Twitter Preparing New Events Feature, Aims to Reach 1 Billion Users. "Twitter will get to a billion members," Twitter co-founder and recently displaced CEO Evan Williams told the crowd at a San Francisco INFORUM event yesterday.
With only 145 million-plus users at present, reaching that lofty goal is still a long ways off for the 4-year old company. To get there - or at least to aid in getting there - Twitter is planning a new feature called "Events. " Unlike Trends - which track currently popular words, phrases or hashtags (a keyword preceded by the pound sign) - events would track a number of keywords that auto-associate themselves with the event. The Very Last Thing I'll Write About Twitter. I have an odd mental relationship with my former employer.
Clearly, I wouldn’t have worked there for three and a half years if I didn’t care about the product and the community. But then, I wouldn’t have left if I really wanted to see that commitment through. I have an investment of stock in the company, of course, but more importantly I have an investment of time and emotional energy. I’ve walked away from the job, but that investment has made it difficult to truly detach myself from it, as excited as I am to be doing what I’m doing now. Next week our team at BankSimple gathers together in person for the first time to kick off development in earnest.
As a disclaimer: nobody at Twitter has read or edited this post, nor am I privy to any insider communication from Twitter and its employees. #newtwitter Whenever Twitter announces anything, I’m filled with a mix of excitement, resentment, pride, and dread. The Changing Role of the Platform. Twitter Takes Over The Tweet Button From TweetMeme. Slowly but surely, Twitter is taking control of all the key features that make it such a powerful communication medium.
Today, it is introducing the Tweet button, a way for Websites to get visitors to share stories and links with one click. Of course, this already exists in various forms, the most popular of which is the Retweet button created by TweetMeme, which is on so many sites (including ours) that it currently generates 750 million impressions a day. Well, that is all very likely going away. “We expect people to switch,” says Tweetmeme founder Nick Halstead, “and we support that.” Twitter is killing TweetMeme’s Retweet button, but with love. Gradual Engagement Boosts Twitter Sign-Ups by 29% Twitter recently redesigned their sign-up process to boost new user engagement.
Though the new sign-up process added one more screen, conversions went up 29%. How? Gradual engagement. Gradual engagement is the process of moving a user through an application or service – actually engaging with it, and seeing it's benefits. With gradual engagement, new users are not just presented with a registration form and then dropped off a cliff (typical process in many Web applications). When done right, gradual engagement communicates the core essence of a service with a few lightweight interactions. Through their user research, Twitter found that while celebrities (and their tweets) were a big reason people came to Twitter, they did not keep them there. Twitter's previous sign-up process didn't hit the mark. In the redesigned sign-up flow on Twitter, the first thing people see after creating an account is a set of topics they may be interested in.