Take a look at Twitter's support page. If you haven't heard of Twitter, welcome back to Earth.
I love the way they gather the case information. You can't make it any simpler.
1.This is what I DID
2.This is what I EXPECTED to happen
3.This is what ACTUALLY happened
Zen.
Considering that most of Twitter's 200,000 users are tech savvy, to say the least, do you think that they could have created a more complex support page?
p.s.: I'm karmali on twitter.
Saturday, August 25, 2007
Twitter's Support Page
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12 comments:
The support page is just like their concept - easy and simple, but do geeks really use support pages ?
I think they would. Don't we all love finding bugs :)
Sowmya, This is Sunil from Earth,
Ahem... (cl;ears throat nervously)...What is twitter's value prop ?
What are the tech savvy people doing there? Should they not be writing/testing/defining code?
How is twitter making money?
Does twiter have a different form factor or are people just sitting around and hitting F5 wondering when Sowmya is going to do something different?
Am I just getting old?
Or just wiser?
@Sunil: Why did you think twitter something different from blogger? I use twitter for micro blogging. In simple terms if i dont have a big story to say i put in snippets and people follow them like they do my blog. BBC uses it to send out news headlines. There is another service (dont remember the name) which sends out their server status updates using twitter.
I'm sure that there are people who check other's tweets just to know what they are doing. Just that it depends on whose tweets are you checking. If Sowmya goes on to become a product management guru, i'm sure there will be people following her pearls of wisdom which she might broadcast thru twitter.
Its all about how you make use of twitter or in that case any other application/product/idea. You can use blogger and gmail to spam too. You can use nuclear power for making electricity as well as atom bomb. If i get some uranium i might wonder what the hell it is all about.
Twitter is being largely used as a platform for other services too. May be its a little early to talk about its value proposition.
Err i think you are getting old :-)
Yeah, Yeah, thorw stones at me :)
Sounds to me like a beta I had seen years ago called Rumour Server (code name). The server was meant to run in an enterprise (This is pre-hotmail days). It ran a ticker on the desktop (Win 95 - I mean 1995 silly) and people had the ability to add stuff to it. The teaker ran around the org and you coudl spread news - hence the name.
Err.. So is there a way of rendering the - did you call them- tweats (one vowel less and somebody would be sued :))? Or is a web page refresh the only way to do it?
@sunil: do you know there are people for whom the words blogger/wordpress doesnt make any sense?
http://romil.blogspot.com/
My point is that things which makes sense to you might not make sense to others. Its how you want to make use or not make use of it. Twitter can be used in many other ways not just to say "what you are doing". Thats just a starting point. Well in your blog too you can say what you are doing and people have to refresh the page every time to see a new post right? So does that mean blogger has no value prop?
Now if there is any other way to make use of twitter??? Thats what i said about using twitter as a platform for other products.
http://twittervision.com/
This is just another way of using the twitter API. Twittervision is beamed on big screens on conferences to broadcast what people are talking about. MTV is using it to enable their viewrs to air their views on the MTV awards.
Or have a look at the other applications made using Twitter
http://twitter.pbwiki.com/Apps
Just saw this post by Hugh Macleod of Gaping Void. He mentions how he would rather use his blog/twitter/facebook to get recommendations for a nice Vietnamese restaurant in Phoenix to take his spouse one evening than searching on google.
Why microsoft should buy facebook
Sunil - taking your Qs one at a time
1. Value prop - Umesh's done a good explanation of what Twitter's value prop is about, so I'll leave that out. I can see a lot of interesting uses for twitter. For example, the organizers of Code Camp San Diego used twitter to send updates to speakers (I was one of them, and so I know) about the event. I can also think of using twitter in projects to send instant notifications of builds, bugs -- as the twitter platform matures.
2. Email, IM, blogging, social networks -- all started with techies. So it is with microblogging :) More seriously, twitter is promoted by WoM marketing and geeks mostly know more geeks.
3. Revenue Model? Anyone's guess. From what I've read (and some between the lines), Twitter may emerge as a platform (think Facebook or Google Maps) for instant notifications via different sources (microblogging aside). They recently raised a second round - with a post money valuation of 20 million! Goog may already be eying it.
4. On form factor: Autorefresh, notifications are all in. All information is pushed to you. In twitter, you can "follow" a person, and you get notified instantly - on IM or as a text message (apart from the web, of course). Think about that - its a powerful mechanism and an addictive thing at the same time.
That reminded me of one more thing. Sowmya if you remember, I was live blogging/twittering at BCB3. And during Kiruba's talk on podcasting, as i was twiterring the touch points of his talk, one of my followers sent his questions which i passed on to him. I twitterd Kiruba's answers too.
This follower was sitting in chennai and following kiruba's talk using Twitter updates on GTalk and he could even get his question answered.
Sure Umesh, I remember that incident - didn't know that you were twittering, though.
http://www.defectiveyeti.com/archives/001892.html
Seems the best plausible reason :)
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