My experience with Twitter is similar every user’s love-hate relationship with it. That is, I hated Twitter when I first signed up, I didn’t see its usefulness, and was perplexed by the features of Twitter. Like most people it took me a while to warm up to Twitter but now I’m a fan. There’s still a lot of issues I hold with Twitter and it amazes me that after 3 years since it first launched there are many relatively simple features and improvements that have yet to be addressed. Twitter founder Evan Williams once predicted that Twitter would “dwarf” Blogger someday but traffic growth appears to be slowing. In lieu of Twitter’s visitor traffic leveling off, feature development for Twitter may be more important than ever right now. This is especially significant given the unusually high attrition rates that Twitter users display.
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DM management – Direct messages (DM) work great but most people don’t ever see important DMs because they are overwhelmed with all the autoresponder DMs. Is it really that difficult to add a filter that allows users that ability manage our DMs Ev? What about simply creating a checkbox next to each DM so that we can select and delete them all at once? I just spent an hour deleting 350 DMs one by one and now I’m kicking myself because I accidentally deleted the 1 DM that wasn’t an autoresponse!
Tweet organization – Such additional Twitter features would encompass a folder or tagging system that permits users to save certain incoming tweets for later reference. Sure you can favorite tweets but if we could allocate them to specific categories it would save us the time of searching through all our favorites.
Follower organization – Twitter features that would extend the ability to organize followers would be great. How about giving users the ability to tag or allocate friends to a self-created list? Something like Facebook’s friend list feature would suffice. Tagging and grouping followers would be a bonus. Identi.ca already permits grouping of followers via the use of ! instead of @. Why you’re at it Ev, throw in the ability to make those groups private or at least provide the possibility to make the tweets that are sent between group members private using a better DM solution.
140+ characters – While the 140 character limit ensures tweets are sent via SMS the need to say more than 1-2 sentences at once is frequently needed. Adding a simple “more” or “continued” link at the end of the 140 character tweet would enable mobile users to see the extended version of the tweet via their mobile browser.
Native retweet button – Call me crazy but I think it would be much easier to retweet if each tweet had it’s own button or link to essentially vote up popular tweets for the day. Tweetmeme does this quite well but its not directly connected to Twitter. Twitter executives should consider acquiring Tweetmeme and/or integrating such easy to use tools as most newbie Twitter users don’t understand hashtags or what “RT” means. More importantly there’s no great way to quantify “RT”. Quantifying popular tweets could also help identify interesting “tweeters” worth following on Twitter as well as those that are merely focused on spamming/marketing.
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While tweetmeme does a good job of voting up popular LINKS, services like dailyRT are better at showing popular TWEETS. I’m pretty sure dailyRT does a good job of “quantifying” popular tweets.
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Twitter/Share/BookmarkHi, thought provoking article
I think Twitter are probably very wary of a move away from the “open ended” approach to more “functional” one. What do I mean by this?
Well “open ended” is, as now, where you’ve got few buttons/facilities etc and you’ve got to accomplish everything you need within the tweet itself. A benefit here is a simple, uncluttered interface (and a lower hurdle for third party clients to implement) but a downside is that users have to get the format of the tweet right otherwise problems occurs. If you want to put “meta data” in a tweet then you need hashtags – e.g “ran #5K today in #45mins (#excercise-plotter)” – get the tweet format right then a third party app can do all manner of things with the data.
“Functional” is more like Facebook where they don’t expect the tweet to have any meta data in it as they would explicitly gather such data using buttons etc. Eg look at how FB capture information on your latest run etc? Buttons/duration etc – very functional – which leads to good quality data but the interface is more complex and there is a bigger learning curve.
Given that FB are trying to fight the bloat with “Facebook Lite” I would assume that Twitter are very wary about putting on weight – they know they have to – they just want to put it on in the right places!
Sorry for the long comment – I got carried on my away on my Blackberry whilst my daughter watched early morning tv.
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Twitter/Share/BookmarkTwitter should further enhance the “new follower email” to include a user’s full set of profile information to speed up the process of identifying spammy followers.
Techcrunch reported that a retweet feature is in the works which should meet your needs without adding bloat. The other features you desire don’t ring true for me but I am not that heavy of a Twitter user.
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Kevin Eklund reply on August 19th, 2009 2:09 pm:
Yeah, more info about a new Twitter follower would be very useful. I’m looking forward to the retweet feature but if that’s created by Twitter, it’s going to have drastic effects on Tweetmeme and Retweet (yet to be launched).
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