Twitter has a problem: A number of users tweet, then lose interest. It needs a way to reengage them in the site. And tonight it’s starting to test one way: Notifications.
The test is currently only rolled out to a “limited” number of users right now, according to this update. But those who have it should notice an indicator similar to what Twitter does to let you know there are new search results on a query (see a capture above and below). There’s another service that does these types of notifications for new messages also: Facebook. Yes, Twitter for once is taking a playbook from its rival rather than the other way around.
When Twitter was still a young service, it used to auto-update with new tweets as they came in, in realtime. That was one of the first features killed off as the service began to explode in size and was having trouble scaling. FriendFeed implemented a similar live-updating stream before the Facebook acquisition, and that seemed to help boost engagement. Twitter currently offers live updating stream with its widgets.
There has always been some debate as to whether a constantly updating stream is better than notifications. Twitter is clearly now choosing the latter. When FriendFeed first launched it, plenty of users complained that the live updating was moving too fast. Seeing as Twitter is much larger than FriendFeed ever was, that could be an issue. The notification method is probably easier on server load than the constantly moving stream, as well.
As you can see in the screenshot below, these notifications shows up in the titlebar as well (just like with Twitter Search).
[photo via stephromanski]
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Sounds like a nice addition, but I assume heavy twitter users would be benefited with this service. Why should twitter worry about it because people who constantly wants updates use clients. Tweetdeck, tweetie and every other client has autoupdates with many other features. When one has powerful and simple API they should not put more load on their serves like this.
But this one is not that much worth they need to do something more innovative
Weird. Why can Twitter’s widgets update in real time (you can see this in action over on my blog http://scobleizer.com ) but the home page gets that lame “click for more items” thing. Sigh. Let’s go real time!
My guess is technical limitations. Twitter can barely release a new feature like lists without fail whales popping up, let alone have every twitter user have real time updates.
It doesn’t seem 2 be a technical limitation. My twitter home page refreshes automatically! http://twitpic.com/obcnm
Because Twitter is basically 3 year old technology that has barely been updated in all that time (all the major changes have been at the front end).
Oh ok, it’s fixed now. Good.
as long as it’s capping the number of daily emails with those notifications, it will work well to get people back to site. email works!
No, it’s not email notifications, its just a little text notifier at the top of the feed.
Email notifications is exactly what Twitter SHOULD be focusing on though. I can emails for DMs, but I should be able to set up email notifications for @ messages and search terms.
There are third party services our there that do it, but this should be part of the basic service and it truly would get people coming back. If I was Twitter, I’d make this part of the sign-up process so that people would by default started getting alerts that would drive them back to the site.
While, there would no doubt be some engineering issues it could do things like sending out search terms results a maximum of once per hour.
Because your absolutely right – email works!
Do know how much spam you would get, once spammers figure out that any @msg gets sent to your inbox
I’d cancel my account tomorrow if it started spamming me more email. Especially any old @mention. Optional, sure, but it’s an option I think a lot of people would turn off.
Kewl. When will they come out with a service to help me be *less* engaged? LOLz #twitterddiction RT @yomomma
I am not trying to be negative here but can you cover more stories that do not involve twitter. I am so tired of hearing anything about twitter and tweets. It’s overrated.
Why do we NEED to tweet so much though? I purposefully don’t tweet or check personal e-mail during the day b/c it’s distracting.
It’s not like people lose interest and never tweet anything anymore. Is Twitter paid on Tweet volume? Not that I’m aware of.
Since I’ve been a Twitter user since Spring of 2006, it’s hard to say whether this is a big deal or not. I’ll have to ask some of my friends who are n00bs if they see this functionality and whether it matters.
I don’t need it but i can see how people that are new to the service would need this.
This pretty cool. I quite enjoy Twitter. Despite many comments that they are not evolving quickly enough the steady progress they continue to make is pretty cool. I just found this site on both Twitter @LifestyleAdvn, and here http://www.life...tyleadvance.com, anyone have any idea what its about? The site doesn’t tell you very much but its sounded pretty exciting so I opted in. I figured my Techcruch peeps would know
Thanks
Burton
I’m not big on tweeting and this wouldn’t make me more excited – sorry
@MG
Here is a link to the other variation of their A/B tests where the screen refreshes automatically. They show a timer on the top right.
Video over here:
http://screenca....com/t/lWBVtVV8
Well Twitter needs to do something to their website if they want people to post more online than on third party services (not that I’m sure that they do).
I know personally I never really post online. I’d much rather post from TweetDeck or another third party app than post online because the third party apps are more what Twitter wants to be: real time.
“A number of users tweet, then lose interest. It needs a way to reengage them in the site.”
Yes.
“And tonight it’s starting to test one way: Notifications.”
What!? This is NOT a way to reengage people who loose interest in Twitter! This is just making the twitter experience better. People not engaged with Twitter aren’t going to be sitting on Twitter – they need email updates to get them back.
twitter is inherently non-sticky. All artificial attempts to bring users back, without changing the core product will fail. Twitter will have turned out to be useful in the long run only inasmuch as it helped develop new Facebook features.
Very good observation. Twitter’s problem is that facebook now does most of what it does, for most people and a lot more besides. For the rest who want the few uniques or use 3rd party apps that make it genuinely more useful, nothing will engage them any more than they already are and what they really need is a proper push notify engine to take the stress off the service and a way of making some money.
Subjectively, there’s almost no way to know if each tweets of those hundreds tweets/seconds is interesting or not before reading it. Naturally, those boring (incl. the n-th RT you saw again and again) are more in volume.
Can’t blame those stop tweeting, besides, how large is the minority of authoritative blogger compared to every blog in the internet.
What would the notification do? Tell them something they already suspect, they followed too much and now their stream is overwhelmingly rapid
I use Opera and pbtweet, which (among its other features) autoupdates the stream. Sure, many clients do this too, but I haven’t really liked any of the clients, and I’ve tried more than a dozen. It is pretty nice, but I don’t think such a feature does anything to keep new users engaged.
If Twitter wants to keep new users engaged and increase retention, the best way to do that would be to have more “tips” when one has signed up. Many people just don’t realize what they’re supposed to do and get bored talking to themselves.
On one hand, that’s a pretty mediocre notification. On the other, that’s what Gmail does.
I use Tweetdeck. It suffices.
I’m thrilled about lists though. I needed a way to filter out the aggro twitters.