My online life revolves around Twitter. I get all my industry information from there. I connect with so many of friends via Twitter. I connect with other industry professionals on Twitter. I get my breaking news from there. But what Twitter hadn’t been for me till now is a centralised and organised source of news not unlike a magazine or blog. So, it was a pleasant surprise when I saw the dashboard for the football world cup on Twitter.
First impression: Looks slick. Very clean UI as usual. Woohooo!
On deeper testing: I can only think of one thing. What am I supposed to do now?
It does not solve any purpose for me. The tweets that are whooshing past in the activity stream are either very irrelevant or they move past too fast. How are they selected? On the basis of most no. of RTs? Or most no. of followers of the original source?
Well, whatever it is, it is clearly failing. There are some tweets which are not about the world cup and some which are not in English (how hard can transliteration be, man?) :
A decent feature seems to be the Top Staff Picks which is a collection of the best Twitter handles (experts and players) on the topic.
The individual page for each page sounded promising but turned out to be a bigger disappointment, full of bots, hashtags and random information.
What is happening here?
The current model is way too reliant on trusting individual users and then streaming their tweets to the visitors. What Twitter needs here is a better search based UI which is good in its algorithms and measures influence properly.
Otherwise, I am afraid Twitter will always be what it is in this dashboard: Noise.
