5 Ways to Improve Twitter

Twitter (my account) is pretty useful. Though I was skeptical at first, I have to admit that, after having used the service for some time, I see the merit in it. Though you have to be careful to not let Tweeting consume your entire work day (unless you’re on someone else’s dime and never get caught) it can be a great place to ask questions, join conversations, meet new people and generally have a new means of opt-in contact.

But this isn’t to say that Twitter is perfect. Even if we forgive the outages and other technical issues, there are more than a few flaws on this service, issues that sites such as Pownce attempted to exploit, although unsuccessfully.

The truth is that Twitter, by itself, is almost useless. Without the API and applications such as Tweetdeck, I doubt anyone would gain much from it. Even when it is at its best, it is merely an alternative means of socializing and communicating, a steep second place to IM, Email and social networking.

Its advantages are its immediacy and breadth, being something you can use when a blog entry is too slow or an IM too personal. But how can Twitter keep its niche while adding features that its users might actually want. Well, here are my five best suggestions…

5. Better “Follow” Emails

My most common point of contact with Twitter is when the service lets me know when someone follows me. I get these about 12 times a day lately and I’m always excited.

However, that excitement often turns into disappointment. Either it is a spammer, someone who has had their account deleted or just someone I’m not interested in. Sure, I follow the vast majority of people that do follow me, but there are 10-15 percent that I don’t wish to have pop up in my Tweetdeck.

These emails could do a lot more good. How about telling me something about this person? Specifically, I want to know five things.

1. How Many People Are They Following?
2. How Many People Are Following Them?
3. How Many Updates Have They Posted?
4. How Long Have They Been a Member?
5. Other Details (Listed Below)

The end result of all of this is that I would be able to make decisions about whether or not I am likely going to follow the person and, if so, follow up on the site. This works much better than having to visit each account individually and feeling like an idiot.

This would also cut down on the number of spammers on Twitter as fewer people would be clicking through to garbage profiles.

4. Friends in Common

One of my favorite features of Facebook is that it tells me what friends I and a potential connection have in common. I may not know a person directly, but I can see that if we have friends X, Y and Z in common that we likely move in the same circle and need to start talking. It makes sense to add them.

Twitter offers no such tool. Granted, the connections are more loose on Twitter, but they can still be valuable. At least giving me an idea of how many followers we have in common would be a huge help. The only question is how do you judge this? After all, we all have people we follow and people that follow us, two overlapping, but not identical groups. This produces many different ways to count the overlap between two users.

However, I’m sure that the braniacs (snicker) at Twitter can figure out some way to get relevant data from this. They have all of the information about who is connected to who, all they have to do is find a way to make it relevant and present it to us.

3. Friend Categories

I follow about 550 people as of this writing. Among them there are many people I want to follow and respond to, but might not know personally. It would be nice if I could create personal Twitter groups for, example, real-life friends, Web 2.0 gurus, announcement lists, locals, etc.

Right now the Twitter stream is more like a race to grab scoops of random conversation. If there were some segregation in addition to flood, it might make more sense and this would be something that the user controls. It would be a huge assistance to me, especially if the categories were not mutually exclusive.

For example, take my friend Patrick O’Keefe (@ifroggy). I could put him in my real-life friends category AND my copyright one since he co-hosts my copyright-oriented podcast with me.

Without this, Twitter is difficult to use and it is almost impossible, without separately subscribing to the feeds that you want, to control who you are looking at when you pull up your client.

2. Real Tagging

Tagging conversations on Twitter is a joke. The #system is not a true standard and it takes away from the 140 character limit that goes with each post. As a result, almost no one uses it, even when they are trying to start up a conversation. There is nothing to be gained from using. My few experiments with it have fallen flat.

Twitter needs to take tagging out of the Tweet and offer a real tagging system. I don’t add #plagiarism #copyright to my blog posts, I have a separate place in the header to list them. So it should be with Twitter. Tagging should be severely limited, perhaps to a few dozen characters, but I should not have my message penalized because I want to tag something.

This might require a decent overhaul of the Twitter system, but it could be done pretty easily. It would make the service much more user-friendly and encourage more people to use tagging both for their own posts and for research.

1. Rich Media… Built In

TwitPic, 12seconds, Twiddeo, all of these sites have sprung up for one reason, to put rich media, images and video specifically, into Twitter. A whole cottage industry has sprung up for just this purpose and why? Because Twitter doesn’t have this relatively basic feature built.

This was the one thing that made people actually use Pownce and consider it a serious competitor. Imagine, for a second, if Twitter would make it easy to post images, video or even transfer files without having to go through third party sites.

Would this require an overhaul of the system? Absolutely. But here is the deal. If microblogging is supposed to be the new form of blogging, and regular blogging is becoming more about rich media. If that trend continues, Twitter will be obsolete at the same time it is supposed to be more advanced. This will not last.

Twitter needs to learn to stop worry and start loving rich media.

Conclusions

I’m the first to grant that most of these features can be resolved via the API and some already have. But here’s the problem, when users are relying on third party sites to make your service usable, is that a good thing?

Not only does it add another layer of unreliability, but it also creates security problems considering that one’s Twitter login is passed around the Web. If any one of these services decided to either “go rogue” or were breached by an attacker, countless Twitter users would be at risk and the entire service could be ground to a halt.

When third party sites create features that users feel are essential, it isn’t time to expand the API, it is time to add those features, either through buyout or creation.