InstantComputerBiz.com: Here are Twitter’s New Experiments in Driving Conversation, for More Interactivity

Here are Twitter’s new experiments in driving conversation

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...Twitter Looses Users But Tops Revenue Forecasts

Twitter continued to shed users as part of its efforts to clean up the social network. However, the company posted revenue and profit for the third quarter that outperformed Wall Street's expectations.

The company reported 326 million monthly active users during the third quarter (July to September), a decline of 4 million, or 1 percent, from a year ago when it had 330 million.

But compared to the previous three-month period (April to June) when it had 335 million monthly active users, Twitter lost 9 million amid the company's attempt to address "the health of the platform," the network said in its earnings announcement.

Twitter and Facebook have both focused on ridding their platforms of fake accounts in the wake of Russian influence on their sites, something that occurred during and since the presidential campaign. "We're doing a better job detecting and removing spammy and suspicious accounts at sign-up," said Jack Dorsey, Twitter's CEO, in a statement accompanying the company's financial release.

During the quarter, Twitter generated revenue of $758.1 million, a 29 percent increase over the previous year. That surpassed expectations of $700.75 million, according to analysts polled by S&P Global Market Intelligence.

Driving the increase: advertising revenue of $650 million, an increase of 29 percent over a year ago.

Twitter reported net income $789 million, or $1.02 a share, compared to a $21.1 million net loss, and a loss of 3 cents per share, in the same period a year ago. The quarter's net income included the release of deferred tax asset valuation allowances of $683 million. Analysts had expected net income of $27.28 million, or 3 cents per share.

Twitter stock (TWTR) jumped nearly 16 percent in afternoon trading to $31.89.

Twitter's emphasis on improving the network could reap benefits, said Michael Pachter. managing director of equity research for Wedbush Securities in Los Angeles, who has a neutral rating on the stock, with a 12-month target price of $37.

"Twitter appears to have its revenue growth back on track overall, and once it laps the hiccup from purging accounts, we expect the company to emerge in better overall health," he said in a note to investors earlier this week.

While Twitter expects to see a continued decline in monthly active users from its clean-up efforts, daily active users — a metric Twitter uses as a sign of engagement by its most fervent users — rose 9 percent during the quarter.

"This is what happens when you focus on improving the product day-in and day-out," tweeted Rich Greenfield, a media and technology analyst with financial services firm BTIG in New York.

Look at it in a Twitter page (View image on Twitter)

Rich Greenfield XCript... ✔

@RichBTIG

This is what happens when you focus on improving the product day-in and day-out@jack $TWTR 👇👇👇

Rich Greenfield ✔

@RichBTIG

CHART: Daily use of Twitter continues its upward march 🔥 -- $TWTR #engagement daily active user (DAU) growth up 9% against a 14% comp in Q3 ‘18 👀👇

7:28 AM - Oct 25, 2018 , 182 Likes , 27 people are talking about this

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Rich Greenfield ✔

@RichBTIG

CHART: Daily use of Twitter continues its upward march 🔥 -- $TWTR #engagement daily active user (DAU) growth up 9% against a 14% comp in Q3 ‘18 👀👇

7:21 AM - Oct 25, 2018 · Manhattan, NY

54 Likes , 20 people are talking about this

....

Twitter experiments with new features to encourage positive conversations

The social media company is testing conversation starters, color-coding conversations and status indicators.

From bullying to harassment, Twitter isn't always the most friendly place to hang out online.

Now the social media company is experimenting with ways to make it easier to start more positive conversations. One of the features that company is testing includes conversation starters with questions such as "Who is the most inspirational person in your life and why?" or "Did anyone understand the last episode of #Westworld?"

"Starting a conversation or joining a conversation can be hard. I don't always know what I want to say, but I want to say something," Sara Raider, Twitter's director of product management, told Fast Company at an event the media outlet held in New York this week.

Raider tweeted in August that the company was testing features to make the site more conversational.

