Ask HN: How would you make Twitter irrelevant?

8 points by matc 14 years ago | 7 comments

If there were a way for Twitter to become irrelevant, what would that be?

Joakal 14 years ago |

A project that delivers decentralised twitter-like applications as well as interfaces that aggregates it. There's several projects I believe. Essentially make it akin to an email service.

I suppose if you're aiming for the next best thing after Twitter, it might be brief videos with voice recognition. eg "Joakal: Met HN's founder!" "(PG talking) I like blackberries. Blackberry companies are best" (10, 20 or 30 secs?). That would make spam control and aggregation pretty challenging but lots of potential for advertisements and interviews.

Here's a brief advertisement (edited), "The Last Exorcism - BEST OF Chatroulette reactions": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CNSaurw6E_Q And brief comedy (edited), "Top 20 5 Second Films Presented By UPROXX": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=saqO_ZqX6uY

adrianwaj 14 years ago |

Well, to answer the question: What are you doing now or what's happening? you could have users wearing glasses that collects video and sound from the environment and sends it into the network for recording and broadcast. The glasses may also have an inbuilt screen and headphones that can receive from the network. Getting lifestreaming right.

The glasses could also detect a user's emotions by their eye state and voice (or pulse.) It may autodetect location and detect sounds to attach environmental metadata -- so great metadata. Think The Terminator combined with Brainstorm.

ohashi 14 years ago |

In theory there are only two options for this.

A. Something that is better than Twitter comes along and people like it more.

B. People no longer find Twitter useful/interesting/whatever makes them use it in the first place.

So basically, irrelevancy by competition or by societal shift.

sp332 14 years ago | |

Lots of things are "better" than Twitter, for almost any way you could measure "better". The only thing Twitter has going for it is size - everyone is on Twitter. Also they are now really fast and pretty reliable, but even back when that wasn't true, they were still growing like crazy.

anujkk 14 years ago | | |

Well, you can also look it in opposite way. Why is everyone on twitter? There must be something that twitter is doing better than others? Ease of use? simplicity? better marketing? hype? Why are you on twitter?

Make something that makes each one of those "everyone" to leave twitter and join your site and you'll make it irrelevant.

jcr 14 years ago |

If someone here had a way to make Twitter irrelevant, they would be working on it, very quietly.

wavephorm 14 years ago |

Twitter is an easier-to-use, web-enabled IRC. I suppose if you were to add a slick Twitter-like interface on top of an IRC with permanent handles/profiles then you'd end up with a real-time Twitter.