Watching Henry Blodget's excellent interview of Twitter's Chief Revenue Officer, Adam Bain, last week on how Twitter makes money via sponsored tweets, trends and promotional campaigns, and why they are so much better (from a click-through + engagement perspective) than display ads, I was struck with two conflicting thoughts.
One, Twitter really gets it, and is positively Apple-like in terms of focusing on very few problems and executing them very well.
And two, given Twitter's execellence, I was left wondering, "Why does Twitter's trending functions suck so badly?"
Case in point, when I look at what's trending now, I am left with the following, which while not completely information-free, is hardly useful.
What I would like, and what I expect is that every time I take action (by tweeting, re-tweeting, replying and/or favoriting), I get information back.
What made me think about this was when I went to LinkedIn today to re-post a tweet I'd made earlier on my twitter account.
Immediately, I saw an in-line message that the link is trending in the Venture Capital & Private Equity Group on LinkedIn.
In terms of context, if I want to find others to "break bread" with on this topic, I now have a real-time place to do it. Similarly, if I wasn't a member of this group, I now see a "like minds" bucket to plug into.
Where can I go with this? The logical next steps are providing visbility to me about:
- Posts related to this particular topic (think Techmeme without all of the favoritism curation);
- Other people similarly interested in this topic and what they're reading right now.
Don't get me wrong, though. I am not suggesting that any of these elements are new concepts, or that different services don't exist that implement these features in some way.
What I am trying to frame is the evolution of the web from the linearity of links to the matrixing of multiple traversal paths based upon topicality and user type.
It's about context, and the desire that when I amplify my interest and intent by posting a tweet, that I get a set of traversal paths back for the effort.
It's the ultimate man-machine feedback loop.
