Interesting that nobody seems to have mentioned Identica yet. It's got quite a few of these features, and development is still going on at a fair rate of knots. Groups are implemented as standard, and you can hashtag pretty much anything you like: messages, groups or even users (including yourself). There are plenty of options for integrating these tags into your posts, so you can have fine grained control over who sees your message. And, as if that wasn't enough, it even allows you to cross-post to Twitter. Oh, and it's open source too.
Hope this has piqued your interest a little. My Identica user name is jakec94 (same as my Twitter one, but lower case).
Norbert Mayer-Wittmann
· 6 months ago
I already have implemented all those features using Wordpress.
:) nmw
paulmwatson
· 5 months ago
RSS subscriptions. I want to follow any feed, not just an account on Twitter.
Greg Hewgill
· 6 months ago
I heard your appearance on the Technometria podcast and thought about an improvement to twitter, particularly in the area of usability of urls: http://ghewgill.livejournal.com/131409.html
Shachar
· 6 months ago
In order of priority (for me...) :
1. high length-limit (48k? :) 2. make replies, links, etc. part of the metadata and not part of the data 3. Ability to follow a thread easily (a-la what tweetdeck does now in 0.26) 4. Groups 5. being able to see all messages from person A, including replies, via API, even if they a twit starting with a "@B" (i.e. replies)
Mason Lee
· 6 months ago
Nice list! Regarding metadata, two things:
1. "in-reply-to-status-id" is already in the tweet metadata, and that's how Tweetie and other apps reconstruct the reply chains. (Of course, that reply metadata is often absent now that power users have stopped using the reply button in reaction to Twitter's #fixreplies screwup: always hiding replies from other followers who don't follow the replied-to account.) The whole "@business" is no longer refered to as "replies", it's called "mentions". (Though I think Twitter Inc is still inconsistent on this-- starting with @ still hides the tweet from others, like a reply.)
2. Links are not typically "metadata" per-se. Often they are the main content of a Tweet. But a case for links in metadata would be a field like "with-regard-to-url". That might be cool. Very similar to "in-reply-to-status-id".
christian
· 6 months ago
I don't think that 140 is perfection, but I do think that it has become a standard that if changed would break functionality.
My wish for a new feature would be the ability to add tags to the people that I follow and follow me. And then be able to view the stream of a certian tag, groups basicly.
Groups is such a big thing. What's missing now is the ability to move groups between twitter clients. I have groups set up on Tweetdeck and on Mixero, while they sync with themselves I have to reproduce that effort on each client, which is a giant PITA.
Perhaps if Twitter (the co.) implement groups that problem would be solved, perhaps not. Has anyone worked on a nice little open format to describe these things called 'groups' ?
deepfoo
· 6 months ago
This supports the view, from finance and Buffett no less, that it is better to be approximately right than precisely wrong. I like the notion of software as a process, not an event. Hence soft, malleable, changeable.
mpstearns
· 6 months ago
I see several good suggestions have already been made. How about removing something: Trending Topics.
Almar van der Krogt
· 6 months ago
I'm actually proposing a custom URL-shortener/mini-message/e-stamp feature tomorrow at #reboot11. So allowing user preferred URL shorteners (as you mentioned in a tweet earlier) is my desired feature!
dave
· 6 months ago
Awesome. I never thought that this would link up to Reboot this way.
Kiubbo
· 6 months ago
Every process is perfectible
Mason Lee
· 6 months ago
Hi Dave. Interesting. I have too long a wishlist to narrow it down to one feature. How about:
1. Extensible metadata on posts 2. People represented by OpenIDs or INames, instead of Twitter, Inc. names 3. Digital signatures on posts 4. Decentralized architecture for pub/sub and mirroring
Isn't Twitter.com too entrenched in its namespace and the web2.0 strategy of "owning the data" to serve as the pub/sub system we deserve? RSS/ATOM was a much better direction, in my book. Regarding 140 characters, it's maybe the main thing Twitter got right! RSS/ATOM post titles should similarly have a max recommended length, for the sake of client apps.
