11 Ways to Improve Twitter
There is no hiding the fact; Twitter is one of the world’s top social media sites. I previously touched on the Twitter explosion a couple of weeks ago.
Twitter has created a community where individuals can tap into people / information they never had dreamed possible before. I for one have made many interesting contacts from website designers, plumbers, ex-felons to leaders of various industries.
One way that we can show our gratitude for the hard work the Twitter guys put in is to give them constructive feedback to help them make it into an even better site.
The other night I asked my Twitter friends how they would improve Twitter.
Here are the 11 top improvements from the list:
- Threaded Messages: allows to quickly see replies to tweets
- Search within your own updates: currently no easy way to search through ones updates
- Reinstate Twitter Instant Messaging: if it’s good enough for Facebook…remember way back when we used to be able to do this?
- Ability to create groups: organize your Twitter friends into groups so you can manage them better
- RSS for customized groups: related to the above – keep track of groups you’re interested in
- Filters on updates to avoid noise: there are just some days where you’d wish people would shut up
- Popularity tweets of friends, tags: trending of hot topics within your own profile page
- Tweeter Timezone display: Not everyone has their profile filled out properly so it’d be good to display their local time so you can tweet accordingly
- Common insterests with other people: Like the StumbleUpon and Digg way of meeting more like-minded people
- Easy ReTweet ability from Twitter Profile Page: ReTweeting is a big part of the Twitter community
- Get rid of the more button: I can understand that this would save on server load so in my view a nice-to-have rather than mandatory
Do you agree? How would you improve Twitter?
Thanks to the following Twitter users for their input (Follow them):
@Jking89
@labeet
@EmVicW
@mistygirlph
@DigitalSignals
@amitsiwal
@gatorjohn
@iamnotjustmummy
@pedaah
@WillHughes
@netwizard2003
@LostInInaka
Oh and don’t forget to add me too 
@mr_gadget
Comments
15 Responses to “11 Ways to Improve Twitter”
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Very interesting post Arnold, I agree will all of the points.
If you were looking for a way to search your own updates you can go to search.twitter.com and type search term from:stewartizer (replacing your own username).
What I also want is a way to search only people you are following for when you are looking for something you know you saw from inside of your twitter client but can’t find on twitter search.
-Michael Stewart (@stewartizer)
i am new 2 twitter so i never knew u could im there that would b nice ucould in somebody rather than go back and forth with direct messages
Thanks Arnold for the list. I agree on all points taken. I like the no. 8 recommendation the most, wherein you get to see the timezone of the persons you communicate with. Most of the people i follow and those who follow me are from all over the globe.
Hi Arnold,
Great article! Being new to Twitter, I didn’t realise that there had been the chat capability preiously but that would be great! I’d also love the grouping capability – sometimes reading a few hundred tweets in one go can get pretty confusing (and noisy!)
Not sure if this is possible at the moment but it would be great to be able to follow the tweets between 2 people if you are trying to keep track of something.
Many of your suggestions are done third party…it may behoove Twitter to look into purchasing some of the third party apps that are out there and integrating them into the standard experience.
I would like to see a variation on the favorites post from above…in addition to being able to track favorite individual tweets, being able to make a favorite tweeters feed would be cool…they already have the page for favorite tweets, adding favorite users can’t be that hard.
having a button for search.twitter.com would be nice too.
Some of the problems I have are due to my own ignorance, but some are due to Twitter. For instance, my biggest peeve is when people reply to something I’ve tweeted & I have no idea which tweet they are commenting on. Also, it would be nice not to hunt down info – like what the heck is with “follow Fridays”??? LOL
But I am loving Twitter because of all the very cool and varied people I am getting to contact. You are one. Thanks for this post!
Thanks Arnold~
being new to twitter I so appreciate your ideas and
information~
All the above are compelling suggestions for Twitter. As a user I would really enjoy the ability to filter and many of the other suggestions. Well done Mr Gadget.
Arnold Thank you . I agree that. and i hope twitter have a search function..and i can search any people.lol
One thing that I had wanted in my twitter is something of a widget which would show anything related to lets say, just my twitter-related websites like, twitpic.com.
Nice post Arnold. These are some good ideas and I definitely think Twitter should incorporate some of these in the near future.
I really think Twitter should spend some time thinking about groups. This could be a priceless feature.
@jonathannelson
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Hi, nice posts there
thank’s for the interesting information
good info
thanks
I’m truly looking forward to see threaded comments over at Twitter. Can’t understand why they still don’t have it.