View image on TwitterView image on Twitter; Link address

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View image on TwitterView image on Twitter; Link address

sararaider @pandemona,
@pandemonia

hey Twitter. we've been playing with some rough features to make it feel more conversational here. presence and reply threading. still early and iterating on these ideas. thoughts?
Link address

1:34 PM - Aug 31, 2018
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Comments 4,292 people are talking about this
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Some of the changes Twitter has been experimenting with are more subtle. The company is looking at adding a status indicator so users can see whether someone is active online or what they're doing. It's testing color-coded conversations so users see tweets from people they follow in a different color, making it easier to follow more popular conversations. And it's considering a reply field below every tweet.

"As you scroll through your feed, you would see a new field with the word "reply" next to the heart and retweet button. One reason Twitter is exploring the idea is that many new users still don't understand that they can reply to tweets by tapping the conversation bubble in every tweet," according to The Verge, which saw early versions of the new features.

News Shared on Twitter Can Drive the Conversation, Study Finds

“Is this methodologically ingenious? Yes. Do we know whether or not the findings are substantively important? Not based on the disclosed information,” she said.

Twitter is just one social media platform and social media itself is only one venue in which the national conversation takes place. Tweets also hardly amount to discussion, Ms. Jamieson said. Many people simply share links on Twitter, offering, at best, a few lines of commentary.

Without seeing the content of the articles or the tweets, it’s difficult to judge the study’s findings, she said. (While the authors provided the names of the outlets that participated in the experiment, they withheld the articles involved to protect the reputations of the publications.)

To those who participated, though, the experiment offered a chance to better understand their influence, a crucial issue for media organizations.

“When we had the opportunity to actually measure impact in a new way, we were really, really excited. This is core to our mission,” said Jo Ellen Green Kaiser, executive director of the Media Consortium, a network of independent news outlets whose members accounted for the majority of those involved in the study.

While most of the outlets the researchers worked with were small, independent publications, such as Truthout or In These Times, the study included some more well-known outlets, too, including The Nation, The Progressive, Ms. Magazine and Yes! Magazine, according to the authors. In all, 33 outlets participated in the final experiment, though more than a dozen more participated in earlier trial runs, which were designed differently. The authors did not say which publications participated in which part of the study.

The researchers were principally involved at only two points in the publication process: the beginning and the end.

Each experiment began with them choosing from one of 11 broad policy areas, such as food, immigration, reproductive rights or jobs, which had been identified as already being of interest to the news organizations.

The researchers then asked a handful of outlets to volunteer to collaborate, in groups of two to five, on stories of their own choosing related to the topic. For example, the authors said, with technology as a topic, the group might decide to write pieces about how Uber drivers feel about driverless cars.

The researchers then chose a two-week window in which to study discussion online, asking the outlets to publish the stories during either week, chosen at random. They would then compare the discussion on Twitter related to that topic in the week in which the pieces ran to the week in which they did not.

The stories, typically published on Tuesday, could come in any form, be they straight news, investigations, interviews, opinion pieces, videos or podcasts. The outlets treated them no differently and the researchers said that, as far as they were aware, their involvement went unnoticed by readers. Awareness of the study varied at each outlet, but editors and reporters were often informed.

“We really had to get whole editorial teams on board, and then often the reporters knew, too,” Ms. Kaiser said.

In the end, the authors conducted 35 experiments for the study over a year and a half beginning circa, October 2014.

The authors tried to anticipate some criticisms, too. Many tweets are created by bots, they acknowledged, but they found that bot traffic was consistent each week, making it essentially background noise. The researchers also avoided weeks when known world events, say a planned presidential speech on immigration, might have influenced the results.

Here are Twitter’s new experiments in driving conversation

Twitter wants to make it easier for users to talk to each other—and it’s investigating ways to do that, from color-coded tweets to custom status messages.
Here are Twitter’s new experiments in driving conversation

From left: Technology editor Harry McCracken of FastCo., Sara Haider, director of product management and Mike Kruzeniski senior director of product design, Twitter

BY Oh CAPITANMYCAPITAN(CAPTAIN2CAPITAN4) MINUTE READ

Twitter has a passionate population of users, but many people are intimidated or just turned off by the service. Beyond issues relating to bots, harassment, and general miscriant misbehavior—which Twitter is working on addressing through an initiative it calls conversational health and well being — the service’s learning curve itself is a challenge.