Keep up the great posts!
Mason Lee
· 6 months ago
The way editing "tweets" would work in a decentralized system might be something like this: a "tweet" is an atom of information digitally signed against one of your public keys so we know you authored it. It goes floating around through various distribution channels. There's no central repository and you can't control where the information is mirrored. If you want to change or retract something that you published, the best you can do is publish another "tweet" with metadata saying that it is a correction to a previous post. If people continue to distribute your old "tweet" without the correction after you request they not, you publish an atom of personal reprimand to the distributed trust economy.
HuStream
· 6 months ago
So you can follow "Topics" not "People" , I'd allow unlimited "saved" searches (Put the searches into groups),
Current limit is 10
I achieve this now but its frustrating. I've found this a quick way to find people who write about stuff I care about.
Groups of people too is essential
Richard Reeve
· 6 months ago
Restore twitter search to all it's historical data.
buckybit
· 6 months ago
My most desired feature would be the possibility - like in FriendFeed - for a conversation, when an interesting Tweet appears: "hop-in/hop-out". The Scoble post on Twitter SUL, was a 60 minute viral conversation with around 20 people, even OReilly joined in. Short. On Topic. Done.
Right now, Twitter is a noise machine, a radio signal broadcasting mess of 'hello', 'hello', me-me-me... there is no way of organizing the stream in real-time to extract the signal from the noise, 'yet'. Hashtags, Groups, verified accounts and future algorithms will help. But for now: follow the link and read the blog or website and the comments add to what Twitter is not allowing at the moment.
@buckybit
Hique
· 6 months ago
It would be really nice if Twitter would allow filters. Like filter only/except some tag. It is simple to implement and very useful. For example, when posting about a technical issue, I could tag it #tech. Anybody not interested in those messages could filter them out.
sull
· 6 months ago
As for Jay Rosen's desire to edit a tweet....
interesting. Of course you can delete it and repost, which might actually make more sense since the newly edited tweet would again enter followers streams & search results as fresh content whereas an older tweet that is edited may not be seen again by some/most.
For the most part, I think corrections can be made by just posting them and noting a previous post that was inaccurate. For the embarrassing spelling error or a wrong or missing hyperlink, for example, or just a poorly written tweet... delete and re-tweet because most will have already received it in their app/device (similar to some cases of RSS and blog post edits).
So their is only partial value in editing a tweet... usually a case of perfectionism (to the point of dave's post) and content aesthetics.
For journalists using twitter, I suggest using a private back channel twitter account as a repository for tweet drafts... Follow this account with your live public-facing account and re-tweet accordingly. You can use this private stream for notes, quotes, url references and your final approved micro-message which you can distribute to your followers by copy/pasting or if you use a nice desktop app like tweetie, just "repost" and remove any additional RT/via/@username stuff.
As for government officials, I don't like the idea of editing tweets and the aforementioned technical realities will make an edit moot regardless.
At the end of the day, "be careful what you tweet" or maybe rather... "you are what you tweet". sorry, could not resist.
Btw, to answer Dave's question of my most desired feature... Yes I look forward to Groups (I like that tweetie/apebits has decided to also wait on twitter instead of bloating their software with group functionality). Beyond Groups, I have concluded that their could be great value in evolving the Twitter Profile to become an actual micro-site of sorts... aggregating in various content (FriendFeed-like) and possibly even allowing for new longer form text and media publishing. Twitter could evolve opposite of FaceBook.... starting with the real-time micro-text-messaging and then user profile pages whereas FB started with the profile pages and added in the micro-message 'status' streams etc.
The last feature that will be interesting and I think we might see one day is 'Pay With Twitter'. That could be very very powerful and if I were Paypal, I'd be trying to be a deep partner now before Twitter implements their own micro-payment system. Twitter may not initially have it's own marketplace but it would be inevitable.
