Twitter’s best moonshot – algorithmic timeline

Posted on : February 8, 2016 By
Twitter’s best moonshot – algorithmic timeline
opinion 

jack

Twitter’s upcoming (though Jack’s been saying it is not *that* upcoming and will always be opt-in, not opt-out. See the end of this post for Jack’s tweets) algorithmic timeline change is perhaps their best, biggest and most appropriate shot at glory. That is, in my view. Here’s why.

When we all started out on Twitter?I started in late 2008?it was a smaller world. Not as big as it is now. We followed a few people. It was a good advice to pass around that you are not merely supposed to broadcast on Twitter, but to also respond and have conversations with people, no matter how high a horse you were sitting in. I’m sure you’d find at least a 1,000+ blog posts with that advice, from the early days of Twitter.

Now? We engage highly selectively. We have breached the Dunbar Number long, long ago. Twitter now looks like a super-crowded, super-busy, email on steroids. If we were following, say 200+ people, which seems to be a norm or average as I notice these days, and even if, out of those 200, 100 tweet at least 4 times a day, that’s 400 tweets to consume.

Humanly possible? Nope.

Algorithm? Oh yes.

We haven’t reduced the followers we’d like to follow. It only keeps going up.

From Twitter’s, the business, point of view, they have a task: that the service seems exciting *every single* time people log in. There has to be some takeaway every time people visit. If not, they will visit it less, and lesser.

Right now, it would seem to people who are following 200+ people, to be a massive email inbox that they cannot deal with. That’s not the best user experience to keep people glued on to the service.

That’s where Facebook’s magic sauce works wonders.

Is it perfect? No.

Do I like it? Far from it.

Do I suspect it is playing with my mind? Of course.

But that’s precisely how it has gotten so sticky. To millions of other people, it works. In showing what they like to see, every time they get in.

How? Through what we post. Through what people we are connected with post. Through what we like, share and comment. Through what we most interact with like, share or comment. Through the pages and brands we like. Through what we stalk, hover and gawk. Facebook tracks everything that we do on its platform intently and very keenly. And uses all that to try to understand us. It won’t be perfect, but it is learning.

Gmail’s new Inbox follows suit, in the very same way.

This is the new artificial intelligence, beyond cute looking robots talking to us. That talking part is the magic sauce, not the physical manifestation of a human in the form is a robot.

In comparison, Twitter’s honest-to-goodness, conventional and democratic timeline seems like stone-age. It is the ideal, to give the right amount of power to people who have earned that attention by being whatever they are.

But the stacks in the social media game is tilted heavily towards the content consumers, not creators. There will always be a LOT more people consuming content with or without creating content. That’s the segment that looks at ads and makes these platforms money. Not the minority that creates original content. Content creators are only as needed as building the image of a user-generated platform. It sure is, no doubt, but at some point the agencies and brands would outnumber it. At least Twitter, if not Facebook.

Facebook was and is still a platform connecting people, forming groups. Twitter never had that task defined well. It was a loose way of knowing people. The connections sure happened, but it seems far less impersonal than Facebook. Trust me, I’ve found a lot more new friends on Twitter and swear by Twitter a lot more than Facebook.

And when this algorithmic timeline change happens, Twitter could also address several other problems that plague its existence currently. Like abusive tweeters, for instance.

If the timeline was sorted organically, based on the time it was posted, then you’d have to endure abusive tweets too, since that is the *right thing to do* as per the current scheme of things. If the timeline goes algorithmic, and you have, in the past, hidden or blocked or marked spam some abusive tweets, then the Twitter algorithm will learn from it and not show you those things.

However, you could argue – what will happen to Twitter’s utility value as a phenomenal real-time information exchange and broadcast resource during natural/man-made calamities/disasters? Won’t we miss much of the action if Twitter was hell-bent on showing only happy, nice things that we seem to have liked in the past?

Oh yes. This is where Twitter rules over Facebook, which, at best, has to initiate an ‘I am safe’ protocol and be content with it in the real-time.

It is here that I hope that Twitter keeps the organic timeline alive as an optional feature, if you want to activate it during such emergencies. You could argue that Twitter Lists are good substitutes, but it’d be difficult to build a List on Twitter of people we do not know/follow and this happens a lot during emergencies.

Twitter Lists are otherwise good for keeping a bit of the organic timeline retained in our lives, particularly while using Twitter via a convenient form like Tweetdeck. A Twitter List is a place where you build a list of people from whom you need to follow every single tweet. And since this is different from the main timeline, I’m hoping this won’t be algorithmically manipulated.

That brings us to the question of how good the algorithmic sorting will be. Facebook, after all these years, is till tweaking and fine-tuning it, despite enormous information at its disposal from all these years. Twitter has relatively less information.

And, the other problem – on Facebook, connections are made on some mutual affinity. You do not connect someone because you want to troll them for their views. On Twitter, this happens all the time. Good old human nature – you hate someone so much that you follow them to wait for a chance to poke a hole in their existence when the chance allows you to. Yes, Facebook has a Follow feature too, but I suspect that was to make it seem more like Twitter (seeing how the Follow business worked for Twitter), and is a lot more recent. And, in any case, when you follow someone on Facebook, you’d see only their public posts, not ones that they share within their friends (not as a Public post).

Twitter, in comparison, is a lot more open, to Facebook’s walled-garden. There are just 2 states of a handle – public, or private. There are no selective states of open.

You follow someone? The handle is public? You see everything they tweet (except direct messages, of course). But there may not be any mutual affinity between you two. It may be one-way too, as it happens with celebrities being followed by millions and they follow very, very few.

But, if you follow a celebrity, for whatever reason, Twitter would need to assume that connection as a fact that you like that person and perhaps show you more from that celebrity. Unless Twitter’s algorithm also includes sophisticated text-mining and context-mining tools (which I’d assume they would surely have or at least be working on), they’d need to work harder than Facebook on their algorithm.

It’s not impossible, but if Facebook can do this, why not Twitter?

My instinct is that, finally, Twitter is looking at a solid feature change to pull it out of its financial quagmire. This move will be more dramatic, disruptive and transformative to the platform than anything it has tried before. A core group of power users will crib and fill Medium and LinkedIn with epitaphs, but I believe this is Twitter’s moonshot that will ultimately win. Even if some power-users crib and quit, this could well be the one change that will bring a lot more new people into the fold simply because it’d end up showing something all those millions like to see, every time they log in.

Which is not the case right now. Or, is the case only if they venture into that dreaded feature called Highlights. Highlights is not default, thankfully, right now. And Twitter has to do a lot better than the algorithm used in Highlights to make this new timeline work, which I’m sure they will.

Jack Dorsey had this to say, on #RIPTwitter, though.

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