LIVEdigitally

Last January I wrote a post “Will Normal Folks Ever Use Twitter?” in which I decried the service from a “regular” person perspective, including the new user experience, search, etc.  It’s been almost two years, we’ve seen change of CEO, product team, engineers, lots and lots of cash, and #NewTwitter, but in my opinion, it’s far from enough.  I’m of the mindset that if Twitter cannot get it’s collective product experience together, their growth will flatten, and usage will recede amongst several populations (great post on that over at AllThingsD).  Here are some of my thoughts on how to improve the Twitter experience:

Eliminate URLs and @Users from 140 character limit
Twitter announced their official URL-shortener is here to stay, which is fine, but I think it’s a poor experience for all users.  Instead, I’d prefer to see a URL and an @User take up a single character each of the official limit.  It makes no sense, even in “tight” communication/messaging, to count against a link or a person simply due to character length. Twitter’s system should ingest all URLs and @Users and only count against the usage, not the length.  Further, all twitter clients should auto-expand the URLs, and preferably replace them with the title of the target website.  Here’s some examples:

whats your opinion on Google+ versus facebook and twitter?  do you think they’ll be able to “win”? @harrymccracken @Scobleizer @jlouderb @jlanzone

Is currently 147 characters, and I as a user would probably remove the 2nd half of the question to tie in the names.  Instead, removing the 39 characters “wasted” on the usernames would make the tweet legit.

i think this is the most important news of the day, everybody should take a moment, stop what they are doing, and read it.  http://bit.ly/p7Ez3c

The above is 144 characters, but of them only 6 were needed to uniquely identify the link, and 14 were a waste.  Further, if the above were auto-fixed by a twitter client, they’d know better than to click on the link.  Suckers.

Make Search Work
I’m not sure which is more useless, searching on twitter.com for something, or trying to stop getting printed catalogs from Restoration Hardware. It’s been more than a decade since Google figured out search, why can’t twitter?

Autocorrect Error @-Replies and DMs
Twitter only really has two “commands” and both can be done so wrong so easily.  That’s like having an iPod that doesn’t always play music when you pushed the play button.  Twitter should intercept tweets “gone wrong”.  Not only would this improve the product experience for all its users, it would probably save some famous people from incredibly embarrassing moments.  That said, perhaps this is just nature’s way of weeding them out?

So if twitter “sees” a tweet like “D @username” or “DM username” or ” D username” or anything *even close* to an almost-DM, the client should prevent it from being sent without a Yes/No pop-up dialog.  Same thing when a user starts a tweet with an @, since I still believe even experienced users don’t realize those tweets are fairly hidden.

What could possibly go wrong?

Offer Multiple Views
Lists are definitely a great way to view tweets, and the media views are good, but realistically they are barely a band-aid on the massive problem: separating signal from noise.  Twitter needs to offer a lot of new ways for me to view my twitter streams.  For example, how about letting me select a few users whose most recent tweets are simply always in my timeline.  Or how about showing me my stream based on which tweets have been retweeted at least X times.  I use Tweetdeck to separate numerous topics, but there’s so much more that could happen here.

#Explain #Hashtags #Somehow
OK, so a hashtag lets people tweet about one topic, and really only seems to exist because of the brokenness of Twitter search (see above).  But most of the hashtags I see make no sense, and even clicking on them doesn’t exactly “answer” the question of why they exist. How about having users “register” a hashtag for a period of time?  Even if multiple users do that, it’d be fine.  Then when a new user clicks on a hashtag, they can see all the “terms in use at present” to close the loop on it.

Eliminate Trending Topics
When was the last time a single trending topic was actually useful to you?  That’s right, it was never.

I'm sure I'd learn a lot by clicking on these...

Help Manage Contacts
Ever get a DM from someone, try to reply, but can’t because they aren’t following back?  That’s not user error, that’s product design error.  Users shouldn’t be allowed to DM without following the target themselves. Alternately, at least inform the user they aren’t being followed back…  Also, why can’t I easily ingest LinkedIn and other contacts into the people I follow?

In Conclusion

The reality is I could keep going.  I could explain why 140 characters is arbitrary at this point and should be bumped up to ~200/250 without “damaging” the service.  I could talk about how they should fix username squatting issues.  I could talk about improving integration with other Web services.  I could talk about fixing the RT/Retweet issues.  But then I’d have to write more, and that would far exceed my character limits.

I surprised myself with the emotional reaction to hearing about Steve Jobs’ passing yesterday.  I guess I knew it was coming, but having never met the man, didn’t expect to have “a moment” about it.  After reading words from Eric Schmidt, Richard Branson, Larry Page, Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, and President Obama (not to mention a few other people), it became quite challenging to write anything original that I hadn’t covered when he resigned.  But there is one thing that I don’t think is as bluntly stated as I’d do it, so here’s my brief take.

Steve Jobs is, in my opinion, singlehandedly responsible for the concept of Consumer Technology.  Or, less brief, responsible for the concept of really amazing consumer technology.

I wasn’t always an Apple fan, but I think I (almost) always respected (most of) their products.  Even before I wanted a Mac, I thought it was awesome that they paid such attention to screws and other little details.  Even when I thought a turquoise computer was silly, I was able to “get” why they did it.  Even when I thought switching to Mac would just cause me a pain (fears of incompatibility, etc), I always kinda sorta wanted to go there.  Even when I thought they couldn’t pull off success in the phone market, I had a sneaking hunch they’d do something a little, shall we say, different, than the rest.

The Apple II was arguably the first mass-market personal computer.  The Mac was the first visual computing environment that put ease of use ahead of a command-line interface.  The iPod was the first end-to-end solution for digital music.  The iPhone transformed phones.  The iPad is transforming the entire computing landscape.

Steve certainly didn’t do it alone, and the entire teams he’s had around him for years deserve immense praise.  But it’s safe to say that no other inventor, entrepreneur, technologist, CEO, engineer, marketer, product designer, or anyone else has pushed the “consumer” in “consumer technology” so far as Mr Jobs did over the past four decades.

So thank you, Steve, for not just the gadgets, but realistically the entire concept of building technology for the people.  You made technology, as you’d probably have put it, delightful.