Robert writes in Scobleizer that Twitter’s traffic may be in trouble and offers up some ideas for improvement. I don’t buy all the suggestions, so thought I’d add my two cents. Still half-baked ideas and some great suggestions are better than what usually comes out of Twitter (eg #fixreplies, #retweet, etc.) So my responses spurred on by his suggestions:
But, anyway, this is all a way to say that there’s a good amount of room for improvement on Twitter. I can see many many areas that Twitter could improve its service to make its service more engaging. Here’s some:
1. Get rid of the 140-character text-only limit. Facebook is a lot more fun to use than Twitter because you can see photos and videos right inline in the feed and you can actually communicate something more than the metaphorical equivalent of a grunt.
No let’s not get rid of the limit! The 140 character limit is incredibly useful for SMS-based Tweeting. It matters. It also matters for getting real-time DM updates in countries like the US where someone has a Text plan but no data plan. What we need is smarter clients. The reason we use clients is… we can see videos in them, or Tweet an audio comment immediately or take that picture. Secondly… it is the “human text” eg anyone that can write it and see it that has provided and proved Twitter’s transparency. That’s a critical asset.
2. Greatly improve the list feature. The idea that it’s limited to 500 accounts is really stupid and the fact that I can’t create more than 20 lists per account is equally stupid. It means you can’t create lists of things that are complete. For instance, I already know of more than 500 tech startups. Let us create lists of lists, which would dramatically increase their usage.
There are times I think you just like pushing boundaries. You did this on Facebook with 5000 followers if I remember right. It actually doesn’t matter where you create the lists or under what account. I can’t click through 500 lists on your page. You can also aggregate your lists to show data on which are most active and all sorts of other things. If you want better or bigger lists… then use an aggregator eg FeedWordPress and just do it.
The limit may indeed be stupid… however perhaps there could be some other more innovative ways of getting around it. Eg if you don’t look or manage your list with a high level of frequency it is dropped / expires. Eg… are you care-taking the list or just using it as a one time development to aid marketing? Or if you want more than 1000 you have to approve or enable only one random tweet per day from those on the list. IE… you set some filtering conditions. For the lists you talk about seem unlikely to be very useful to people from a watching consumption POV.
3. Come out with a “supertweet.” Or, a new display surface for each tweet that can display all sorts of metadata. That would make each tweet more useful.
I’ve had posts that have argued various forms of SuperTweet for awhile. I wrote a post today in response to @stoweboyd on TwitterStreams
4. Add comments to each tweet.
I’m not sure this is valuable. Why do you need it one to one. If you need it one to one then add a hashtag. If you add comments to a Tweet is this also inline and does it go into my Tweetstream or not. Is it bloglike (lost to my RSS) or tweetback / trackback like?
There are ways to thread comments already eg #hashtags. Now having your #hashtags as a link off your Twitter page may be useful and important. In fact I think you’d pay for this. You could then even automate certain tweets / updates into certain tags. You could also filter and train the system for which ones are on-topic and which ones are not. Fact is you could provide every Tweet with a unique #hashtag just rewrite the bit.ly link as a #http://bit.ly/xxxyy Now all replies to that hashtag can end up on your blog page somewhere with a little ‘tweeking’. So too can all those RT’s.
5. Make the new retweet feature more useful by showing much more information about each retweet.
I’d have to agree that the RT feature is a mess. Let’s just skip it for now.
6. Improve search so that it has some usefulness.
I don’t understand this one. I find it pretty useful already. So “some usefulness” seems a little overstated. Please share what you would like to do.
7. Integrate a game into Tweeting, like Foursquare has. Give out badges for good behavior.
I think we’d agree that Twitter isn’t really into marketing. They have some passionate users and yet it is still hard to get going. At the same time… when that “ah ha” moment comes they become devoted.
8. Greatly expand the bio. Or, just scrap the bio and make a deal with Google to integrate Google Profiles (here’s mine) into Twitter. Make it easier to search for people and companies.
Now we are creating other issues. What do you want to do… make it Facebook? While I realize I could leave an expanded bio mostly blank… that tends to become socially inappropriate over time. There are real benefits for leaving Twitter’s profile very simple. It relates to the idea that the TweetURL is a contract and this is what we share. It also is supported by a set of public Tweets for which we can make a reasonable judgment about the person. The URL link does enable a link to other info. I do think there should be ways… that when I tweetyou @scoble …. , that URL for the Tweet can be supplemented with other profiles. Eg My Tweet if you want to accept it… or exchange details which I manage under other identity services you can request that we exchange them. Example, Twitter could put little Facebook, LinkedIn. Match, etc logos on my profile. I may even pay for this. However you won’t get my name on that profile unless you share yours. Eg… The Tweet becomes the request to share details with Facebook or something else.
Why would I look at it this way? I’ve got many examples that I used when I talked about Phweet. When you want to escalate to a conversation quickly when in a specific location you may also want to share certain profile information … As Twitter is the only open channel in almost all of this…. it can be a great info broker… However, let the other services broker the details of that facet of my identity that I want to have managed by them.
9. Get rid of the follower counts. They are a game that increases noise. Everyone knows, like Anil Dash reported, that they don’t mean anything anyway. They just reinforce bad behavior.
