Twitter Pushes Space and Live Audio Chats Promotional Campaign

Twitter is still pushing Spaces as a crucial connecting tool to make it a more integral part of the Twitter experience. The latest on this front is a new Spaces marketing campaign as it is attempting to highlight the app's importance of Spaces and audio discussion. And the Spaces themes that it highlights here are undoubtedly prevalent — right now, you'll discover a slew of Spaces on NFTs, 'shower musings,' and the like on the Spaces tab.

The difficulty is that most of these debates are rather a niche, and Twitter's algorithm is still not great at exposing the most relevant and fascinating discussions to each particular user. Because the conversations are happening in real-time, they can't be controlled or categorized ahead of time - though Twitter has added topic tags to aid with this. A bigger issue could be Twitter's unwillingness to endorse Spaces which could be problematic. The blowback could be enormous if you went to the Spaces menu and saw a top Space that Twitter had highlighted, and that Spaced turned out to be, say, a camouflaged talk about QAnon.

This is just one of the many issues with live-stream footage, as demonstrated by a Twitch user who filmed himself going on a shooting spree in Buffalo earlier this week. When you promote live-stream content, you also run the risk of promoting harmful material, which is an unavoidable element of the live experience, as Facebook discovered with its live map feature, which it eventually shut down – when you promote live-stream content, you also run the risk of promoting harmful material, which is an unavoidable element of the live experience.

Despite its large social graph and insights into user interests, Twitter has never been very good at personalization, which TikTok has nailed with its ever-evolving 'For You' algorithm, which draws you into a vortex of topical, relevant information faster than you realize. Hours pass by as you scroll through TikTok video, and it's because of this addictive viewing experience that it's grown so popular. It's now leading the next wave of social interaction, with all other applications catching up.

Twitter has never been particularly good at this. For example, it was never able to integrate top Vine video into Twitter, and its focus on live-streaming via Periscope waned as it struggled to increase interaction. Unfortunately, Spaces appears to have the same problem, and I don't see it becoming a crucial companion piece for the general Twitter experience until Twitter can make it more appealing by displaying the best, most personally relevant, and most important in-progress streams at any one time.

Perhaps another issue for Elon to address once he takes over the app.