I am often called upon to do Twitter support at conferences. Explaining non-intuitive concepts like “hash tags” to folks who aren’t digital natives takes a bit of… effort.
I have posted before about how great Twitter is at conferences, and I’ve found that it’s an environment that often brings in these new users.
A year or so ago, Twitter for the web began breaking their search function into two tiers, “top” and “all,” with top being the default. Only seasoned tweeters appear in the Top search.
The result of this decision is that newbie tweeters don’t see their own tweets without clicking the obscure “all” link, and have no way of seeing their tweet on mobile. This causes questions like, “did I submit my tweet,” or “why are my tweets not showing up?”
I am sure that this design helps with server load, but it is a bad decision for building a user base. On the web, first impressions are everything. I have personally seen this initial experience drive some very smart people away from tweeting.
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