The reason why 44% of 947 million people with Twitter accounts have never tweeted is hiding within plain sight if you work founder Evan Clark Williams’ surprising formula for getting rich through an online business into the equation. And at the risk of sounding like we’re twisting his theory to suit our own, we’re going to say that Twitter’s new redesign is a clever decision made to remedy the issue of inactive users.
First off, you’ve probably been seeing reports about the less than half of Twitter users being active on the site splashed across the internet. The micro-blogging and social networking portal prides itself on being the place where news breaks and the easiest way to ‘stalk’ people (including celebrities, of course). But human beings are creatures of habit.
In an interesting interview on Wired, Williams said that companies who ‘lose sight of basic human needs — who want to give people the next great idea — will have problems.’ He hints that given a choice between what is familiar and what is new, folks will go for the former. The trick is offer a well known product which makes achieving a need faster and does not force the user to think.
When Twitter was launched in 2006, Facebook was already huge. The latter was all about connecting friends who could also alert each other to headlines from around the world, albeit, not very quickly. Twitter was a new product, a service which forced you to express yourself with a limited number of characters and its strength was delivering news as fast as possible via word-of-tweet.
According to Williams’ speech, Twitter should have been a means of spreading important headlines faster than Facebook and it needed to offer a better means of social networking too. As we all know, it does breaking news very well, but fails in the ‘connecting people’ department. This is perhaps why we’re seeing it gradually morph into Mark Zuckerberg’s baby.
It will take some time before Twitter loyalists start liking the new design and even more time before all those inactive users take to it as fondly as they do Facebook.