People talk about groups, and other similar additions to Twitter. Personally, I don’t think these are necessary – and I’m not the only one. But here are few little tweaks that I would like to see:
- Always Show “In Reply To” links – if my friend twitts @someone, and that someone is not my friend I do not see “in reply to” link on my home page. However when I go to my friends page, I can see the link there. Sometimes I would like to see what one of my friends is publicly replying to – and there is just no convenient way to do it right now.
- Mute Friend Option – it would be nice if you could temporarily prevent someones twitts from showing up on your front page. Kinda like a “leave” that extends to the site – not only IM and text.
- Selective Mute/Leave – give users an option allow replies from a friend that was suppressed by a “leave” or the mute option I mentioned above. In other words, only twitts prefaced with @yourusername would get through
- Show Relplies from Non Friends – this might be more difficult to implement, but it would be nice if a public reply (ie. @yourusername) from your follower would show up on your front page, whether you follow that person or not. To prevent spamming you could also implement a “always ignore replies from this person: option
- Proper Search – we could really use a proper search algorithm that would index the whole twitter database. The current twitter search is nice, but it only goes back a day or so.
All the things I mentioned above are minor usability tweaks that would not have major impact on the way people use twitter. They could however improve user experience a little bit. Or perhaps I’m wrong.
Thoughts?
I’ve got another one:
Reply to specific twitt – right now when you do @user, twitter generates a “in reply to” link that points to that users most recent post at the time of posting. This feature lets you track conversations between friends by following these links. However if someone you are replying to, manages to post another twitt during the time it takes you to compose a reply, your post will get linked to the wrong entry.
It would be nice if all the entries on your home page would have nice “reply to” links that would pre-fill the text box with an appropriate @username:id code that would link to a specific entry (where id is the numeric part of the URL that uniquely identifies each twitter post).
[tags]twitter, twitt, twitter search, search, social, web[/tags]
