10 ways to improve Twitter
It seems that years ago but in actual fact it was only April 2008 when I started using Twitter properly. I actually had an account since late 2007 but April was the turning point when I realised that you could use Twitter for other things other than telling the world what you were having for tea. Since then I’ve found Twitter to be those rarest of things, both fun and useful. I’ve used it to send visitors to my sites, as a business tool, as a method of connecting with my peers and finding new and interesting people to talk to and meet. Even to source root beer.
However, despite all of that Twitter still has some room for improvement. I’m not talking about making the platform more stable (I still see the Fail Whale) daily or even making DM’s actually work. I’m talking about enhancements to the functionality that won’t detract from what makes Twitter awesome, it’s simplicity but will instead enhance the user experience. So here we go, 10 ways that Twitter can be made better:
1. When I click on somebody’s Twitter profile I want to be able to see if they are following me. Tweetie 2 for the iPhone let’s you do this and it’s really useful.
2. Allow me to seamlessly switch between my different Twitter accounts without having to log off and then log back in again. While you’re at it, let me send the same Tweet to 2 or more Twotter accounts simultaneously. Tweetdeck lets you do this and it’s very useful.
3. Shorten URL’s for me automatically, just like Tweetdeck does.
4. Given me an option to publish my Tweet to my Facebook status to. If I want to.
5. Sort out the Retweet function. Sometimes when I Retweet I like to add a little comment of my own explaining why I’ve Retweeted it, so please let me.
6. Let me advertise to your users. Can’t understand why you haven’t rolled this out already.
7. Hyperlinks. Let me convert plain text to hyperlinks so I can send people to websites without using my valuable 140 characters on full URL’s that include http etc. I’ll even go one step further and ask that you allow me to show meta data when hovering over hyperlinks. I.e. a short description (similar to the alt tag on an image) that describes what the hyperlink is all about. This would also help when people annoyingly just post a hyperlink in their Tweet with no description to what it is. The only way to find out is to click it, very annoying.
8. Threaded conversations – when I click the “in reply to” link below some Tweets show me the whole conversation, not just the tweet that you replied to.
9. Allow me to send a mass Tweet to everybody in my Lists. So if I have a List dedicated to say just close friends then I may want to invite them all out to drinks. So let me Tweet to them all at once giving the details and time etc.
10. Allow thumbnails of Twitpics. If someone posts a link to Twitpic of another Twitter photo sharing service then display a small thumbnail of the image. Again this saves time on clicking pictures only to realise that they are of no interest to you.
Has anybody else any suggetsions on how to improve Twitter?
What I’m listening to right now: R. Kelly – “Untitled“
Post from Kieron’s Blog
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