in twitter. Often the trends are ruled by what’s happening in US and smaller country trends don’t get much attention.
Regarding threaded comments / responses, there are 2-3 services that already attempt to do that.
For me, at this point in time it would be to get rid of the damn spam @replies.
Something has changed in twitter that means many, many spammers are now sending tweets with links to their spammy crap with my @name at the back of the tweet.
It’s really cloggin up my stream – I can barely see the real @replies for all the crap.
Nightmare.
Ian
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“i think that according to me nothing is there to change except the message size. It should be more than 140 characters
there is nothing to change in twitter. its a fantastic option to build a social network.twitter is just awesome
Your on the money Dan you can sum up Twitter’s issues in one word and that is Spam, sure it’s great for product and service promotions, but your average high school girls and 18-25 non-bloggers will quickly start bolting if Twitter doesn’t do something to handle the spam.
it is taken you months to gain the priviliges to autofollow hundreds then you’re far less likely to abuse the system as you would lose your account and have to start over from scratch.
They need to change that 140 character limit. Another thing is that the followers can be categorized in to different categories.
I think there are still lot of spam on twitter..they should first try to make it spam free. Also they need to remove the 140 char limit..
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“i think that according to me nothing is there to change except the message size. It should be more than 140 characters”
Who idiot invented the 140 character limit?
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I find this sad that Twitter is becoming more and more like a “make money in X ways” spams day by day.
Else for the 140 chars…I am somehow a person who needs more characters lol. So most of my tweets are often on two tweets rather than one
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Yes, I also think there are many Spam accounts on Twitter which auto follows, auto reply and send RT’s only to make money..
I Haven’t seen anything positive from Twitter on this issue they just have created @spam account where you can notify about any spam going on.
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Why hasn’t Twitter deployed Extended Validation (EV) SSL to combat phishing and fraud?
All they have to do is upgrade their Certificates and tell Tweeps to look for the Green URL Bars . I’d love to hear what they say.
sorry dan but i might done something wrong but i was talking about groups like friendfeed.
I liked stefan’s idea of threaded comments.
I disagree with more DM limit becuase it will lead to even more spam and more followers/day limit is approriate as getting huge number of followers doesn’t guarantee you to get more retweets. \
I think those who don’t like twitter should try out friendfeed, there you can like or comment on any post and also you can have more than 140 charachters
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Well, if Twitter started to use threaded comments they would not only get rid of the problem of keeping track of discussions but also get rid of the comments with 140 letters. Why? Simple because people could post one short tweet on the subject and then post a long tweet (no limit) as a second comment on their own tweet.
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The above ideas are all great and should make Twitter more enticing to use. Thing about Twitter is that they are not innovating to much, as compared to third party applications that makes Twitter much more fun. Hootsuite for example has given more excitement to my Twitter adventure. Twitter’s own interface is boring and not interactive enough. So yes, Twitter guys, listen to these suggestions above and your “uniques” will probably rise again. Thing is, not so much of these “ideas” will reduce SPAM:)
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The biggest problem I see that Twitter have to address is the increasing spam. Or rather what I call “faux spam”. In other words it is people masquerading as real people or “helpful” business communication but in reality the soul purpose of the account is to sell you stuff.
I guess most of us have got savvy to it now but it must be working for some as they keep at it. Still there are some new tools out there that attempt to auto unfollow/block all the spammers attached to your account.
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i think that according to me nothing is there to change except the message size. It should be more than 140 characters
if it’s taken you months to gain the priviliges to autofollow hundreds then you’re far less likely to abuse the system as you would lose your account and have to start over from scratch.
I’d like to see lower “follow per-day” limits put in place to prevent the spam bots that are set to autofollow hundreds of people at a time. I mean, come on, how many people’s updates can a real person keep up with? These limits could be incrementally increased as an account gains trust, which would also discourage the abuse of trusted accounts – if it’s taken you months to gain the priviliges to autofollow hundreds then you’re far less likely to abuse the system as you would lose your account and have to start over from scratch.
The fact is that the majority of spammers aren’t making any real money from Twitter, buyt there’s just so many idiots out there who are willing to give it a go.
As for the 140 character limit – I initially found this to be a bind, but came to love it – it focuses you on what you *really* need to say!
I am not a big Twitter user yet, but the 140 character limit can definitely limit what you have to say. Especially if you have a long URL that you want to promote.
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