Simon Says: Twitter Needs These 3 Improvements

I love Twitter. I never shy away from admitting I think it’s the best social media platform around at the moment and will continue to be so. Why? Well it knows it’s place online. It knows that people are only using a handful of sites every day so to be one of those sites you need to have content that brings people back.

Twitter is a great place to find things out but this post is more about the main three things that bug me about the platform.

1) No List Functionality in the Apps

Lists are in the top 5 features on Twitter. I hate that I am limited to 20 as I need more feeds. Twitter is about creating news feeds for yourself and so it makes sense to be able to create as many of these as you need. Additionally it makes sense not to follow everyone as some peoples updates aren’t as usual as others all the time.

So I think twitter should include List functionality in all of its apps. It should allow you to add / remove people, create / edit / delete Lists and follow other people's on the move. I treat Lists like my RSS feeds and as such I need access to them when I find an account I want to keep track of.

2) Follow Suggestions

Follow suggestions are a little ambiguous at the moment. I believe they’re done largely based on the people you’re following (much like Friends of Friends on Facebook). This is (for the most part) rubbish. We all know influence and interest is more subjective than this and Twitter has a wealth of knowledge on me (and everyone) in which it has yet to tap into.

We all Tweet specifically about brands, bands, locations, businesses and people. Why can’t they tailor the suggestions around my previous tweets? If I type "just had an amazing innocent smoothie" can it not use its own API so see if there’s an account labelled "innocent smoothie"? 

How much more useful would it be if we were offered the accounts that directly interested us rather than the people our friends are Following with the largest number of Followers themselves.

3) Categories for Favourites

This is a big one. We all star tweets we like and never look at them again. Often when I do look back on them I see tweets I’ve starred in the same way I would 'Like' a post on Facebook next to one I’ve bookmark because the link goes to an interesting article next to an alert about a film / tv premier.

Can we get categories for favourite tweets? It could be as simple as Gmail's Google Labs experiment where you click the star once for important, twice for interesting and so on.

It would be much easier and quicker to discover / find what we bookmarked if we could give them a "folder" to sit in. Additionally a search facility would be invaluable for people (like me) who star more things than they probably should.

While we’re on the subject… can we have a feed of things we’ve RT’d? Sometimes I need to go back and scroll for hours to find something I RT’d months ago. A search tool would be great.

These are only my top 3 pet peeves with this website. What are yours?

Photo (cc) cobalt123