“Technology”

Today I was going to blog about house-intruder-victim-turned-internet-sensation Antoine Dodson. But I decided I needed another day with that post to make sure I’m saying what I wanna say you know what I’m saying?

In the meantime, I might as well talk about one of my favorite past times–twitter. For me, twitter has served a lot of purposes. It’s a way to promote my writing, chat with likeminded (and not-likeminded) individuals, and past the time away when I feel like procrastinating or being lazy. I don’t think that the people who founded twitter thought that people would use twitter as an all-day-multi-purpose tool.  I think it’s also clear that twitter wasn’t prepared for the way that  twitter clients like tweetdeck, echofon, and Ubertwitter would alter its landscape [who cars about promoted or regular trending topics when you're tweeting from mobile?] The host of changes twitter is trying out proves this point.

Out of all the changes, the one that’s most annoying has GOT to be the twitter follow suggestions. Oh boy, where do I begin. Let me first say that a lot of us left myspace and facebook because of the freedom to pick and choose who we associate with more easily and with less emotion than can be achieved on sites where the motive to join is to connect with people on more than a conversational level. Twitter is just about the conversation, anything else is extra.

The problem with Facebook’s friend suggestion is that it makes uncomfortable suggestions–whether it asks you to follow abusive ex-boyfriends or people who are already deceased, many of us want no parts of it. Though facebook’s friend suggestion component is annoying, it’s understandable for its business model and fairly nonintrusive. Overall, Facebook benefits by helping people increase the amount of friends they have.

However, for heavy twitter users, friend suggestions aren’t effective. Most of us follow and unfollow people at will. Because twitter can involve heated debates between strangers and ongoing strings of conversation, the relationships on twitter tend to be more intimate. Many times you unfollow people simply because you can no longer stand their bullshit. Now, twitter will suggest you refollow the bullshit rather than leaving well enough alone. What twitter doesn’t understand is that for communities of tweeters, the reason for unfollowing someone can be much more complicated than simply no longer being interested, informed or entertained by their tweets.

Before this, the automatic twitter RT button was the most glaring example of proof twitter doesn’t understand a lot of its base. People do NOT like strange avatars in their feeds and there are some people who are retweet addicts, and the twitter RT function is their cyber cocaine. Twitter has giveth and taken away and then giveth again the ability to block someone’s twitter RTs from showing up your timeline without having to unfollow them.

Twitter seems to be struggling with how to maintain and engage its users. But most people who are on twitter for any bit of time learn how to do this on their own. What might be helpful, since a significant amount of people tweet once or twice and give up on twitter, is for twitter to provide suggestions for who a person should follow during their first weeks on twitter. Maybe even make a “you should follow” site where people can type in search terms to find people they may want to follow and converse with. But the algorithm needs to be much more complicated than simply allowing search access to user names or twitter handles.

Right now, twitter clients’ suggestions for follows include a lot of celebrities, and once again, frequent twitter users know that unless you’re in high school celebrities are the site’s most unfulfilling follows.

What do you all think? Does twitter understand us?

Twitter has become the social media tool du jour. The number of users keeps growing and those who are active users are typically on the site for the better part of the day. Still, twitter runs much like a beta site…even when the site isn’t showing the dreaded “fail whale” there are other issues that a site with such a large user base simply shouldn’t have. There are 5 things I’d like to see twitter do immediately. I didn’t include fixing their servers because I figured that’s a given!

1.  Fulfill It’s Promise to Delete Inactive Accounts After 6 months

Since a significant amount of tweeters use their accounts once or twice and then never tweet again, there are a large amount of accounts with really great screen names that aren’t active. That means active users are using all sorts of underscores and numbers to build screen names. Twitter would be a much better experience for everyone if the most active users had the most memorable names.

Further, though twitter has done a great job dealing with its bot-follower issue, inactive accounts contribute greatly to inflated follower counts. This makes it difficult for the average user to gauge the “reach” of their account i.e. how many people are actually viewing their tweets on a daily basis

2.  Give Me Control of My Old Tweets!

I don’t know about you, but in the year that I’ve been active on twitter, I’ve dropped some gems! Also, I’ve changed the way in which I use my account. It’d be great if twitter would do one of two things. Either upgrade the service so that users can access their old tweets OR give users the option to delete all previous tweets.

Now that the Library of Congress will have access to all the tweets (not sure how this is going to happen) it’s even more imperative that tweeters have access to them as well. I think that social media companies have gotten lax with privacy and rules regarding what they will do with information contained on a site. The assumption remains that anything you post is accessible. The problem is, accessible doesn’t mean that someone else owns my posted thoughts and should have the ability to completely eliminate any personal control I may want to exert over the “information” I provide.

3.  Let Me Have My Favorites

Right now, on my personal twitter account, I have just over 1000 tweets favorited. It’s one thing for twitter to not allow me to access tweets from March 2009, it’s something entirely different not to be able to scroll through a list of 1000 tweets. Since those tweets are not accessible it almost makes me wonder how twitter expects users to use the favoriting function.

4.  Make Direct Messages Deletable En Masse

Twitter routinely deletes direct messages (which is a separate issue I could complain about but won’t), but doesn’t make older direct messages accessible in any way. Once conversations begin to build in your DM box it becomes difficult to scroll beyond the DMs you want to keep to get to the ones you don’t. Most people that I know have hundreds if DMs–I personally have 800. In order to access DMs 1-700 I’d have to take a lot of time to delete them one by one.

5.  Fix the Search Function

Part of twitter’s appeal is the ability to find likeminded individuals talking about subjects that interest you. The search function is good about two weeks back (unless the topic is particularly hot and then you can go back about 3 days if you’re lucky). Often when scrolling through the search page, twitter freezes. Imagine starting a search over once you’ve gone back 6 or 7 pages. Talk about frustrating.

Those are the top 5 things I’d like twitter to do right now. Feel free to contribute others.