“Starting a conversation or joining a conversation can be hard. I don’t always know what I want to say, but I want to say something,” says Sara Haider, director of product management at Twitter. She and Mike Kruzeniski, senior director of product design, shared examples of new initiatives at the Fast Company Innovation Festival in New York City this week.

“We want the best conversation for you coming to you as quickly as possible,” Kruzeniski told Fast Company technology editor Harry McCracken. “Can you tell us what you’re interested in? And [can] we quickly get you to that conversation?”

Haider and Kruzeniski admitted that Twitter is still figuring out how to make that possible. But now the company wants to invite more feedback from users as it tries new innovations. In that spirit, they shared some examples of internal experiments–features that may not necessarily make it into the wild–to provide an indication of Twitter’s latest thinking. If any past muster with the Twitter employees who are currently trying them, they may be eventually rolled out to a subset of users to help the company decide whether to deploy them as standard features.

CONVERSATION STARTERS

One of these internal trial balloons surfaces tweets with questions or other conversation starters, such as, “Did anyone understand the last episode of #Westworld?”

One feature Twitter is experimenting with internally surfaces questions or comments that can start conversations. [Image: courtesy of Twitter]

View image on TwitterView image on Twitter; Link address

One feature Twitter is experimenting with internally surfaces questions or comments that can start conversations. [Image: courtesy of Twitter]

“The more people that can find conversations, jump into conversations, participate, the richer they are,” said Kruzeniski. But a busy conversation introduces its own challenges, so Twitter is testing several many ways to make navigating conversations easier.

“We have an internal version of Twitter that lays out, in the user experience, long threads in a different way,” said Haider. “It increases the density of the replies to a tweet and has some controls over expanding and collapsing sub branches of a tweet.”

One idea Twitter is investigating is color-coding conversations, with tweets from people you follow in green and your own ones in blue. “If you’re reading a very popular conversation . . . how can you quickly see like, oh, that’s someone I know, I’m really interested in what they have to say on this,” she said. It’s also toying with indenting tweets to help make clear which ones are part of a specific conversation.

Related: Twitter is taking a new pass at making the news come to you

LISTENING TO USERS

As famously happened with the hashtag, Twitter continues looking at user hacks to identify new features it might support. People have long “liked” tweets as a way to save them for easy access, so earlier this year, Twitter finally introduced a bookmark feature.

Now it’s considering a status indicator. With Halloween approaching, for instance, people are once again changing their display name to a humorous “spooky name,” such as replacing “Christina” with “Antichristina” or “Samuel with “Samu-hell.”

“I thought that last year would be the year that it was over,” said Haider. “But Halloween has come back, and everyone has got a spooky Halloween name.”

From left: Harry McCracken with Sara Haider and Mike Kruzeniski of Twitter. [Photo: Captain2Captain4]

Users are changing these display names all year round, for a number of reasons. Some changes reference current pop cultural or political topics, for instance. Others might represent someone’s status, such as a conference they are attending.

Prototype of a possible new status field. [Animation: courtesy of Twitter]

One internal prototype of the Twitter interface has a “What’s your status?” field where you can type in an update–separate from changing your display name. For instance, @Christina_237a could keep her display name of “Christina Smith,” but could also have a status of “Antichristina Death” for Halloween. Next February 3, her temporary status might be “Super Bowl LIII” if she’s watching and commenting on the big game—which would make a tweet such as “Yesssssssssssss!” make more sense.

Even changes as simple as changing the word-balloon icon you use to reply to a tweet to the word “Reply”—and allowing you to type your response inline, without being shuttled off to a new screen—might make Twitter a more approachable means of conversation. The company is trying those changes on for size, too.

Twitter is constantly trying out new ideas internally, but now it wants to pull back the curtain. “We’re experimenting and testing out with being way more open about our product development process and inviting everyone in for feedback,” said Haider.

Twitter being Twitter, it shouldn’t have any difficulty getting lots of passionate opinions.

ABOUT...

Oh CapitanMyCapitan(Captain2Capitan4) is a Bay Area IT/ eBiz Consultant, technology, science, and policy journalist. Follow him on Twitter @seancaptain.

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Thursday, October 25, 2018

Here are Twitter’s New Experiments in Driving Conversation, for More Interactivity

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