I keep hearing that Twitter will soon have premium (paid) accounts for businesses. That will be good. Bite sized chunks, clearly articulated will dramatically improve marketing communications. I kept thinking, what would I, as a small entrepreneur need from Twitter. Here are a few.
1. A more flexible layout of my twitter page (Right now there is some innovative backgrounds, but a customizable page would be great).
2. A set of tags to define my business as a part of my profile. Search engines can use these tags to do better searches.
3. A widget framework (this is the geek in me speaking) that allows people to build widgets and put them on the home page.
4. A better search. This should not be too difficult to do since Twitter has a lot more context than generic content on the web.
5. A tagcloud of tweets, retweet, replies in the user home page would be of great help.This could be a widget.
6. Tweets as commands. For example, @wefollow #tag #tag #tag is a kind of command. This feature deserves a full blog post.
7. Twitter as a distributed data collector. People can send in all kinds of data (to all kinds of apps) using simple text.
8. Twitter Usage Patterns: will help people understand how to use the product better for business.
9. I would love to have 255 characters. While I manage to live with 140, I need to constantly edit when I retweet.
10. I would love to see some formatting improvements in retweets. I may retweet with a comment and that should show up in a different color/format than the quoted text.
11. I would also love to see some kind of permalink pointing to the original post in the case of replies. Makes it easy to follow conversation.
12. Raw Twitter Data as open linked data may let lots of new innovative applications bloom.
This is my first installment of wishes. There will be more but these are the most essential ones.
3 thoughts on “Wish List for Twitter”
Yep, twitter can improve lotsa things.
But most of things that were mentioned above like page customization, widget framework, , etc would make twitter no different than myspace/facebook etc.
Tweet permalinks are already available. In tweetdeck clicking on “in reply to blah” will open up the original tweet.
Most of the data on twitter can be both accessed and manipulated via its extensive api. I have used its api to build an application for my project and its pretty simple too.
Since they seem to have kept the 140 limit for sms, its more reasonable to ask for a raise to 160 which is the actual limit for smsing.
And some of the other things would really help understand and visualize data in a better way especially considering the large user base and an exponential amount of updates that the large user base makes. I suppose though not built into twitter directly most are available as third party apps.
Great stuff here, i really enjoy reading your blog.
Cheers, Kalyan
Kalyan,
Thanks. The request for open data is to get all the data from the beginning. From what I heard (have not tried it), twitter API and search only go back 30 days. I think innovative uses of Twitter are increasing.
The page layout request is not to turn it into a social network like Facebook. If you are a business, you may like a header, a tag line, some links. Obviously this can be done with the twitter as a widget even in iGoogle or Page Flakes.
Thanks again for the insights.
Comments are closed.