Why Twitter does not want to become Pocket?
I have been using Twitter for the last 5 years. Once I started using it actively, one of my recurring needs was “Hey, I find this tweet engaging. I wish there was an option to save it and access it later”.
So, pre-2018, I worked around this by liking the tweet so that I can access it later in my profile.
This approach did have its limitations
When you like a tweet, it is made public. And you don't want to broadcast everything that piques your interest. Especially, during current times.
Liking a tweet also runs the risk of misleading Twitter’s recommendation algorithms.
So, soon enough, in early 2018, Twitter released the Bookmark feature which allows users to save tweets privately. “Privately” being the keyword here.
Now, before we dig deep into how the Bookmark feature can be improved, let’s first understand the different scenarios in which a user would like to bookmark a tweet
Revisit a tweet that piqued your interest in the past. This is the classic “save for later” use case for which Twitter released the bookmark feature.
Bookmark a tweet that you haven’t engaged with or read fully.
A Twitter feed can become overwhelming quite soon. You might have already wasted a lot of cognitive energy in consuming tweets related to entertainment, memes, “not so useful opinions”, etc. before you come across a tweet whose premise you find interesting. You realize that you need to spend some cognitive energy to get the value out of this tweet. But, you’re low on cognitive energy. So, you decide to bookmark this tweet and come back to it later.
Now, the second scenario is where things get interesting. I am going to hypothesize that this is the main reason Twitter is hesitant to “improve” its bookmark feature. It fears that the second use-case might start becoming the dominant one and can lead to reduced “in-moment” engagement.
To understand this better, let’s look at the current bookmarking flow
You click on the share button and in the resulting popup, you click on the “bookmark” option
To access a bookmarked tweet, you click on the “bookmarks” tab under your profile. You’re then taken to the bookmarks section where you see a monolithic list of bookmarked tweets with the latest tweets appearing at the top.
Now, it is easy to suggest a few improvements to the current flow
Why can’t we have a separate “bookmark” button right next to the reply, retweet, and the like buttons? Surely, there is enough real estate out there.
Now coming to accessing a bookmarked tweet, the first thing that stands out is, there is no search capability at all.
Want to search based on a keyword or the author’s name? Sorry, ain’t happening.
Want to filter out the tweets that you had bookmarked in the last 2 weeks? Sorry, you’ll have to scroll through the list.
Hey, I would like to label my bookmarked tweets so that they are better organized and it is easier for me to access them later. Sorry, that’s not happening either.
Hey, I have been bookmarking a lot of tweets to read them later. But I never get to them. At this point, am not even sure why I bookmark every second tweet that I come across. I wish Twitter could nudge me into reading the tweets that I had bookmarked.
The last paragraph kind of gave it away. You don’t want Twitter to become another Pocket.
Remember that amazing app that lets you save articles so that you can read them later.
Let’s be honest. What actually happened was, we were always short on time. So, we saved every second article to Pocket on a whim in the hope of reading it later. Except, that day would never come. And then one fine day, you’ll be too overwhelmed by the gazillion unread articles on Pocket that you decide to delete everything.
We have all been there.
At the end of the day, Twitter is always looking to increase the “in-moment” engagement of its users (i.e.) tweet more, like tweets, retweet them and share them across the various channels.
Reducing the friction in bookmarking a tweet (moving from the current 2-click flow to a single click flow) and adding more search capabilities might morph Twitter into Pocket. Something that could reduce the “in-moment” engagement and be detrimental to Twitter’s bottom line.
Thanks for reading. I would love to hear your thoughts on this !!