the facebookizing of twitter

Sunday, March 29, 2009 ·

after the last post where i gave my thoughts on the twitterizing of facebook i started thinking about how to facebookize twitter a little. i do love that twitter is so very simple and uncluttered, but i do believe they could be a bit more social. certainly not going so far as to diverge from the core of what makes twitter so great and loved, but to add a few features to enhance the overall experience.

here's some things i think could make twitter better:

more profile information
as twitter becomes more and more the virtual presence of people on the web (at least one of them), i think we could have the ability to feature more information on the person behind the @. it's pretty limited right now where you only have a 160 characters for your bio and a website link that gets cut off. i often see people trying to get around this by making a background picture with a lot of the info, but it doesn't always work. so just building it in makes sense.

more customization
i don't mean to the extent that myspace allows you to create such an ugly profile, but allowing users to make the profile more their own. could be as easy as simple blog type features to incorporate a few widgets or pull in rss feeds. just more personalization.

who's following who
as it is now, there's no easy way to know what new people the people you're following are now following. you could go to each of the people you're following and see if there's anyone new, but that's a bit cumbersome isn't it? especially if you are following more than say 50 people. it makes sense as your social network expands, and as the twitter user community grows, to continue finding those interesting people, that those you find interesting, also find interesting.

message threading
not only for the main stream, but dm's as well. especially dm's because right now, they are just a jumble without the ability to sort, group, file, etc. in the stream, some lessons from friendfeed in how conversations appear could go a long way.

groups
similar to how you can sort your news-feed in facebook and similar to how you can set up groups in tweetdeck. simply an easier way to manage your stream, prioritize people and separate like content.

a few thoughts. nothing i think strays from the core functionality of twitter and nothing i think detracts from the experience. maybe adding these features is a revenue route. charge a small fee to allow you to add these features to your profile.

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