Twitter has been releasing a number of new features lately. Notable ones include: grouping the people you follow in public and private lists; the new re-tweet button that allows you to RT automatically; and the new geolocation API which lets users share their exact locations, opening the door to numerous location-based apps (a la Foursquare), and more accuracy during moments of breaking news (a la the recent Iranian election).All of these features are extremely important steps towards increasing the usability and versatility of Twitter as a communications tool. But there are definitely more improvements that Twitter can make. Here are a couple that are at the top of my list:
1. People You Have In Common
Twitter could borrow Facebook's ability to see the people that you have in common with new (or potential) friends, and one would ideally be able to see common people and lists. Why? Because knowing how someone came to follow you allows you to establish a better relationship with that person. You know the context within which they found you and it opens up the opportunity for a proper dialogue. To be honest, it also reduces a little bit of the creepiness factor that comes with anonymous following. And it also tells you who your most influential advocates are on Twitter: is it a friend that re-tweets you a lot, or the fact that you're on a particular list? What activity is getting you your followers? In marketing terms, you have a better idea where your "leads" are coming from, so you can "optimize" your content better and increase your Twitter followers.
2. Favorite alerts
To further "optimize" your stream, it would be helpful if Twitter improved the Favorites feature. Currently, users can see each others' Favorite tweets when browsing profiles, but if someone Favorites my tweet, it would be great to get an alert right away, and also see it in a column somewhere (in the same vein as the new re-tweet feature). This will allow me to see what's popular among my audience and tweet more about that kind of content.
Services like FastPencil are rapidly changing the concept of publishing as we know it. The application allows people to collaborate online to write, edit and publish a book, and it also offers the ability to publish a blog into a book, with each post serving as a separate chapter. This kind of "bookbinding" feature would be an excellent addition to Twitter. The ability to index all tweets, export them to Word or Excel, make them searchable and sortable by date or @reply would really allow users to have a portable resource and history of their tweets. They could search their own data with a lot more ease, and also leverage these "published works" as part of their creative portfolios. Even if this feature is far off in terms of viability, a step in the right direction would be to do away with the "More" button and go back to a numbered page system for profile pages. It would be great to be able to see back to my very first tweet so that I can search my own data more easily and effectively (the Search field doesn't always oblige).
Those are the top 3 features that come mind at the moment. What kinds of improvements would you like to see on Twitter?
