Scripting News - Latest Comments in The myth of perfection (Scripting News)

Re: The myth of perfection (Scripting News)

paulmwatson — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 16:01:42 -0000

RSS subscriptions. I want to follow any feed, not just an account on Twitter.

Re: The myth of perfection (Scripting News)

davisre — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 16:33:48 -0000

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.

Re: The myth of perfection (Scripting News)

Jake Choules — Sun, 28 Jun 2009 04:43:31 -0000

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).

Re: The myth of perfection (Scripting News)

Nando P. — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 11:54:47 -0000

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.

Re: The myth of perfection (Scripting News)

Chuck Shotton — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 10:57:25 -0000

Agree 100%.

Re: The myth of perfection (Scripting News)

Chuck Shotton — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 10:56:55 -0000

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.

Re: The myth of perfection (Scripting News)

Raymond K — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 05:56:57 -0000

I would like to see local trending topics

Re: The myth of perfection (Scripting News)

Chris Aldrich — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 05:39:05 -0000

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.

Re: The myth of perfection (Scripting News)

toho — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 05:37:59 -0000

Feature groups will split twitter. May be it will prevent some of reading all the messages or scanning special tags or words.

Re: The myth of perfection (Scripting News)

Ben LaMothe — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 05:22:02 -0000

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.

Re: The myth of perfection (Scripting News)

Ruben Schade — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 05:20:27 -0000

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.

Re: The myth of perfection (Scripting News)

domsparks — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 05:16:26 -0000

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.

Re: The myth of perfection (Scripting News)

Shaun Trennery — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 05:15:34 -0000

Groups.

Re: The myth of perfection (Scripting News)

ann — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 04:31:34 -0000

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.

Re: The myth of perfection (Scripting News)

Coturnix — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 00:50:15 -0000

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.

Re: The myth of perfection (Scripting News)

Michael Markman (Mickeleh) — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 18:19:35 -0000

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.

Re: The myth of perfection (Scripting News)

Mason Lee — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 17:26:12 -0000

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.

Re: The myth of perfection (Scripting News)

Chromepoet — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 16:25:35 -0000

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.

Re: The myth of perfection (Scripting News)

pius — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 13:42:25 -0000

Important point from your podcast, glad you highlighted it here.

Re: The myth of perfection (Scripting News)

Maurício Bastos — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 13:27:31 -0000

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.

Re: The myth of perfection (Scripting News)

sull — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 12:36:20 -0000

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 ;)

Re: The myth of perfection (Scripting News)

Hique — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 11:13:22 -0000

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.

Re: The myth of perfection (Scripting News)

Adam Beckett — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 10:58:44 -0000

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

Re: The myth of perfection (Scripting News)

ccseed — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 10:22:11 -0000

Restore twitter search to all it's historical data.

Re: The myth of perfection (Scripting News)

Mason Lee — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 10:08:03 -0000

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".