Why Twitter is broken and how would we fix it?
It is hard to follow a busy Twitter stream. There are too many tweets to read, and they are poorly organized. Twitter is good for low-speed communication, but when the talk is hectic, Sofanatics is superior to Twitter.
Recent statistics show that Pinterest is generating more referral traffic than Twitter. For a company having perhaps one tenth of the users Twitter has, it is an amazing achievement. Or is it?
When looking at the number of tweets, you would suppose Twitter to generate colossal amount of referral traffic. But it does not. I believe this is because Twitter is good at generating tweets but it fails badly in content consumption.
The textual stream approach Twitter uses is very limited. It is really hard to scan tweets, since you need to read and understand the text. Whereas Pinterest's user interface is based on pictures. It allows users to scan, analyze and value content fast. The visual approach allows users to go through dozens of messages without reading or processing any text.
Twitter's poor content prioritization is another problem. The most important stuff is not highlighted real-time. The idea of retweet is very clever, but Twitter - nor any Twitter client I know - does not use it in its full potential. In stead of seeing "the alpha tweet" you see it retweeted in dozens of different ways.
The way Twitter handles pictures and structured content isn't optimal. In stead of focusing on the actual content, Twitter shows just the text commenting the content. You see captions of hidden pictures. That makes no sense.
Sofanatics is a real-time service, and our team is working on these issues all the time. During peak moments, we are handling hundreds of messages per second. Our innovative user interface, the virtual stadium, can handle that easily.
How is this possible?
- We use the whole screen to present content.
- Automatic filtering: Everything the user see is filtered. This happens not only in the back-end but also in the user interface: Most meaningful messages are highlighted visually.
- Social filtering: Users are able to join messages by shouting-along. Shouted-along messages are highlighted immediately: the message grows bigger, it stays visible longer, and the faces of the people joined appear on the message without any delay.
- Focus on pictures: Photos and drawings created with our simple painting tool are an integral part of the service: you see the picture without any interaction and the size is optimized carefully.
- Features for reactions: If you haven't seen Sofanatics in action, just think how it is in a real stadium. When something interesting happens, fans stand up. In Sofanatics stadium fans jump with their profile pictures. Or they cry with them. Or shake head. These actions replace the most common messages with animations. In stead of flooding the screen with hundreds of "Yeah!" messages, we can show hundreds of simultaneously jumping pictures. It is not only handy, but it looks very, very cool!
Because of the things listed above and hundreds of small tweaks, the content consumption on Sofanatics much easier than on Twitter.