@sull
(this post has been edited ;)
Maurício Bastos
· 6 months ago
I think Twitter should allow us to define in what language each tweet is being written. I´m from Brazil and sometimes I tweet in Portuguese, sometimes in English. This is a problem, cause most of my followers who speak in english don't understand portuguese. And I may lose followers for this reason.
I would like to let my followers choose if they want to receive my english, portuguese or both tweets.
pius
· 6 months ago
Important point from your podcast, glad you highlighted it here.
Chromepoet
· 6 months ago
I'd like to see a full-feature, browser application with a few default and subscriber defined channels. (or groups). Channels, ala WoW or DAoC might be a nicer way to collect subscribers than groups.
Michael Markman (Mickeleh)
· 6 months ago
I'll second Jay's wish for editing. Edits to existing tweets should propagate to other sites that display them (blogs, FF, FB, etc). I have deleted and reposted tweets n the past. But the echoes of the previous revs never die.
Coturnix
· 6 months ago
Lots of good suggestions already, especially editing the tweet. I'd also like to be able to schedule my tweets for the future date/time.
ann
· 6 months ago
i would like to be able to edit tweets as well as have a more character limit. not even that many more maybe like 250. i want music on my twitter page.
Shaun Trennery
· 6 months ago
Groups.
domsparks
· 6 months ago
For twitter, ability to properly and completely delete a tweet. Currently when you delete it will still appear in people's timelines.
Secondly, (as a developer) better API's for getting older messages (i.e. more than 200 at a time), and higher/no API limits for users.
Ruben Schade
· 6 months ago
I've found virtually every tweet is a comment with a hyperlink. This limits the number of characters for the comment and forces us to use URL shortners. "URL shortner" sounds like a cake. So my most desired feature would be to have a separate field for the link to "associate" with each tweet. We could do away with URL shortners entirely (no more obscurity and middlemen that could potentially break), and we'd have the full 140 characters to comment.
Given I live in two different places my other wish would be allowing us to define a timezone override for individual tweets when we're outside our defined timezone in our profile.
Ben LaMothe
· 6 months ago
I'd like the ability to send Tweets to specific groups instead of everyone all the time. It would greatly increase overall effectiveness and could help to reduce the amount of "clutter" that people get in their streams. It would enable you to better understand your followers by anticipating what they'd be most interested in, be able to target a specific group where you're likely to get the most/best feedback. It would also help Twitter reduce the stigma it has of being a virtual mixer where everyone talks at the same time and all you do is over hear things.
cshotton
· 6 months ago
Agree 100%.
toho
· 6 months ago
Feature groups will split twitter. May be it will prevent some of reading all the messages or scanning special tags or words.
chrisaldrich
· 6 months ago
Interesting that some of the desired features people are asking for are things that were in the now defunct Pownce or which can be found in FriendFeed or other current services. Alas, but for the critical mass which Twitter has managed in great part due to it's broadly defined API.
There are fortunately glimmers of Steve Gillmor's long missed "track" functionality returning, which thrills me to no end though Dustin's version of Twitterspy has held me in excellent stead in the intervening months amidst the broader availability of search related tools for real time conversation. These days it would be great to have some of the not-so-old features like "search" to work properly (that is give results from more than just the last 8-15 days). Hard to think that the $15 million shelled out for Summize was really just worth this after all the intervening time!? I recall not so long ago that Twitter might even be a so-called "Google-Killer" when it came to search, but if they can only manage to search two weeks worth of tweets in real time, they've got some serious work to do. Perhaps before we go looking for more functionality, we should hope for the functions they've currently got to actually work properly in the first place.
Honestly, I'm just thrilled that they've managed to scale as well as they have in the last 9 months. I remember when failwhales were an hourly sight almost a year ago. Things still manage to get hairy in this regard if you just look at the backlog and some of the downtime experienced today with the millions posting nebulousness about Michael Jackson.
If I could, I would hope for some better version of Social Media Signal Processing so we might increase the signal above the noise caused by the influx of the millions who joined the service since December 08.
