Yahoo Finance Jack Dorsey wants a smarter ‘Mute’ button for Twitter
Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey wants a smarter “Mute” button for Twitter (TWTR) that would, among other things, help “Game of Thrones” fans avoid spoilers.
The 42-year-old chief executive of Twitter, who also splits his time running payments company Square (SQ), envisions a future in which Twitter’s “Mute” button is intelligent and wide-reaching enough to remove tweets around entire topics, even if those tweets come from numerous Twitter accounts. (Twitter’s Mute button currently only removes Tweets account-by-account.)
“Imagine if you could follow a conversation or you could follow any topic cluster, whether those be time-based or enduring, and also imagine the inverse of that, where you could mute any account, or you could mute any conversation, or you can mute any topic cluster,” Dorsey explained onstage on Thursday during a keynote at the annual Goldman Sachs Technology and Internet conference in San Francisco. “‘Game of Thrones’ comes up in a few weeks. … You don't want to get any spoilers, so you just mute the whole concept of Game of Thrones, and you don't see anything on the surface about it. That's how it should work. So it's changing some of the fundamental aspects of the service so that we can broaden the actions to get at that idea.”
‘A ton of power over the experience’
Eventually, Dorsey would like the Mute button to be even more comprehensive — a feat that would be accomplished through a mix of artificial intelligence and machine learning.
“Once we get to topics, then you can imagine, following a neighborhood, like you know, SoMa [South of Market], a city like San Francisco, an area like the Bay Area, or even a company like Twitter, so it really gives a ton of power to the experience,” Dorsey added.
Dorsey’s remarks arrive a week after Twitter posted fourth-quarter earnings that topped Wall Street estimates but offered light guidance for the company’s fiscal first-quarter 2019. The San Francisco, California-based social network reported earnings of 31 cents per share on revenues of $908.8 million. (Analysts had estimated earnings of 25 cents per share on revenues of $867.1 million.) Twitter also reported monthly active users, or MAUs, fell to 321 million in the fourth quarter from 326 million in the third quarter.
Twitter stock has declined nearly 5% since the company reported fourth-quarter earnings.
The social network’s focus moving forward, as Dorsey emphasized on Thursday, is improving the so-called “health” of conversations on Twitter: a strategy that includes improving the user experience and deleting millions of fake and suspicious accounts.
“Our number one priority in ‘health’ right now and information quality is proactive enforcement and practice amplification of healthy tweets, conversation, and accounts,” Dorsey emphasized.
A smarter “Mute” button, at least as Dorsey envisions it, would obviously be just one cog in Twitter’s larger strategy. But it would certainly go a significant way to making sure Twitter users see significantly less of what they might find unnecessary, obtrusive, or even offensive. And by doing that, it’s unequivocally Dorsey’s hope that Twitter engagement rebounds in the process.
More from JP:
