Twitter Improvements That We Need!

Writing by Nick Stamoulis

I entirely embrace Twitter and what it has done for the business and personal world as far as online communication goes. What boggles my mind is how does a company which receives so much venture capital funding fail to evolve the overall user experience of their product?

I’m not talking about rebuilding the website I am talking about basic changes to how others communicate with each other along with how we can leverage tweets even more.

Twitter is one of the most powerful websites in the world yet there website changes and additions are few and far between which leads me to wonder what is going on in that San Francisco office that is stopping a quicker growth of features? Why can Facebook continuously tweak and change the way their “wall” is utilized yet Twitter can’t seem to make any new fun changes?

Here are some improvements that I would like Twitter to make to their site:

Images
I would like to see a feature where I can upload an image into the wall rather than a link that points to a third party. This can’t be that difficult.

Videos
How about the ability to upload a video where we don’t have to click on a link and we can just view it directly on the wall stream?

Embedding
How about having an “embed” button that allows a user to take a snippet of a Twitter wall post and embed it on any web page they want leaving a nice link coming back to that specific profile? I’m honestly shocked that Twitter has not come out with this feature yet. If this feature existed I know many bloggers, myself included would probably write entire posts surrounding one or even a group of Twitter wall posts.

Profile Expansion
I think the user profile is a little on the weak side when it comes to content and user experience. Right now when you visit a profile half the page is taken up by recent tweets which I think could be shortened in order to free up some valuable real estate space for other features like a video, a quote, personal resume whatever it might be.

Recent Uploads
I think a section where you can display a certain user’s uploads all one page would be pretty interesting. Aside from just seeing the wall stream of each of the 140 character tweets a page to view all uploads by a certain user would be nice. Maybe even allowing the ability to leave a comment would entice a more social interaction.

Share Button
How about a share button? Where you can share a tweet with someone in a variety of ways? This seems like such a simply feature to add on that would make a really nice impact on inbound traffic. Not like Twitter has any problems with this but it could help acquire that much more market share.

Ping Me Feature
Some people do not mind receiving loads of emails or notifications throughout the day. Some people have separate email accounts set up so that they can go through email accounts that receive information. How about a feature that pings you when a specified user tweets something? Maybe the technology can allow you to input keywords that need to be visible in the tweet or the user could limit the feature to when another user uploads a video or an image in the Twitter stream.

The point I am trying to make is that every great website is only as good as its innovation abilities. Let’s look at Yahoo for a second because they are a prime example of what happens when you start to forget about innovation. Without innovation your website or brand cannot grow the way its supposed to. Yahoo was at the top of their game for many years and a lack of innovation along with tools and technologies caused them to slip away from the lime light.

I sometimes feel that something is holding Twitter back from continuously bringing in new user experience innovations that will not only enhance a person’s visit to Twitter and if someday Twitter decides they want to charge for their service they are going to need to add some meat and potatoes in order for people to whip out their credit cards. If anyone out there has ever seen this type of usability and/or 3rd party Twitter tools, then please do share!