So, Twitter is a bit of a shitshow right now, isn’t it?
I wasn’t sure what to expect when Elon took over, but I’ve got to say: it wasn’t this.
As someone who’s been building on Twitter’s API primarily, I’ve got to say: doesn’t feel great.
In terms of what I’ve been planning, it’s caused me to think long and hard about the direction I’m taking.
Do I think Twitter will completely fail? I’d be really surprised if it did. I think it’s going to have some major issues over the next 3-6 months, and probably contract quite a bit, user-wise, but I think it will stick around.
Is that something I want to continue building on?
I’m not sure. But I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about the answer to this question:
I wrote a bit about my thoughts here.
But even though that was a general answer, I started thinking a little deeper about that question. How could I help people back up their info?
I was a little surprised that I didn’t get any takers when I offered to download users’ data and send it to them, but oh well.
Maybe some people will take me up on using the Jupyter notebook I offered.
Like some people, I also decided to download my Twitter archive. Luckily, I did so early. I saw some people were having trouble getting theirs.
I’ve been trying to think about how useful that archive is, honestly. I’ve got a few ideas about how I can process it (particularly interested in throwing it into GPT-3 with a few prompts, but want to make sure I don’t spend a ton of money on it before I start to figure out useful ways to do so).
One thing that was missing, though: bookmarks.
That conversation led me to build something new: Manage Your Bookmarks
And the first goal is to make bookmarks work well with Jenn’s new tool: KeyLink. Check that out if you have a habit of copying and pasting all sorts of links/messages into various platforms. It’s an integrated keyboard for your mobile device that lets you easily find and post those things you use all the time.
It’s going to stay a free tool, at least for now. I’m just trying to help people pull as much of their data off Twitter as possible, but bookmarks are incredibly underutilized I think. I may expand this at some point as well, because there are a lot of use cases I can think of.
Simplification
I also simplified “Who Should I Unfollow?”.
I canceled all of the subscriptions and pulled out the subscription code. I just left the one-time payment for bulk unfollows, because that was a lot simpler. I also just added lifetime access for all users who were currently in the database. Ever since I screwed up the user database and my AWS account, I haven’t spent much time here. But this was a good way to simplify everything quite a bit, not worry about building out more features on top of it, and spend my time on other things that can tie into that functionality. I’m planning on potentially offering a monthly subscription to a number of tools, but I haven’t figured that out yet.
The Future of Social Media
I’ve obviously been thinking quite a bit about this, but I’ve spent more time on it since watching the Twitter fiasco play out.
I don’t think many people, especially those at the top of the economy, truly understand what social media is. And that has a lot to do with where their income comes from. It doesn’t come from the average user, the models right now focus on those who are advertising. Twitter is interesting in that they are now focusing a bit on identifying power users as a direct source of revenue. I think that part of it is intriguing, and probably more in line with where we need to go. The hard part for Twitter is the pushback from those who aren’t the power users, who are used to enjoying everything for free. They don’t like the fact that their free use seems to be in danger.
So I’m looking at how things can be modified with Social Media Gardens. I’m continuing to think about how all of that works and testing some ideas. My goal is to get some functionality released in the next week or two that I’ll start testing with some select creators. If that feedback is positive, I’ll start opening up things to the waitlist.
I’m focusing a lot on creator ownership of their relationships and how I can help creators that are playing with multiple content streams, not just podcasts, not just YouTube, not just blogs/newsletters. How can we increase the discovery of individuals?
Podcast discovery is a big problem right now and that’s what I’ve played around with a bit. I know that’s something I hear over and over from podcasters, so if I can figure out something that helps with that, it’s a great way for me to “land and expand” as they say.
Fun Project Opportunity
I’ve been part of a community called Buildspace for quite awhile now. I joined them for a web3 project several months ago when they first started, and honestly haven’t done much with them since. But they just announced a project focused on learning to use GPT-3 and it kicks off this weekend. It’s a free community to join/build along with, so if that’s something you’d like to start playing with, here’s a good opportunity to do so. I’ll be attempting to follow along this weekend around family obligations and building other things because I want to start doing more directly with it.