Microblogging is hot with the shiny new object set and as the practice of Twittering extends beyond early adopters and gets more mainstream media coverage, the crowd will get hungrier for more functionality. I don’t know about you, but I’m hungry for more Twitter functionality now. Check me out onTwitter here.
Whether the enhancements come from all the amazing third party Twitter applications or from Twitter itself, I really hope many of these updates happen soon. Here are a few items on my Twitter wish list:
- Ability to categorize and tag people so you can interact with each group individually (read and post) as well as to the entire group of followers
- Stats! post frequencies, web traffic & sources, rate of following/dropping, message topics, most common domain names getting linked to, most common urls getting clicked on, time of day, etc all with various time ranges
- Follow on the profile links. For God’s sake! It makes no sense for Twitter to hoard the link popularity yet receive the benefit of the community generating content.
- Enable a “social roll” list of links in the right column to the other social sites you’re a member of so followers can see where else they can connect with you
- Ability to place custom messages or links to ads if I choose in the RSS feed
I expect that some or all of these enhancements might be available through third party applications, but they are so disparate and unconnected, it’s risky to rely on any one of them – at least in a business sense.
It would be great if Twitter operated as an open source app like WordPress, where plugins and added functionality were all compatible with a single application (PC, Mac and Mobile versions of course).
What’s on your Twitter wish list ?
You took the words out of my mouth: Ability to categorize and tag people so you can interact with each group individually (read and post) as well as to the entire group of followers
Like the list. I would add it would be nice to see if someone you follow is on noted by a lit button. Many forums have that feature and it’d be nice to know if you want to DM someone.
Ah, I just put in a @Twitter request this morning. I want the ability to bulk delete Updates and Direct Messages. I’m not into the numbers thing so purging my Updates and DMs weekly is something I’d like to do.
i would love to see a wayback machine-like search function for profile pics ~ i quite like the idea of a “social roll” too 🙂
This list is great! My simple desires:
1. The Twitter Search / Summize search field to the home page. Additionally, the basic name search needs to come back too. 2 clicks to get there? Ugh.
2. People you might know. I always make fun of it on Facebook because I rarely know those people, but this would be SO helpful as Twitter becomes more and more mainstream. I keep discovering friends on Twitter that I didn’t even know knew about it!
3. When looking at one person’s profile, a “People you know in common” list. Would help the relationship building and networking aspect of Twitter. “You know Debby too? Small world!”
Great ideas, Lee. I think some of your suggestions may be covered by tools in Twitter’s rich ecosystem like Tweetdeck and Tweetstats.
@warrenss
I personally like the social roll idea. That is so helpful on blogs and other websites and I think it could be a real addition for twitter.
1. ability to send messages to people whom you are following but are not following you, i.e. @leeodden, you had a few dead links on a blog post and i didn’t want to make it public, (didn’t think it would matter, we all have dead links, but you never know..) but couldn’t send DM, then after i sent a public message, you didn’t get it anyways.. ack!
2. ability to have an “online” indicator for those that use a twitter client..
3. kinda of fitting with #2 – the ability to see all DMs and replies since you last logged on.
Great list Lee… however something I’ve been asking for – forever is a list / number of other friends (like on Facebook You and I have 76 ‘Common Friends’) that would be handy when your trying to decide if your adding a spammer to your follow list or not – Ah and I just read through the comments – What Sandra said in #3
db
These ideas are awesome. I would really like a “common friends” type deal. I may have ADD but I love all music related Twitter accounts. My buddy interns at Nettwerk Music Group and i guess they’re gearing up to start their own. http://www.twitter.com/nettwerkmusic
Nice list – agreed esp on removing the no-follow. I tweeted this too for added effect.
Call me shallow but…I want to know about the twitterati – influential people, celebs etc. twittering.
I’ve found nothing definitive so far.
I would really like to be able to easily see if a person you follow, follows you also. I often want to respond to people I follow but am not always sure if they follow me and will see my response. I know I can go into the followers page and see that, but it takes so much time to scroll through them.
I’m often confused about how to make the most of Twitter. This article echoes much of what I’d like to see there as well.
I agree with jcrn – so far, I’m pretty much just using it to send updates to my Facebook wall.
Tags has to be be the next step. I want to be able to organise my followers and those I follow.
There’s just too much noise at the minute and I want to be able to focus my twittering time.
Nice to see some new features like checking replies directly in twitter.
Thanks for all the comments and the retweets! There’s supposed to be something coming up soon I hear – let’s hope Twitter folks have been able to make some progress with the funding outside of stabilizing infrastructure.
I love the idea of the “social role,” Lee.
I’d also add a relationship with Word Press to that list. Why I can’t add a freakin’ Twitter badge to my Word Press blog is beyond me.
How about a revenue model? All those suggestions are nice but twitter won’t be around much longer unless they find a way to make a buck…