Why I Don’t Want Search On Twitter
With the news of FriendFeed’s launch of the search feature for its users has come the questions of where’s Twitter’s search feature? Let’s think about this for a moment…
What’s the greatest thing about Twitter?
For me, it’s the amount of information that’s both selective and useful, and thrown my way every day by my followers and those I’m following on Twitter. I could use any major search engine, at any given moment, to find the answer to quite a few of the questions I ask on Twitter. I could wade through hundreds and hundreds of articles on these search engines to find only five (5) that were worth my time and effort. I could do all of these things, but as I find more informative and intelligent people to follow on Twitter, they make using search engines seem like a tedious chore!
Now, this doesn’t apply to everything that I think to search for. Twitter isn’t somewhere I can go to find music that I want to download. That’s something I’d search and ask about elsewhere. ;)
In my eyes, having a search feature would take away from the user experience of networking, and connecting with those whom you’ve befriended and those that have befriended you on Twitter!
Twitter is the place to go to for those great, hard to find, resourceful articles! With Twitter, you have intelligent people at your fingertips to help you find what you’re looking for more efficiently than any search engine ever could! As I stated in the beginning, I could use a search engine to find what I’m looking for. Yet, I’d rather use Twitter, to connect with great minds that have scoured the internet for hours and have come out with bookmarks and links to great articles on just about everything! The search feature could definitely aid in the finding of previous messages and whatnot. Though, I’d rather for users to seize the opportunity to build upon the relationships they’ve made with others on Twitter first.
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Twitter NEEDS a search because the UI can’t handle large volumes of people.
Twitter is at its best when you’re able to tap the opinions, outlooks, perspectives and expertise of a large volume of people.
I’ve come to rely on @ messages — otherwise, yes, unfortunately, the chances I might catch any one person’s updates in a cogent fashion are pretty limited.
I wish (I should get around to writing it maybe) there was an app that let you easily pick out certain twitter feeds, and easily keep up with those — the people with whom you’ve established more than just a random, passing acquaintance. But even then, there are hundreds of people I’d like to follow closely, you know?
Twitter can be a victim of its own success, from a usability standpoint.
@AndrewBadera mentioned that he’s come to rely on @ messages. My primary use of TweetScan is to FIND @ messages.
I access Twitter through a web browser on my phone a majority of the time, and m.twitter.com works well for reading recent tweets, or reading your own archive of tweets. But m.twitter.com falls flat on its face when you want to look at replies - you end up getting redirected to the regular Twitter page for replies, which takes forever to load.
TweetScan pages load much easier, so I use TweetScan to check for replies. This offers the added benefit of also retrieving mentions of my Twitter handle which are not formally replies (e.g. “Did you see that dumb tweet from @oemperor?” would be retrieved by TweetScan).
So, in my case, I usually use search to help maintain my existing relationships.