In the spirit of my most popular Tumblr entry ever (a whopping 18 NOTES you guys), I’ve been thinking of ways Twitter can improve. I’m sure most of these have been said before, but Twitter is fast becoming my most visited site aside from Tumblr and lately I’ve noticed some areas that it is seriously lacking. I love it for its simplicity, but it could definitely be more functional, at least for my tastes. And here’s how!
- It should better manage messages relevant to you. Direct messages and @replies are two of the core concepts of Twitter, and yet the site is painfully bad at notifying you of such things. Having to click a tab on the right to find them (or scroll through your dashboard to do the same) is way too much effort for messages that are meant to be delivered right to you. The TwitterFon iPhone app highlights @replies in your stream so that they stick out— not a bad idea for Twitter proper to incorporate. It’d also be nice if the tabs on the right denoted how many NEW @replies and DMs you had, rather than the total number always. Some small way to alert you to their presence would be much appreciated.
- @replies and @tweets need to be less buggy and more easily navigatable. I wish my @replies list included ANY tweet that said @dfleishman instead of just tweets that started with @dfleishman. And in general, I wish there was a better way to follow Twitter threads (users replying back and forth to each other) that didn’t involve using the search function. A link beneath a given tweet that said “see all replies to this tweet” wouldn’t be a terrible idea, especially when someone posts a tweet asking their followers to answer a question or give advice. There are plenty of times I’m interested in reading answers to one of those, but the person who posted it and I don’t share many followers, so I have no way of seeing what’s been said in response. A “responses” link would fix that— and would likely encourage user-to-user communication, strengthening the Twitter community.
- It should find a way to incorporate ReTweets— and more successfully than people have done on their own. ReTweets are nice in theory but absolutely terrible in practice. By the time you include all the necessary terminology (“RT @whomever” etc.) the character count is often too shortened to include even the original tweet, let alone any sort of commentary on it, and the tweets look like a mess. I’d love to see a ReTweet button that simply reposts the tweet in question for you, including a small “RT:” in the beginning that automatically links back to the original tweet, and credit to the original author in the space below the tweet (where “…in reply to username” usually is). But really, any way Twitter could facilitate this— since users are doing it already, and it just looks gross— would surely be an improvement.
- I shouldn’t have to use 3rd party applications to perform basic functions that are essential to my enjoyment of Twitter. I can’t believe there is still no way to make use of Twitpic through Twitter.com, and though I don’t like TweetDeck much, it’s nice that it allows you to sort people you follow into groups. Those in power need to take a manifest of these most popular 3rd party features and start supporting them through the Twitter.com dashboard. Seems like no matter what, it won’t be good for business if Twitter users are primarily reading and posting through places OTHER than Twitter.com, and they wouldn’t have to if Twitter would keep up with the times. I don’t want Twitter to get TOO complicated, but these are things that really improve the Twitter experience, and I don’t see any reason to ignore them.
Y/N? Am I the only one who cares about these things?
Danny has some great suggestions for how the Twitter experience could be improved. I also appreciate the simplicity of Twitter, especially when compared with the chaotic facebook experience. A lot of times people ask me why I use Twitter, or how it’s different from facebook status updates or an away message on gchat. I truly think you need to try Twitter to understand it. Does anyone have a good way to articulate why you Tweet, or how it’s different from other web 2.0 sites?
Reblogged from lifedigital| |#