by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner
Again, I only write about this pointless mental exercise because there is, in fact, a window of opportunity for a tech startup to swoop in and replace Twitter if Elon Musk manages to force his new acquisition’s implosion. I have six novels to work on and I should throw myself into that instead of daydreaming about shit like this. It’s finally really gotten into my thick skull that no one is going to listen to me about this idea if I can’t code or have the resources to pay someone to make this a reality.
But my hope is that someone, somewhere might read this and run with the idea. I’d prefer to simply get some credit for having thought up the idea, but other than than that, lulz. I know how the real world works.
Anyway, let’s talk about how the “Feed” of this Twitter replacement would work, given that instead of Tweets you would have full page, graphic rich Webpages you would interact with instead. This would take even the Facebook concept of the status up date to the next level.
Here’s my solution to this situation — you would “subscribe” to individual Threads within Groups that you’ve subscribed to and whenever there was a new Post that Thread you would see in it in your timeline, like you might otherwise see a new tweet. But you wouldn’t see the whole post, but rather just its subject and the first 100 words or whatever. Something manageable.
When you click on the subject of the Post, you see the whole thing in the context of the overall Thread and Group that it’s in. This solves one issue with the Group feature that is a hold over from Usenet newsgroups — newsgroups were notoriously parochial and unwieldy. That’s why back in the day, any popular Usenet newsgroup had to have a FAQ to stop people from asking the same questions over and over again when they joined the group for the first time.
One tricky problem is how to solve the “Hello” issue. Inevitably, new people to any service will want to say “hello” just to make sure someone can see what they’re tweeting. This was a real problem with Usenet newsgroups — especially during after AOL gave the broader public access to Usenet in I think 1993. It got so bad that there was a specific group devoted to people simply saying “Hello” — alt.hello.
I think the solution would be to address this issue through a combination of the onboarding process and maybe giving people a productive way to say hello in a Group set to Personal that only their friends would see. Or something.
I’m well aware that all of this a lot more complicated than the average Twitter user might be accustomed to AND if this proposed service grew popular enough that Facebook would either want to buy it or crush it because it would be easy, through mission creep, to turn this proposed service into something more akin to Facebook than Twitter.
Anyway, absolutely no one listens to me. But it feels good to get this off my chest.
