Twitter's initial user experience in the context of discussions

"I want to follow your witty thoughts ... just join Twitter!"

So nags my friend. They say brevity is the soul of wit. Wit does not often work well without context though. How well does Twitter incorporate context into its brevity-oriented space?

From a usability perspective, simplicity can often be a nice counterpoint to the clutter of many modern website designs. What is the problem with Twitter's brand of simplicity though? For all its aggregation and trend analysis features, Twitter's web interface does not provide an adequately holistic method of presenting all that information in an easily digestible form.

For example, one of Twitter's most visible features in its web interface is the Trending Topics sidebar. Ostensibly, it keeps you up to date with the Twitterati zeitgeist, and a search provides you with a real-time stream of tweets related to that particular term. One of the problems inherent to displaying an unfiltered stream of tweets like this is that the discussion surrounding the topic at hand is disjointed. There often is no discernible starting point to figure out why a particular issue is hot. This is a greater problem when a topic approaches the middle of its trending lifespan, and verifiable references to original articles are far and few. This has been a problem before.

Even if we put aside the well-known problems of fraudulent re-tweets, tag abuse and spam bots, the evanescent and fleeting nature of Twitter makes it difficult to latch on to trending topics. Twitter's existence as a real-time discussion hub lends itself to uncensored and unfiltered discussion which can provide insightful value into events as they happen, but gems of information are buried quickly in the real-time stream. Even for those gems that do surface, because there is little support in the standard web interface for any form of threaded discussion, it becomes notoriously hard to find the source of a discussion point, or find comments on a particular topic without clicking through a labyrinthine path of "follower" and "following" links.

You don't follow trends? Fine, people use Twitter for all sorts of things. Many people use it to stay in touch via status updates and comments, all within a tightly knit network or community. Yet unlike Facebook's threads of discussion, which are tied to anything and everything (including status updates), there exists no metadata to connect replies or comments on people's statuses, as mentioned earlier. Twitter through various kludges which have been partially devised by Twitter-specific conventions. These include the @ symbol, "re-tweets", and hashtags, which act as (rather cryptic) search terms that connect common discussion on a topic.

The argument can be made that Twitter was not built to address these kinds of issues, and that threads, filters and aggregation impose structure on what has been seen as largely a free-form communication medium. We know that there is less actual two-way conversation going on than there is one-way soapboxing on Twitter, and it seems rather obvious why, given its limited capacity for peer-to-peer conversation. But by its own admission, Twitter was built largely to push forward the concept of personal status updates, and it has already grown far beyond that initial vision. People use Twitter-specific terminology as a hacky workaround to solving some of these problems. All interactivity is handled by parsing the 140 characters contained while third-party apps attempt to filter and aggregate tweets so that they are visualizable and understandable in many different contexts.

So if all the third-party apps continue to address these issues while Twitter's default interface lags behind, what's the problem? People will just migrate to applications that use Twitter's API better than Twitter does, right? I don't believe this is the optimal user experience that Twitter can provide.

Users are left to find out on her own what client will suit their needs best, but the sheer tyranny of choices provided by even a simple search for Twitter apps is intimidating. The initial buy-in is just that more difficult when new users are presented with such a kludgy default interface. Given that the average number of tweets in a Tweeter's life time is one, and user retention rates lag far behind other social networking sites, a little bit of interface work might go a long way. Twitter's leaked documents suggest that they are evolving their web strategy and fundamental design behind tweeting to meet some of these concerns. Until that day comes though, the casual Twitter user will have to learn how to work the disjointed interfaces and cryptic syntax behind social tweeting, instead of having the system work for them.