Thursday, January 03, 2008

Before a biz model, Twitter needs some features

With all of this talk about Twitter and it's potential to become a billion dollar business and what business model it should take, I'm thinking a couple features need to be added before Twitter can hit and more importantly maintain 100m users.

As a preamble, let me say to my most tweety friends who might have their feathers ruffled that I of course LOVE all of your tweets but consider the following:

At present time, when following someone, I have to take everything they're going to Twitter. This includes kids puking, drunken bar posts and conversations between two people that should be Direct totally lacking any context but for some reason are posted publicly.

Feature #1: Start tagging posts. They could even be one letter tags (#t = tech, #p = politics, #r = random stuff etc etc.) I could then choose when following someone, which of these types of tags, I want to listen to.

Feature #2: Allow Twitter users to rate others' posts. Reply to each post with a 1, 2, 3 or do it binary style "hot" or "not". This would build a Twitter Hot list that would be something to shoot for. Currently we have quantity over quality, and that poses a problem long-term. After all, how many of us respect people for how often they talk?

Feature #3: Build a Blackberry App! I Twittered this a little while ago to no reply but there is such a DOS/Linux command-line thing going on that so isn't retro-cool. Give me a slick interface that makes it such that I don't have to remember all of the command-lines. Command-line interfaces relegate the service to a more techie-oriented crowd, not the masses.

Feature #4: Last but certainly not least, get to the root of your service outages, missing tweets etc because if you're going to start charging or even adding advertising, QoS is going to be increasingly expected of you.

Of course, should you choose to implement these features, I'm available for consulting for a few stock options ;)

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Comments:
Tom,

Great suggestions, although it may be awhile before the Blackberry becomes Twitter-friendly. I love the idea of tags - would get rid of the riff-raff you have to read.

Mark
 
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