Feature Requests for Twitter Clients and Applications
I basically have one thing in mind when I use Twitter:
Listen to what people are saying, so I can help them out if I am able.
Actually, I suppose I have that in mind all the time. But, it comes to the forefront when using Twitter because the tools (i.e. the different Twitter clients and applications) are still so embryonic, and often make it so difficult.
The introduction of Twitter Lists is a major step forward, in my point of view. Lists allow me to create different listening contexts which reduces noise. In other words, when I am listening to my “friends” that’s different than listening to “social media opinion leaders”.
That being said, at the moment there are a few features that would make Twitter immensely more useful to me. I’ve listed them below in order of priority.
Feature Request #1: Follower Stream
At present, the basic usage model for every single Twitter application is to show the tweet stream of the people I follow. That is, it shows my followee stream.
However, the means for listening to my followers are really limited. I can either follow them all back (which I don’t want to do…because they might not be someone I want to follow), or I can very manually listen to their tweets by viewing each of their Twitter pages individually.
What I would like is an app that shows the stream of the people who follow me—my follower stream.
As far as I’m concerned, I feel like this is a major deficiency in the clients available. If any client—twitter.com or otherwise—introduced this feature, then that app would instantly become my client of choice and I would most likely become it’s loudest evangelist.*
Feature Request #2: Question Filter
I take a lot of pleasure in helping people out, especially by answering their questions. I think it it would be awesome if there were a Twitter app that showed me a stream of the questions that both my followees and followers asked. In addition to just looking for question marks, the filter would have to look for key phrases as well.
(Someone suggested using Twitter Search for this, but that doesn’t work because I want to search only the tweets from my followers.)
Feature Request #3: @reply filter
When looking at another users Twitter page, e.g. http://twitter.com/<username>, I want a checkbox that filters out any @replies.
Why do I want this? When I’m perusing someone’s tweet stream, I’d like to quickly be able see the things they said “out loud”, as opposed to the things they said “to someone”.
Feature Request #4: Increase the DM Character Limit
Why are DMs limited to 140 characters? In my view, this is just silly. There’s no reason why I shouldn’t be able to send someone with whom I have a mutual following relationship a message longer than 140 characters. At present with the limit, at some point the conversation just ends up moving to e-mail which is inconvenient.
Feature Request: Yours??
Those are the things I’d like to see from a Twitter app. What would you like to see? Please, leave your ideas in the comments.
* – I favor web-based apps over desktop clients. I use many computers, and I don’t want to have to install something on each of them. In fact, lots of times I’m using computers that don’t even belong to me, so by having everything on the web, I can sit down at any computer, anywhere and instantly have the tools I need.