10. OpenID / OAuth Support. I know, I know… you guys are all over this, along with a better Jabber API, hCards and several other projects. Having worked on a couple of twitter applications it would be so nice to have OAuth… and as a user, OpenID would be very nice as well.
9. @Replies view in mobile Twitter. I don’t watch twitter all day, every day. Who does? So it makes it very nice to sit down and hit the “replies” view on the main web page to make sure that I haven’t missed anything that was specifically directed to me. When I’m on my mobile phone http://m.twitter.com is one of the best ways that I’ve found to use twitter. Its’ just very frustrating to not have a @replies view there! While we’re on the @replies topic… it would also be nice to include replies if your @name was mentioned anywhere in the response, not just first. (we’ll call that 9.2 😉 )
8. Tracking feature to work everywhere, not just through SMS. Most tweeple have probably never heard of this feature, but when you are accessing twitter via SMS, you can give various twitter commands. For example, let’s say that you are interested in what people are saying about events in the DFW area (in case, you know, you happen to live in the DFW area – conveniently enough for me, I do). From your registered SMS device you would simply enter “40404 track DFW”. Then any twits that mention DFW would show up in your twitter feed.
7. Live IM integration. It’s great that I can use Twitter with gTalk, AIM, Yahoo (and every other IM on the planet)… but I use Live Messenger and I’d really like that to work for me.
6. Tag my contacts. It would also be nice to be able to add some context around certain people… met this person at SxSWi, this person is a SharePoint Genius, etc…
5. Multiple feeds that I can create and then group contacts by feed. I’d then like to be able to “listen” or “un-listen” to my various feeds via a twitter command.So for example, there are a lot of “acquaintances” or “friends of friends” that I follow, but sometimes I only want to actively “listen” to my co-workers, or to my closer friends.
4. Groups. Sometime I attend events that have other people at the event that are also twittering. I’d like to hear what they have to say, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that I want to follow them forever. It would be nice if I could just follow a group, and see the tweets from anyone else that is also following that group.
3. I might know you… who do we know in common? I get this on Facebook, why not Twitter? When someone adds me it would be nice to try and see how and from where I might know this person.
2. I’m following you, but are you following me? When I visit a person’s profile page, I can immediately tell if I am following that person or not. What would be great would be if I can quickly tell if that person is following me or not.
1. Reliability. Yes friends, “up time” has now become a “feature”…. please dear twitter, for the sake of all that is good, can we please kill that “FAIL Whale” and just stay up for more than 5 hours straight?
That’s all I have for now. (I’m sure that I’ll think of more later.) What about you? Are their any features that you would really like? What do you see as the largest feature gaps or missing pieces to twitter? If you could add a feature to twitter, what would it be?
If you’re not already, you can follow me on twitter.
I suspect some of these convenience features will come once the uptime is fixed. We could write our own convenience features using the api if they’d stop limiting requests.
++Alan
I suspect some of these convenience features will come once the uptime is fixed. We could write our own convenience features using the api if they’d stop limiting requests.
++Alan
@Alan – That’s true, but some things (like Jabber support, multi-feeds) would help relieve the stress on the system while other features (tracking specifically) will add to it… most of these, I think, would be pretty neutral or at least minimal to the system.
Either way, I think that twitter (more than anything else) has proven the point that the whole application is the user experience (not just the UI). The “ilities” count in UX (Scalability, Reliability, Flexibility, Maintainability)
@Alan – That’s true, but some things (like Jabber support, multi-feeds) would help relieve the stress on the system while other features (tracking specifically) will add to it… most of these, I think, would be pretty neutral or at least minimal to the system.
Either way, I think that twitter (more than anything else) has proven the point that the whole application is the user experience (not just the UI). The “ilities” count in UX (Scalability, Reliability, Flexibility, Maintainability)