Three Ways to Improve Twitter

Twitter is a phenomenal resource. The naysayers who take on the “I don’t care what you had for lunch” mentality are ignorant, plain and simple. Most users who have spent the time to figure out how to use Twitter, learn the language and little fundamental tricks to communicate on the medium, and set up a feed that is customized to what they are looking for will tell you that it was well worth the effort. Think back 10-15 years, around the time that the first bloggers were setting up shop on the Web. Think about how many late night talk show hosts and media professionals frequently painted a picture of these bloggers as 35-year old fat slobs who were musing on various subjects from their parents’ basements? My how things have changed – you probably visit 5-10 blogs in the course of a day, sometimes maybe without even knowing it. In a similar way, it will only be a matter of time until the Twitter naysayers come to realize that Twitter holds some real value. But as much as I love Twitter and the information that it provides me, there are still some major improvements that could be done to make the experience more enjoyable for the user. With that in mind, here are my suggestions to Biz Stone and company:

1) Provide more e-mail alert options. I like getting an e-mail each time someone new is following me. I could care less about getting an e-mail each time someone direct messages me, because 99% of the time it is an automatically generated messages that is either spam or the standard “Thank you for following me! I look forward to reading your tweets!” Users have the ability to change this and opt to receive or not receive messages for either of these cases. However, for some reason, there’s no option to set up an alert for when someone “@ replies” to your Twitter account. To me, these alerts would be the most valuable, because when someone sends you an “@ reply” it’s usually something personable — a response to something that you tweeted or simply someone reaching out to get in contact with you for whatever reason. But unless you are logged in and checking your “@ reply” section on the right hand navigation constantly, you would never know that you were receiving any of these messages. I also understand that this would be a feature that is for everybody; if you send out 1,000 tweets a day and get just as many “@ replies,” you probably wouldn’t want that. But at least provide it as an option for those who do.

2) Following accounts should be easier. I don’t know about other regular twitterers, but I often perform searches on Twitter, either to find out info on a trending topic, follow a conference, or to find other accounts that I’d like to follow. Sometimes these searches yield some very good information, and I often find myself wanting to follow a lot of the accounts that I find. However, Twitter does not allow me to do this easily — at the bottom of each tweet, there are only two options: reply or retweet. My question is this: if I am inclined to reply or retweet, wouldn’t I also be inclined to follow this person? Twitter needs to offer me the ability to do that right there, rather than making me click on each profile I would like to follow in order to do so. It’s tedious and annoying.

3) Allow for hyperlinks and other clickable info in the background. If you’ve been on Twitter for a while, you likely have a custom background. This is an opportunity to display a company logo or, if it’s your personal profile, something that reflects your personality. Either way, it’d be nice if Twitter’s default settings allowed for users to put in their e-mail address or website and have other followers be able to click it from there. There are add-ons that allow this, such as ClickableNow, but they are limited because it requires not only that you have the add-on but that others use it as well. If you have it, great, then you can hyperlink text in your background, but if I don’t also download it, it won’t mean much.

Now, as I am sure most of you are already thinking, there are plenty of Twitter applications out there that are dedicated to improving the user experience, and some do incorporate some of the suggestions I have stated above. Like Tweetdeck or Seesmic for example, which can let users know when an “@ reply” occurs. The only caveat is that you have to leave the program running on your desktop or phone. These programs also make it easier to follow an account, but it’s still a more tedious process than it needs to be. I have no problems with niche programs that can help you get the most out of Twitter by showing reciprocal  followers or automatically shortening URLs, but I believe that the suggestions above are pretty basic and should be provided by Twitter itself.

What kind of changes would you like to see on Twitter? Or do you like it just the way it is?