5 Enhancements That Would Make Twitter The Killer App

I have been Tweeting more and more lately just to see what happens. So far, seems like not much, but I am catching up on a lot of ideas from people I hardly know. Don’t get me wrong, I actually do like Twitter and think it has potential, but there are a few features I have dreamed up that I think would make it even better.

1. The “Lead” button – Everyone knows its more fun to talk than listen. I would like another button next to “Follow” that says “Lead”. That way if I want to skip the part where I listen to their tweets before they sign up for mine, we can fast forward to them listening to me and I don’t have to listen to them.

2. Personal information filters – This would be an automatic, always-on feature that filters out personal stuff I don’t need to know because I barely even know you (e.g. “Jane is…clipping her toenails.” “John is…sure Jane is cheating”) Just thinking out loud here Twitter friend, but if we don’t talk or email in the real world, then I can probably skip those tweets until we are REALLY close…or ever.

3. RSS – I know this is a technical leap, but what if there were another related technology that streamed articles or blog posts directly from your site to me so that you didn’t have to post each one for me to read individually. Let’s call it RSS – REALLY SIMPLE SELF-PROMOTION. That way I could get a list of your content and decide which items I care to read.

4. Ridicule Rooms – What Twitter is missing from the real world is a good private way to rag on people behind their backs. I was thinking you should be able to grab a few of your following friends and go to a separate private room to make fun of someone else’s posts where they can’t defend themselves.

5. Echo Metrics – This one sounds official enough to be the name of some new hot tech start-up. I just want a number – some kind of score that sits on the dash right below that # following | # followers that says “# who care”. That would be my “echo metric” which is to say “am I tweeting into a giant canyon and the only one listening is me?” Knowing how many people care to listen to what I have to say would be a lot more useful to me than knowing the number of people that clicked “follow” because they might.

Now I may have offended some of my fellow Twitterers with these ideas, so maybe I should add one more feature to the list. How about something that automatically filters out content before it gets to you if it contains any viewpoints, sarcasm, or humor that you would find offensive. That way you would have never had to read this.