Since downloading the New Twitter app for my iPhone and getting the new web experience, I have felt uneasy using Twitter. I love Twitter. It is the ultimate realization of social media’s narcissism engine. But now I find myself fighting the experience, instead of embracing it.

Twitter has a small, limited feature set. Users publish messages. Users follow other users and observe their messages. Users interact with messages: they can republish them or “favorite” them. Users use a special syntax to direct messages at others. Users can search through messages. If users are mutually connected, they can send a message to one another that only they can see.

Later, Twitter added the ability for users to cultivate a group of other users to observe their messages without those messages appearing in the normal reading experience. They called it, simply, “Lists”.

What I dislike about the new experience is that explicit feature set has become obfuscated. Lost in what some of the users I follow on Twitter call “Marketing speak”. Home, Connect, Discover, Me.

Home

Home shows me the stream of messages from users I follow. It is the default. It seems harmless, but in the context of Connect and Discover, it becomes unclear what Home is supposed to be. Connect and Discover offer worlds of possibility: who can possibly be connecting with me? What can I possibly discover in these messages? Home? Oh yeah…that’s just my default view. In context it is not as exciting as Connect and Discover, even though it’s likely the only reason many use Twitter: to read the messages of those they follow.

Connect

Connect contains “Interactions” and “Mentions”. A user can observe how others are interacting with their messages or what messages are being directed to them. I don’t get a lot of mentions, but why separate these things into different streams? And why place these two actions under the Connect area? Why not lift this whole thing up and call Connect “Interactions” and be done with it. Connect is a thin veil, obscuring something that in the original Twitter (and Twitter for the Mac, which is increasingly becoming my go-to experience) is just one finite area. Notably not in this section is one of the features I highlighted above: If users are mutually connected, they can send a message to one another that only they can see. In this new nebulous area of the site devoted to “conversations” (http://fly.twitter.com/#connect), Direct Messages are completely absent. “Connect is your way to keep the conversation flowing.” Unless you’re having an actual two-way conversation. Furthermore, the <title> tag for the Connect area says “Twitter / Feedback”. What is it I’m looking at again? Feedback, Connections, Interactions, Conversations, or Mentions? Loosely defined, weak naming conventions sink ships.

Discover

The Discover section has very little if anything to do with Twitter users. This area feels entirely devoted to Twitter customers. Twitter’s power is its volume of messages. When it can cull together messages focused on a trend, or centered on a location, or based around some data point, it can sell the experience batched around that message group. If a user is interested in topic, Twitter can group together messages mentioning topic and sell the messaging experience to entity invested in topic. The new Twitter Discover area is an investment in selling that experience: “Stories”. My feeling is that the entirety of New Twitter is devoted to fostering this Stories user experience, and it was haphazardly grouped into Discover for some touchy-feely reason. The best thing about Discover is kind of lost: the “Activity” section where you can see how Users you follow are interacting with others. But maybe that should go under the Connect tab, where the conversations are. And when you think of it, what the hell is the difference between Connect and Discover? It’s completely arbitrary, completely nebulous, and completely pointless.

Me

Finally, the Me section, somewhat obviously, is where your profile and account settings live. But it’s also where your Direct Messages and Lists live. I presume they are in this section because they are mine, but once again this feels arbitrary when there’s a whole section dedicated to “conversations.” Direct Messages, since they are private and two-way, offer absolutely no value to Twitter. They can’t sell DMs. It’s a shame, because I really like Direct Messages: less immediacy than an SMS, less ceremony than an email. They are as good as dead. Lists, too. Lists are great. I have a list for NYC Food Trucks. I don’t want them in my timeline all the time, only when I’m hungry. Buried.

My whole problem with New Twitter is it drives users to a new experience at the expense of the old. Tweets aren’t as important as I once thought. Trends and hashtags… all that stuff that I didn’t think anybody cared about, that’s what New Twitter drives. The connections forged between the following/follower relationship, those exist as second class citizens now.

I’ve moved over to the fantastic Tweetbot. The previously shunned third-party app platform is really the only way to experience the true depth of Twitter now. Twitter took a very narrow feature set, and then suppressed some of those features under the premise of monetization, and what’s left is not as enticing.