• by P.J. Bednarski , Staff Writer @pjbtweet, March 10, 2017

I use Twitter a lot. I’m a journalist and Twitter seems to have been invented for us. It is like a random wire machine, absent the clatter and it's a helluva a lot quicker.

All the stories about the failure of Twitter to catch on interest me, because it seems like it could be successful even with people who don’t love the idea of being overloaded with scraps of facts. 

To a lot of people, Twitter is just too hard to use.  A Twitter critic observed, “Nonusers can continue to ask: ‘Why should I use Twitter?’” It is, he said, “too difficult to use.”

That person was Anthony Noto, Twitter’s COO and it’s a quote from story in Wired--two years ago.

A year ago, Twitter vowed, “We are going to fix the broken windows and confusing part that we know inhibit usage and drive people away.”

We're waiting.

When I tell people about something I found Twitter, the looks I get back makes me imagine how Marco Polo must have felt. So exotic!

The Website Market Realist has taken a look at Twitter’s lagging performance. It applauded Twitter for recently--just recently!--beginning to show view counts for videos posted on the site.

“By showing view counts for videos, Twitter could encourage more video consumption on its platform, as users would easily identify popular videos they might also want to watch,” reasons the very reasonable Market Realist.  “More video advertisers could also be drawn to Twitter if they’re impressed with video popularity on the platform. As such, Twitter could end up increasing its digital video advertising budget by simply showing video view counts.”

In another post, Market Realist suggests is the one that I’ve already complained about. A snippet:  “One of the reasons Twitter has struggled to grow its subscriber base and revenue, is that many people still perceive Twitter’s site as complicated to use, the company’s former CEO Dick Costolo once admitted. The perception that Twitter is difficult to use hurts user engagement and makes it difficult for the company to attract more advertisement spending on its platform.

"Simplifying the site for the masses and adding new features and services, such as more video content and live streams, could help attract more subscribers and marketers to the platform, leading to revenue growth.”

Twitter started in 2006; it’s been on everybody’s trouble list for easily the last four years. If its big fix is to count up most popular tweets--video and otherwise--and make it just easier to use, those don’t sound expensive or hard. It’s #common sense.

pj@mediapost.com