Well said. While I do agree that the #Disocver tab would be much better served with custom content that is relevant to me… I have to disagree with your last line about the content being forced on the users. I haven’t felt forced to check out the Discover tab, in fact.. I didn’t really even know what it did until I read this post. Could it be Improved? Absolutely. But, it’s kinda hard to complain about a free service with optional features..isn’t it?
Technically, it’s quite easy to complain about anything—complaining requires very little, whether the complaint is aimed at a free service or a paid product. That said, I hope this is more helpful critique than random complaint. I have a few friends who work at Twitter, and I love the service. I just want it to be better.
Re: the forced comment, if the #discover tab in my phone didn’t glow blue with new content—as if I’ve somehow missed something as equally important as new tweets—I might think differently. But Twitter has made an intentional design decision by placing my timeline, mentions/interactions and the #discover content (stories, trends, etc.) on equal playing field. They’re telling me, “Hey, this Scott Baio story is just as important as tweets from your friends.”
I agree that Discovery is broken. This is probably too literal, but to me Discovery is about me searching out something new. I don’t feel like I’m discovering anything, I feel more like I’m turning the blue glow off so it doesn’t bother me more than anything. What you mentioned in your comment about the blue glowing notification is exactly how I feel about it. There seems to be now rhyme or reason as to why that notification shows up, other than the fact that I have opened the app. It is literally there EVERY time I open the app. It doesn’t matter if I close the app and then immediately open it up, it’s still glowing blue. Personally, things like that scream at me rather than offer subtle hints or recommendations of, “Hey, there might be something cool over here”. That’s why I will be turning off the LED notification light for the 4S when I get it.
So far, I haven’t gone to the Discovery stream and found something that interests me and I haven’t already heard about from people I’m following, nor seen on my own traversing the wilds of the interwebz.
The blue glow…YES. I have to click it just to turn it off every time I open the Twitter app. Maybe I’m A.D.D. or something, but it just bothers me if I don’t. I think it’s more of a “discover what others are talking about” than “discover some things we think you’ll like”. In reality it should just be a Top Trends tab or something, but I’m not sure it’s even the top things that are listed there. I care about what I like and what my friends like. If it’s relevant to them, there’s a decent chance it’ll be relevant to me. But nothing I’ve seen in that tab has been yet.
And…did Dustin say the first thing quoted in this entry or did you? Both are attributed to you at the moment, but the ensuing commentary makes it sound like Dustin actually said that first one.
Dustin said the first one (“Discover is a fundamentally flawed idea…”) and I replied. Sounds like the new embeddable tweets UI is working for you?
I guess not? I see: “I don’t care what everyone is discovering, I only care what people I trust are discovering. People in aggregate have bad taste.
— Joshua Blankenship (@blankenship) December 8, 2011″ and below it starts “Dustin was likely tweeting in response…”
I’m reading from work, though…on a government site stuck using IE8…which also blocks the Twitter domain completely. So that could have something to do with it?
Worth noting… Switched to FF6, which is the latest version they’ve pushed out here, and see the same thing. I’m a designer whose workplace dictates I use a Windows XP machine with 3GB of RAM and spend 25% of that time designing for web with only IE8 and FF6 to test compatibility. I feel like I should start a support group. ha
Brent, if your work blocks the Twitter domain, you won’t see the embedded tweet styling since it’s an iframe from platform.twitter.com pulling JS from that domain, too.
Full ack!
“because people in aggregate have bad taste (or at least different enough tastes that serving the same content to all of them is silly).”
Just like in the old days, seems a lot like the TV paradigm.
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On Discovery & the Social Graph
Wed 12/14/11
This exchange happened a few days ago:
Dustin was likely tweeting in response to the top-level #discover tab in the recently-shipped Twitter products. Whatever you think of the new Twitter, I’m primarily concerned with how broken #discover is in its current implementation. The discovery opportunities that exist for Twitter as a product and for me as a user are vastly under-served.
For example, what in my four years of interaction on Twitter would lead any sane person to think I care about Fantasy Baseball, #CosasAburridas, or Scott Baio? I’m not just listing random stuff; I have the opportunity to “discover” each of those are stories/trends right now in the #discover tab. But I don’t want to, because none of them are relevant to me.
If relevancy isn’t a priority, #discover actually is a list of random stuff. Or more specifically, it’s a list of random stuff I’m being shown by a service who has access to years of my documented behavior (content, RTs, favorites, frequency of replies, etc.) and seemingly doesn’t care because I should care about Scott Baio because…why? Other people on Twitter do? Or it’s easier to selling advertising to advertisers around Scott Baio or [insert trend here] instead of something I actually might engage with?
The #discover results could be almost any randomized content and it would be exactly as relevant to me as the current offering. How do you sit on that much data about your users, ignore it, and serve up Chachi instead? How is that not a massive, wasted opportunity? Why do you ship a product that doesn’t address it?
I don’t care what everyone wants to discover, or even what everyone is discovering, I only care about content that’s relevant to me based on my previous and current behavior and/or the behavior and content of people I trust. The aggregate stories/trends aren’t useful to me because people in aggregate have bad taste (or at least different enough tastes that serving the same content to all of them is silly). Surely somewhere in 6000+ pieces of user-generated content there is enough information to make #discover useful to me.
If you’re going to force “discovery” on users, at least give them content they might want to find. Isn’t that in the best interests of your users and your bottomline?