Raymond
· 6 months ago
I would like to see local trending topics
cshotton
· 6 months ago
I want to be able to partition my followers into separate groups that I can broadcast to independently. Geek messages to my nerdy friends, notes to family members, recipes to foodie buddies, etc. All of the social media sites fail in this regard, forcing you to treat your list of friends/followers as a single collective group. I can tell you for a fact that my high school buddies on Facebook don't give a damn about posts to my friends on Twitter from the old Mac WWW days and vice versa. Consequently, I have to moderate myself and limit the posts to bland, generic offerings that make sense to both groups.
In short, let ME define my communities of interest and don't assume (quite wrongly) that I want everyone lumped into one, big pile.
nando pereira
· 6 months ago
It would be nice to see a feature that could improve RT. One idea is to do the RT excluding from viewing it the group of my followers who already follow the user who is being RTed (because they already must have read it). I guess we could do that by assuming RT as an official command of the service (when used in the beginning of the sentence) and adding a minus signal before it. Like this: "-RT @username tweet". You could re-include everybody using RT without the minus (or the opposite, assuming the minus as the default behaviour, and re-including everybody by using a plus signal: "+RT @username tweet").
As an example, if I have 100 followers and 30 of them are common for the @usertest, when i RT a tweet of his, just the other 70 people of my list will see the RT. Is that clear?
I believe that that could make sharing of thoughts, opinions, links etc more useful and less repetitive -- although I don't know if RT is exactly a core function for the most of people.
davisre
· 5 months ago
It sure would be nice to search just the tweets from people I follow. Often I'll remember seeing something in my stream but won't remember who said it, and currently Twitter's search feature (even if it searched more than just a few days) can't help me find the tweet.
All Comments
Hope this has piqued your interest a little. My Identica user name is jakec94 (same as my Twitter one, but lower case).
:) nmw
1. high length-limit (48k? :)
2. make replies, links, etc. part of the metadata and not part of the data
3. Ability to follow a thread easily (a-la what tweetdeck does now in 0.26)
4. Groups
5. being able to see all messages from person A, including replies, via API, even if they a twit starting with a "@B" (i.e. replies)
1. "in-reply-to-status-id" is already in the tweet metadata, and that's how Tweetie and other apps reconstruct the reply chains. (Of course, that reply metadata is often absent now that power users have stopped using the reply button in reaction to Twitter's #fixreplies screwup: always hiding replies from other followers who don't follow the replied-to account.) The whole "@business" is no longer refered to as "replies", it's called "mentions". (Though I think Twitter Inc is still inconsistent on this-- starting with @ still hides the tweet from others, like a reply.)
2. Links are not typically "metadata" per-se. Often they are the main content of a Tweet. But a case for links in metadata would be a field like "with-regard-to-url". That might be cool. Very similar to "in-reply-to-status-id".
My wish for a new feature would be the ability to add tags to the people that I follow and follow me. And then be able to view the stream of a certian tag, groups basicly.
Originofspecious.blogspot.com
Perhaps if Twitter (the co.) implement groups that problem would be solved, perhaps not. Has anyone worked on a nice little open format to describe these things called 'groups' ?
1. Extensible metadata on posts
2. People represented by OpenIDs or INames, instead of Twitter, Inc. names
3. Digital signatures on posts
4. Decentralized architecture for pub/sub and mirroring
Isn't Twitter.com too entrenched in its namespace and the web2.0 strategy of "owning the data" to serve as the pub/sub system we deserve? RSS/ATOM was a much better direction, in my book. Regarding 140 characters, it's maybe the main thing Twitter got right! RSS/ATOM post titles should similarly have a max recommended length, for the sake of client apps.
Keep up the great posts!
Current limit is 10
I achieve this now but its frustrating. I've found this a quick way to find people who write about stuff I care about.
Groups of people too is essential
Right now, Twitter is a noise machine, a radio signal broadcasting mess of 'hello', 'hello', me-me-me... there is no way of organizing the stream in real-time to extract the signal from the noise, 'yet'. Hashtags, Groups, verified accounts and future algorithms will help. But for now: follow the link and read the blog or website and the comments add to what Twitter is not allowing at the moment.
