by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner
Even though I’m very tired of thinking about this idea because it’s just never going to happen for various reasons, I feel like letting off a little steam and writing about it some again. The key element of my proposed Twitter replacement is the Group feature.
This would be a lot easier to understand than G+’s “Circles” because it’s implementation would be pretty much just a more modern, more flexible incarnation of a Usenet newsgroup from 25-odd years ago. The key interesting part of the Group feature would be everyone could create a one for any reason for any subject.
So, imagine there’s a big breaking news story. With Twitter, you generally have to be following the right people — journalists, etc — to know what’s going on moment by moment. And, even then, what you get is a flood of information that is difficult to process because there’s no rhyme or reason to it all.
But with my imagined service, you would have two options in the breaking news use case. One would be, you could follow the user and the other would be you could follow just their Groups you were interested in. As such, you would get notifications whenever a user you followed created a new Group and you could opt-in to joining a group you found interesting. Meanwhile, you could also use a discovery feature to find Groups with a subject of interest to you as well.
And, remember, because of the redundancy involved with the service, it’s a lot less likely that a Group will grow so huge as to be unwieldly. And, if you really wanted to manage the size of any particular Group, you might even give the owner of the Group some basic administrative abilities like controlling who can post.
This brings up one potential flaw in the Group idea — management of groups might grow overwhelming and cumbersome. Most people don’t have the time, interest or energy to use granular administrative tools for a Group if they have dozens of Groups to oversee.
There are two solutions to this.
One would be your more popular accounts would probably already have a social media management team that could handle all of that. The other solution is you could have some sort of universal application feature that would set the permissions of all your groups and you could change it for an individual group as necessary.
Remember, the only reason why I even mention any of this is Twitter is in trouble and, as such, there is a window of opportunity for someone, anyone to swoop in and fill that technological and social space with something new and better.
But, in general, it’s a very limited window and you would have to have a lot of spunk and vision to pull it off because, lulz, all the momentum is in Web3 and AI.
