Tag: start ups

‘Twitter Killer’ Use Case: Brands

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

Here is how I imagine brands might use my “Twitter Killer” on a practical basis. The key issue to remember is Brands, like everyone else, would have a far more feature rich experience to use than they would on Twitter.

Instead of just a 280 character tweet, they would have an entire webpage to work with — that would be threaded! So, say you were a Widget Company and you were releasing a new Widget. You could create new Groups devoted to different elements of this Widget.

And because you would have control over who could Post to each of these groups — they would, essentially be read-only to most people — you could all but eliminate trolls and other people who might attack your brand just because they could. They could still attack your Brand elsewhere, of course. Just not in your Groups.

What’s more, people could buy your Widget straight from a Post — with our Twitter Killer getting a cut, of course.

If you were a content provider, meanwhile, you could push content from your own site –original formatting included — into the Twitter Killer itself. Then authorized users could inline edit your content inside a Group that was threaded.

All that sounds pretty cool to me, at least. Too bad this is all just the ranting of a broke writer who should be working on one of six novels he wants to write before he crokes.

Discovery & My Proposed ‘Twitter Killer’

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

In my imagination, the Discovery feature of my proposed Twitter Killer would allow you to find any Public Group that might have been created by another User. I vacillate between letting everyone create Public Groups and letting only Verified Users create Groups.

But I think letting everyone create a Public Group is probably the way to go because that way everyone feels equal, even though in reality they aren’t — especially when it comes to who can post in a Public Group.

Back to Discovery, though.

When you searched for a Keyword or Phrase, you would find a multitude of Groups devoted to the subject in question, with varying degrees of popularity. I suppose you might have Sponsored Groups or Leader Board Groups that are featured in some way.

There is a lot you could do with the Group concept because it’s so flexible and powerful. There might be some clutter if everyone is creating a Group in an ad hoc manner with little or no regard for how to properly name one so people understood what the heck they were about.

But that would also be some of the appeal of this element of the service. And, remember, each Group would be associated with the account of a User, so that would really help narrow down how interested someone might be in the Public Group.

There are a lot of ways the Public Group concept could go wrong, of course, but I’m really enjoying thinking up different use cases and trying to bounce up and down on this platform concept to see where I can find and fix weaknesses.

An Interesting Feature Proposal For My ‘Twitter Killer’

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

It just occurred to me how to fix a problem with my proposed Twitter Killer based on updated Usenet UX — instead of reposting each post when you post it in a group, you might allow people to inline edit through collaboration like you find with Google Docs.

This would allow the service to scale a lot easier and also reduce the risk of a zillion posts that were just people re-posting with the words “I agree” somewhere on the Post. This really fixes a huge issue with the service. My natural inclination is to make things way more complicated and nuanced than necessary, so maybe there would have to be a reason why you posted a new Post in a Thread instead of using the collaboration feature.

Maybe, essentially, you would have to “opt-in” to spawning a new Post in a Thread. The default would be just inline editing via a collaboration feature. Though, remember, you wouldn’t be able to edit someone else’s edits to a post. That’s the only way to prevent shenanigans.