Twitter Wish List

Twitter’s growth spurt isn’t slowing, and the social network has even begun to put revenue streams into place without ruffling too many feathers. While the site has its fair share of Fail Whales, fans don’t stay mad for very long. While I’m not one to look a gift horse in the mouth, there are just a few little teeny, weenie, silly things I, and some of Twitter friends, would love to suggest, as Twitter becomes a critical tool for daily communication. Not that they asked.

• Mass Direct Message Delete Capability – Like emails, DM’s are one of those pesky things that add up quickly, until you have more than 600 like I do. I hope you all manage your messages better than me, but wouldn’t it be great to delete them all with click?

• Sort Function for DMs – While we are on the topic of DMs, have you ever thought of an old DM you wanted to revisit, only to find you had to slowly go through each page until you could find it? It would be much more efficient to sort by sender, as a start. It’d be even more awesome to search by keyword, but let’s not get greedy.

• Longer Shelf-Life for Searches – PR expert @jgoldsborough and I remember the good ole’ days in Twitter’s younger years when we could go back much farther in time to track activity on a certain topic. Now, search.twitter.com only goes back several days. Can we please go back months instead of days? This is also important for Twitter as they expand resources for businesses – in order to track conversations and trends to prove the social network is a viable marketing tool, we need a more robust archive to study.

• List Notification – Lists are an important way to gauge influence on Twitter, trumping followers when automated follow tools may artificially inflate perceived popularity. Lists can also help signal users that they are important to those in their communities. PR and social media strategist @timotis would love to see some sort of notification that you’ve been added to a list. Sometimes it’s impossible to keep track.

• Manage Multiple Accounts in Web – Most of the many Twitter functions trump Twitter’s own interface because they feature sophisticated functions like the ability to manage multiple accounts from one page. Social media practitioner @samirb mentioned how great it would be if Twitter would add this function, which would encourage more usage of Twitter’s Web version.

• DM Multiple Accounts –PR and social media whiz @ryanmathre suggested that, outside of the annoying auto-DM, the ability to “CC” multiple Twitter accounts via DM would help streamline correspondence as we look more and more to the social network for communication.

• Easier to Search by Geography – Public relations and social media pro @arikhanson suggested that an easier way to search by geographic location would be a valuable upgrade. I agree, as geo-targeting has become critically important for marketers this year. I’d go farther and suggest additional ways to better search the people you want to reach, such as by profession or interests.

• More Detailed Follow Notifications – The current email notification sent by Twitter only includes the new followers name and many followers he or she has, and how many people are followed. What’s more valuable, in my opinion, is the bio which appears on every profile page. I’d love to see that at a glance, to help me decide if we might have a good connection. Right now, the numbers don’t mean much to me.

I couldn’t include every great idea, so I just posted some of my favorites. To reiterate, I know everyone who answered, myself included, are huge Twitter fans, so trust me when we say we aren’t being critical. We’ve simply integrated the network into our daily routines so heavily it’s easy to create a wish list of new and improved features. What did we leave out? If you were in charge of product development, what would you put on Twitter’s roadmap? Leave your suggestions in the comments below.

Photo credit: alicepopkorn