Nick Bilton does not approve of how Twitter works.
It’s utterly insane that you still need to put a period before a person’s Twitter handle, such as “.@twitter,” if you want everyone to see it. Could you imagine Facebook doing that? Twitter still uses “favorite” instead of the more universal “like.” And Twitter still expects people to use Boolean search commands.
As a user experience, the product is still a drip-drip-drip stream of seemingly random tweets. It feels like a deranged video game, where players are blindfolded and win only if they accidentally come across a good tweet among a mudslide of drivel. (This is hopefully going to be fixed with a new feature called Project Lightning, which will put human curators behind the wheel of the timeline.)
There is reason in all this. Twitter must grow beyond the people who use it, to satisfy the people who paid for it. Unfortunately, this is what happens when companies go public: the simplest, dumbest vision of their future prevails. And the simplest, dumbest vision of Twitter's future is to turn it into a Facebook clone.
All social network platforms attempt to expand until they are Microsoft Excel with grandma in it. Those that fail to do so are ruined by trolls.
