5 features Twitter could use
Twitter has been quietly and steadily adding new features to its web interface, making it a richer place to log in to, without compromising on the simplicity that has become Twitter’s trademark.
Today morning, I woke up to find my replies tab replaced with a new “mentions” function. While seemingly inconsequential, this makes things a whole lot easier for users. I constantly have Twitter Search tab open in Firefox to track retweets or to see if someone tagged me in a tweet. Now I don’t have to.
The current web interface has integrated search, trending topics, username tracking and all major Twitter features enabled. Here are some other things I would love to see them add to it.
- How about a localised version of trending topics? Show me the hot topics being discussed among my friends, not all of Twitter. The Twitter universe is vast and rich, but there are pockets of it in which various people feel comfortable in. Tech people subscribe to the tech crowd, news people live in the news sphere. My personal Twitter pocket comprises of mostly Indians. It would be nice to see what my crowd is talking about when I log in.
- When I go to a user’s Twitter page, I want to see if he/she is following me or not. If not, an Orkut-style bread crumb telling me how I am connected to someone would be nice. There are Twitter apps that allow for this. I don’t see why the official web interface can’t.
- How about having a box pop up upon mouse-over on usernames (or user pics). Friendfeed does it already and it is a big help. This box could have details about the user (user bio, stats) as well as contextual information on how I am connected to him/her and what friends we share (like on Facebook).
- I want to see the number of times a tweet of mine, or anyone else’s, has been favourited. This can be done with a simple message under the tweet that says: “Faved 8 times” or “Faved by 8 people”. If the main stream proves too inconvenient a place for this, the notification can be on the tweet’s permalink page. The “like” function is one of the most used feature on Friendfeed and Facebook isn’t doing very bad with it either. Time Twitter opened up the favourites.
- While something like Friendfeed’s realtime interface might be overkill on Twitter (I follow 1990 people), a way to notify users of new tweets would be most welcome. How about something like the yellow bar in Twitter Search that tells of new results “since you last searched”? One of the reasons why Facebook scores in this department is because of the little red notifier they have in the bottom right corner. No conversations are lost track of and no eagerly awaited update is missed.
If I had to guess, I would say Twitter’s monetisation strategy would depend a great deal (if not completely) on its web interface. They have already added a cute little box highlighting apps and services centred around Twitter. I wouldn’t mind at all if that space became home to social ads in the future. Here’s hoping for the best!
Of course, if you want to follow someone with abysmally low IQ levels (It’s true! I took a quiz on Facebook!) you can follow @vimoh on Twitter.
