It's like being that guy the girls hang out with because you are good friends with the handsome guy in school. You might get to hang out with them but in the end they go home with your friend.
Google works because it give you a selection of what you are looking for right now. It knows whats top of your mind and.
Twitter gives you things other people are interested in or find interesting.
They are in no way comparable.
One is letting you find things you are looking for, the other is mostly showing things you don't care about sometimes things that are interesting to you.
Google finds this information based on keywords. Twitter finds this information by looking at conversations and people you are interested in.
Saying Google and Twitter are in no way comparable isn't helpful. They are comparable though certainly different!
Google has better information on your preferences and exactly what you're interested in. That doesn't mean Twitter doesn't have good information.
If you follow a ton of yoga instructors then Twitter can feature yoga ads in your feed. While not as targeted as Google ads they still provide value to the user and the advertiser.
I don't want to get into an argument, just wanted to explain where I was coming from.
Twitter lets you discover what happens in areas that you might be interested in if someone wrote about it. It's a newsfeed for that specific reason. It require a tweet to happen.
Google allow you to find exactly what you are looking for whether someone tweeted it or not in all the content they can get a hold of including twitter.
Your search term on twitter does not show you intent, search on google does.
You are comparing two completely different things here.
Furthermore EVERYONE who uses google search use it to find things they are looking for when they are most interested in it. Only some people use twitter search terms to figure out who on twitter has something to say, mostly about themselves.
People don't use twitter as a search engine but as a discovery engine the difference is hugely different for so many reasons I am not sure why you keep insisting on them being the same.
All I'm saying is that at a high level both services let you find content you're interested in. That's it. It doesn't contrast with what you've said above. They do it in very different ways and for very different use cases.
"People only stare at Google to find content that lives somewhere else."
Thats not what people do. They search google and then stare as those results.
Thats a completely different concept from staring at a twitter feed with random things.
It's comparing apples and cars.
I think you're hung up on the "stare at" wording. I interpreted the words to mean "use" - hope that clarifies my point.
Compared to a google search result it is completely in the opposite end
I am not hung up on anything. I am saying that your comparison is as wrong as comparing DuckDuckGo with an RSS feed. There is so much noise even with the things you carefully select.
Compared to a google search where I am going specifically for something and is showing my intent.
I don't go to google to see whats going on, I go there to find something very specific.
You said that twitter doesnt provide value "because they stare at the feed only to find something that then lives somewhere else."
When you search Google you're finding things that live somewhere else. I'm simply pointing out that you don't need to host the content the user is looking for to provide value.
I'm not saying the companies are the same. I'm not saying Twitter can be successful the same way Google has. I'm agreeing with all your points besides the fact that you need to host content to provide value.
In other words they provide plenty of value they are just not able to make a living from it.
Instead they should get more people to stay on their own platform by allowing more content to be created there just like Facebook is.
I brought up Google because time spent on a site doesn't necessarily mean a whole lot more ad revenue. What matters is serving up useful ads that provide value to the user and advertisers. Google is great at that - Twitter isn't because of many reasons you've stated.
So maybe twitter should be trying to improve their ad program to serve better ads. If they can't do that well (no way they could do it as well as Google) then perhaps increasing time users spend on Twitter is their best option.
I only wanted to point out that the solution is not self evident. Just because people are using a service to find content hosted elsewhere does not mean it can't make money. The problem might be that Twitter is bad at finding ads people want to see.
> Not really because they stare at the feed only to find something that then lives somewhere else.
For me, twitter is for a few things: connecting with folks in a cold-call way; learning of trends and new ideas in my areas of interest; getting to know someone.
Many many many people don't use it like you do but almost everyone use it as a way to find new content and so thats where twitters opportunity is.
Edit: to clarify my point, I say that Twitter not only is friends with the attractive guy, but is also funny and charming and interesting in his own right, and that this is a major value.
Facebook has directed huge amounts of traffic to external sites for years and that doesn't seem to have been a major problem.
Just the ability to do a preview of on article is such a big eyeball keeper that it leaves twitter in the dust. Or to write a comment to the article which make people then react to what someone wrote about the article without maybe even reading it.
It's like with checkins. People think FourSquare and Swarm is big but it's dwarfed by FBs checkins it's just not a major focus for them and so we don't think about it as a place a lot of people check in. But it's a numbers game.
It would completely change because suddenly you are consuming your content on twitter not someone elses page and so twitter would have much better ability to do advertising.
It's not that there is no value in Twitter nor in the amount of data on things people like and talk about on the service, but more it's more difficult for new users to intuitively jump in and start than it is with facebook or snapchat (Twitter strikes me more as a platform to listen to lots of others than as a platform to have a broad audience unless you, the content producer, are bringing fame from elsewhere).
When I search on google I am getting the results I am looking for and I am only there because I am looking for something. Google uses their knowledge of my intent to give me highly targeted results. It cannot be highlighted enough how big a difference that is from twitter. I am not passively looking at random search results streaming in.
On twitter I am served with a combination of things most of them not really interesting to me and always depending on someone having tweeted them.
The big difference is that google knows your intent at the very moment you are using it. Twitter don't.
They are as different as day and night.
Yet they have a tough time monetizing that.
Why hasn't a twitter or a reddit sought to get rev share from the traffic they drive from the resultant pages? (I don't know enough about adrev/rev-share to know if this would work) -- but reddit and twitter know exactly how many people click on each link.
One thing I would like to know is the diff in % of users that click into a comments session without ever clicking on the actual link. I know that I do this as amajority of the way I read reddit and HN even. I get the gist from the title, some additional details from the comments and sometimes other, better links from users as well as commentary, corrections or what not.
I also upvote an extremely few number of posts and stories. How many times have I clicked a link or read comments about a post without ever upvoting or down voting it? Probably about 90%
Why would I, as a site owner, ever pay Twitter or Reddit? There's only two ways they can motivate me:
* Prevent linking to my site if I don't pay. This has obvious (and terrible) side effects on what those sites are and how they work.
* Provide some sort of advantage to payers. For something like Reddit, this would be possible through rank boosting or "sticky" posts, likely on posts that I the payer create myself. Twitter could maybe have tweets distributed to random users, regardless of whether they follow the originator. (I believe Facebook does something similar to this.)
Content and relevance is meant to be controlled by the users in these platforms. Both these options begin to abuse that implicit trust by placing the ability to pay on equal footing with the ability of users to naturally boost content. This will work for a while, until the users' trust is sufficiently eroded that they begin to leave.
All I was saying that monetizing link aggregation with commentary, twitter and reddit, is pretty hard. Vs google who is actually providing the conduit for people that are actually searching for something where suppliers will incentivize google (pay) to be a top result.
sites like reddit, even moreso than twitter, have a user base who HATE the idea of a content provider paying to be a top of the frontpage or anything "sponsored"
my suggestion is equally flawed in that you cant then expect reddit to have a yelp-like model where they extort money from content providers for traffic...
But that was essentially what I mentioned, I guess.
Maybe the real model is a super low cost fee for advanced customization features?
Like i'd happily pay reddit $1.99 a month for more control over my experience -- even though we get that also from RES.
*my employer
My guess is that they will change exactly that sometime soon. First allowing you to write longer texts as attachments and first then might join FB and Apple in "killing the open web"