This is going to be a really key issue for Twitter over the next year. Right now the service’s design incentivizes users to focus on increasing followers counts, even if it makes their own ‘following’ stream borderline unreadable. The net effect is that Twitter is growing rapidly, but its value as an information and communication tool isn’t keeping pace.
For most users, focusing on “followers” is an almost subconscious act (like following an extra person once in a while because they follow you, or posting or replying to something, just to get something out). And as long as the follower count is a key motivating force on the system, users will naturally over-post and over-follow.
What’s being left out here? Quality. Which, long term, is what will determine whether the system succeeds or fails.
The Facebook Platform, circa this time last year, is a pretty good comp. Users were adding big, annoying apps to their profile, at the expense of FB’s core features. And while it increased activity on the site, it muddled up the interface, and made Facebook look a lot more like one of its subpar competitors.
The key is changing the incentive structure, as Facebook eventually did with its redesign. People might not be downloading as many apps as they were before on FB, but those that they do add, tend to be more useful.
Twitter needs to take similar steps to promote quality over quantity, and the first step should be to deemphasize the follower count. The simplest way to do this is to relegate a user’s stats to a subsidiary page (instead of the user profile), or at least make them far less prominent.
The better solution, however, is to simply allow users to organize the people they follow into groups, much like the tagging system on Google Reader. You could then filter out the posts (or posters) you don’t actually want to read, even if you want to keep them as followers. This changes the entire reward structure of the system, emphasizing quality over crap. Being followed wouldn’t necessarily equate to being read; posters would have to offer real value, or be filtered into a ‘useless’ tag.
This could be a very important step for Twitter, since it directly impacts the system’s core value proposition. In the end, quality is what leads people to use services. This, above all, should be Twitter’s focus in the coming year.
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