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Five Quick Suggestions to Improve Twitter
After the positive feedback on the previous Five Quick Suggestions for TechMeme and PodTech, today we take a look at Twitter. So without further ado, here are my "Five Quick Suggestions for Improving Twitter."
Suggestion #1 - Groups
Let me organize the people/companies I am following into groups and then decide how to deal with each group individually. For example, I would like groups such as: family, friends, coworkers, companies, bitter rivals, etc. Then, for example, I can set the family to always text and message, companies to only send me texts during the week, coworker twitters should always forward to cell and so on. Right now its a clusterfu** and every time I add a person to follow, I have to individually set what happens when it would be way more efficient as a group. If I want to make a change, I do it at the group level instead of the individual level.
Suggestion #2 - NO MORE TINYURL
Ok, this one baffles me. I assume Twitter wanted to ship a product so they used TinyURL to handle the URLs that we put in our twitters. Sounds great right? Well think again bub! Most of the twitterheads say that this tool is to create a mini-blog, but what happens if the TinyURL service is out-of-service or goes under? Then what? Goodbye millions of URLs. So Twitter, take some of your new bankroll and build (or buy) your own TinyURL that will live within the Twitter domain. Then at least all is not lost if this outside service crashes.
Suggestion #3 - Better Performance
I know it's kind of a joke these days but it's time for Twitter to stay up for a week with no downtime. It's pretty bad when Vegas has odds on downtime for a Web app. With Skype going down this week there were several comparisons made to the downtime for Twitter. You have a bankroll, use it wisely. Forget the Aeron chairs.
Suggestion #4 - Design Improvements
Check out Yappd and while it's probably too Web 2.0 (whatever that means), it certainly is more polished than Twitter. Let's get rid of the Arial/Helvetica ladies and gents and move into 2007. While Twitter allows you to change your background image, I assert that it is not enough. Why not let me customize the style sheet as I see fit? Provide a class list and let me go to town because Twitter is about each of us, correct?
Suggestion #5 - Threading
Please let me thread especially when the following person is replying to someone outside my network. When I see "@jowyang - I agree, Yankees are better" - how in the heck do I know to what the person is referring to? What are the Yankees better than in this example? This system is more than just a 1-1 text message app. We have followers and we follow hence we need a way to follow intelligently.
Check out our previous Twitter coverage.
Thanks for the pointers, learnt some. I think its time the pretenders, Jaiku, Twitter, Pownce, Yappd etc started to filter themselves out.
I want to use a microblog in the enterprise (2.0) field. Currently none of them are there. Your suggestions are all valid, and one of these would do well todetach itself from the ubiquitous-use market and go for a solid business platform. I would pay good (or bad) money for a business twitter. However, I think you realise too that they are all within sight of the big cheese and would it make sense to settle for second best?
Also, many ridicule Twitter for the fact that one can record one's most inane moments and send them on. There is a service and a sale around that, and like it or not, its brilliant. Didn't we all love 24 hour reality TV a few years back? Will we be able to pry microblogging out of the hands of an "always-on" culture?
As I said, ironically on Twitter, I want 1. a search field so I can find others with my interests (Africa, LatAm, Europe, poetry, punkity rockity music, hiking, games, threatened bloggers, absurdism, etc.), 2. a way to find out if people you know and people you already follow are on Twitter (via email address book and bookmarks and perhaps Facebook).
Here are some:
http://www.techquilashots.com/2007/07/25/twitter-become-the-facebook-platform-for-mobile/
And accepting MMS [youtube is doing it via 5-digit shortcode now], so that photos and videos can appear in your stream. [although the big question is then, will they push photos/videos out to people's cell phones that are following other users?].
Stability is job 1 though -- it's bad when everytime i read about twitter, the first thing people mention is the downtime. Maybe move from RAILS?
Many individuals combine business-related messages, with tech news and personal items. Sometimes you just want to follow one of their catagories. By having posters self-define their channels, if they want, you could decide which ones to follow, or follow all.
Right now it's one big alphabet soup.
I disagree on the fonts; I like the simplicity of Twitter, which is essential to be able to skim through your "following" updates quickly. I've tried both Jaiku and Pownce, but found Twitter more usable for this reason.
Others may use it differently, but in my view, Twitter is one potentially very helpful tool for handling information overload.
Besides that, it would be nice to be able to put more information about yourself into your profile page, i.e. more links, maybe more of a basic profile.
I use Twitter a lot, on my computer, and find it much better for many things/updates than email, because the short format forces people to get to the point!
Also, I agree with Suggestion #1, about groups. Twitter needs both topical and geographical groups.
And #3, yeah, they were down quite a bit this week!
I like that they created the replies section but (and a lot of people don't seem to know) you have to put @username at the beginning of your tweet. I'd like to see them track the whole post.
In the mean time I have a Yahoo Pipes mashup to track this via rss.