Not sure I want to see this happen. I know that many followers are “spam” but then I don’t auto-follow back. In fact the only thing that really gets me to follow someone today is an @message or seeing someone I respect in a list. Re who I follow… well that list is almost meaningless to me, but it may be useful for others who follow me. So my lists and other lists along with search make it easy for me to find things when I’m interested. I do still like knowing that a few people actually want to be part of or follow my tweets. I may have misinterpreted your statement. You perhaps mean only get rid of the count on the profile. If so I’m still not sure that it is important. We just make adjustments…
10. Get rid of the suggested user list and, instead, point people to Listorious or a similar service, which would let people find groupings of people using Twitter (with a preview).
YES I hate this… and think it sends the wrong message about Twitter to new users.
11. Give us a private Twitter that we can share just with our friends (and make it easy to choose where Tweets go).
Well isn’t that Yammer? Or one of the similar services. Or isn’t that a DM? Otherwise you are talking about a private Tweet to a private list. That seems plausible… although that is still broadcast. So now you have to make sure that the “private tweet” is not RT -able. Otherwise it is public. Generally these type of small group lists are difficult to manage. the best private chats I know are actually SkypeMultiChats. Then it would make a lot of sense if Twitter and Skype would actually work together. That could really change telephony. Context or Tweet before the call. Oh that was Phweet too. We’ve talked about that.
12. Give us a much better direct messaging capability. Right now that’s very lame, even compared with the very lame Facebook capability.
What’s lame about it?? This is the only system in the world where I can send a DM to an email address using SMS when I don’t know their email. All I need to know is your @twittername to send you any message. To send a private one… you have to follow me. That’s not lame that is bloody brilliant. DM’s work when you take them on SMS. If you get too many SMS’s your problem maybe you follow too many people. Make the messages public and get some control. IE stop following so many.
13. Give us a major UI update. Time to take Twitter into 2010 and stop making it try to fit into a 2006 mindset.
Yes there certainly could be progress. Yet where Twitter matters is on the mobile. Again SMS works. And for those with great 3G connections advanced phones have their choice of Twitter apps. When we talk UI… and messaging what we require is SMS updates for @messages. While I can get their via various means as Notifications on the iPhone this is not true for someone on Airtel in India… and Twitter really cares about India. Separately, where we should be disappointed is the slow progress on geo-tweets. Geo-Tweets is the real Twitter revolution. If I was working on TwitterUI it is where I’d focus most of my attention. Right now you are on or off. GeoTweets must be available by Tweet. I’ve blogged on this stuff too.
14. Make it easier to create and manage multiple accounts. Why do I need to use tools like Seesmic to tweet to my three accounts? Why can’t Twitter itself hook them together? This would let me create accounts with a lot less noise and a lot more purpose, which would help new users a lot.
Should be a premium service. Yet while you think this is neat I rather like that Twitter isn’t aiming at this for the value add. It’s low hanging fruit in 10 years maybe… but not now. Twitter is a text pipe… that we all understand and can make us do complicated things. It really focuses the mind. The access and availability of tools has meant that innovation has continued to drive Twitter. Developers would never build anything if they didn’t think that 1)twitter would have to buy them out, or 2)they really could make a viable business out of it and 3)they won’t be treated like Skype Developers. Twitter should leave the “update” apps alone. What they have to worry about is any one of them become more popular than they are themselves. Yet each move they have made… is smart. TweetDeck builds lists and starts registering you with an email. Twitter provides oAuth. TweetDeck lists are dead…. Twitter lists matter. Soon I won’t use a client that doesn’t support oAuth. It’s one way that Twitter protects my identity.
A suggestion on how you can make your tweets to different accounts better. Use WordPress. Push all tweets through wordpress first. Tag them. Use the feeds to then post to Twitter accounts. That way you can support all sorts of groups etc. Now to make it easy we need a Twitter client that enables us to view tweets and make and post our tweet via our blog engine.
Re new users? It’s becoming a whole lot easier to share. Twitter is actually big on sharing links. It’s a way we get our news. What you really want to do.. is use Twitter to drive traffic to the bigger conversations you want to host…. in a more tweet-like format. That means you have to bring content from Tweets back into your blog. That may require you to bring lists into your blog. In fact there are many little experiments that could be run.
As always you are a perfect test case. Lots of followers, lots of content. Can you thread your tweets back into your blog and create deeper, better, faster for informative conversations?
Just some ideas.
Yep, just some ideas… thanks for motivating me to just push a little harder today!
{ 1 comment… read it below or add one }
Agree with you on all of this.
And don’t understand why Robert Scoble wants twitter to be like another facebook.
The limitations a very usefull for start, this is the essence of twitter.
It’s because messages are short that people can get or send quick updates from anywhere using any kind of mobile.
It is because messages are short that people have to go to straight to the point to make them meaningfull.
It’s also for this reason we can follow so many people easily and get such a variety of information.
Same for the lists. There are only so many list anyone can follow or look at. Apart from Scoble who’s going to read 500 hundred lists ?
Again having a limit forces you to make choices so you have to choose only the best, which again gives values to your followers.
Simplicity and openess allowed twitter to become a vibrant ecosystem. Sure there’s a lot of junk but if you know how to find your way, twitter is a gold mine of informations.
And why doesn’t Scoble build all these features himself using twitter API and other apps? This is another great thing about twitter, its open ecosystem that allow developpers to customise their twitter experience.
Sure there are many things that can be improved on twitter, but I think the team behind twitter is doing a great job. it looks like they don’t do much but most often less is more. Everything they did so far was very clever in my opinion.