Comments on: Five Quick Suggestions to Improve Twitter

By: derek

derek — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

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?

By: Scott Kingery

Scott Kingery — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

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.

By: Gordon R. Vaughan

Gordon R. Vaughan — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

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!

By: Gordon R. Vaughan

Gordon R. Vaughan — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

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!

By: Frank Fulchiero

Frank Fulchiero — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

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.

By: Curt

Curt — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

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).

By: Steve Poland

Steve Poland — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

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?