New Features Twitter Needs to Compete
Is Twitter getting alarmingly stale?
For all the excitement about its effectiveness as a streamlined communications tool, Twitter is showing troubling signs of falling behind in the arm’s race given what FriendFeed is doing (social aggregation and, now, search) and what much-neglected Pownce has within its arsenal.
Twitter, meanwhile, continues to struggle with infrastructure issues while providing little or no indication that its feature set will be expanded any time soon. As a Twitter fan, here’s some things I’d like to see Twitter do:
1. Improved people search, including a recommendation engine (a la Friendfeed) of who I might be interested in following.
2. Tagging
3. The ability to send files using P2P (copy the Pownce model by providing a free service for files under a certain size, and charge a premium for larger files)
4. Email notifications alerting you about activity by a particular user or about a specific topic.
5. Easier ways to send private messages. Unless you know something Twitter ID, using the drop-down menu to go through your followers is far from user-friendly.
6. The ability to have private or semi-private group conversations.
7. A business model (advertising, premium services, etc.) so Twitter can find way(s) to make money so it can hire developers to launch more features, and harden its infrastructure.
8. A native desktop application to compete/complement products such as Thwirl. Nothing like a little competition to boost the eco-system.
9. More support for third-party developers to create plugins to expand Twitter’s functionality.
10. Buy Pownce to jump-start its feature roadmap.
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Tags: FriendFeed, Pownce, Twitter