@buckybit
interesting. Of course you can delete it and repost, which might actually make more sense since the newly edited tweet would again enter followers streams & search results as fresh content whereas an older tweet that is edited may not be seen again by some/most.
For the most part, I think corrections can be made by just posting them and noting a previous post that was inaccurate. For the embarrassing spelling error or a wrong or missing hyperlink, for example, or just a poorly written tweet... delete and re-tweet because most will have already received it in their app/device (similar to some cases of RSS and blog post edits).
So their is only partial value in editing a tweet... usually a case of perfectionism (to the point of dave's post) and content aesthetics.
For journalists using twitter, I suggest using a private back channel twitter account as a repository for tweet drafts... Follow this account with your live public-facing account and re-tweet accordingly. You can use this private stream for notes, quotes, url references and your final approved micro-message which you can distribute to your followers by copy/pasting or if you use a nice desktop app like tweetie, just "repost" and remove any additional RT/via/@username stuff.
As for government officials, I don't like the idea of editing tweets and the aforementioned technical realities will make an edit moot regardless.
At the end of the day, "be careful what you tweet" or maybe rather... "you are what you tweet". sorry, could not resist.
Btw, to answer Dave's question of my most desired feature... Yes I look forward to Groups (I like that tweetie/apebits has decided to also wait on twitter instead of bloating their software with group functionality). Beyond Groups, I have concluded that their could be great value in evolving the Twitter Profile to become an actual micro-site of sorts... aggregating in various content (FriendFeed-like) and possibly even allowing for new longer form text and media publishing. Twitter could evolve opposite of FaceBook.... starting with the real-time micro-text-messaging and then user profile pages whereas FB started with the profile pages and added in the micro-message 'status' streams etc.
The last feature that will be interesting and I think we might see one day is 'Pay With Twitter'. That could be very very powerful and if I were Paypal, I'd be trying to be a deep partner now before Twitter implements their own micro-payment system. Twitter may not initially have it's own marketplace but it would be inevitable.
@sull
(this post has been edited ;)
This is a problem, cause most of my followers who speak in english don't understand portuguese. And I may lose followers for this reason.
I would like to let my followers choose if they want to receive my english, portuguese or both tweets.
Secondly, (as a developer) better API's for getting older messages (i.e. more than 200 at a time), and higher/no API limits for users.
Given I live in two different places my other wish would be allowing us to define a timezone override for individual tweets when we're outside our defined timezone in our profile.
There are fortunately glimmers of Steve Gillmor's long missed "track" functionality returning, which thrills me to no end though Dustin's version of Twitterspy has held me in excellent stead in the intervening months amidst the broader availability of search related tools for real time conversation. These days it would be great to have some of the not-so-old features like "search" to work properly (that is give results from more than just the last 8-15 days). Hard to think that the $15 million shelled out for Summize was really just worth this after all the intervening time!? I recall not so long ago that Twitter might even be a so-called "Google-Killer" when it came to search, but if they can only manage to search two weeks worth of tweets in real time, they've got some serious work to do. Perhaps before we go looking for more functionality, we should hope for the functions they've currently got to actually work properly in the first place.
Honestly, I'm just thrilled that they've managed to scale as well as they have in the last 9 months. I remember when failwhales were an hourly sight almost a year ago. Things still manage to get hairy in this regard if you just look at the backlog and some of the downtime experienced today with the millions posting nebulousness about Michael Jackson.
If I could, I would hope for some better version of Social Media Signal Processing so we might increase the signal above the noise caused by the influx of the millions who joined the service since December 08.
In short, let ME define my communities of interest and don't assume (quite wrongly) that I want everyone lumped into one, big pile.
As an example, if I have 100 followers and 30 of them are common for the @usertest, when i RT a tweet of his, just the other 70 people of my list will see the RT. Is that clear?
I believe that that could make sharing of thoughts, opinions, links etc more useful and less repetitive -- although I don't know if RT is exactly a core function for the most of people.