An audience of two

Thursday April 24, 2008

The problems with Twitter
I was reading Dave Levy's Twitter Manifesto, in which he comments one of the reasons I first dropped twitter was that I found consuming it on the phone too intrusive. This time I shall probably stop following those who post to much.

The problem with twitter is that it's like being at a cocktail party. There are conversations going on all around. Meanwhile there are several TVs all tuned to different news channels. It's information overload. It's crazy. And the filter is way too coarse.

What twitter needs is a way to group the people you follow. All that it natively supports is the ability to select whether updates get forwarded to your mobile phone or just to the web. So the noisier tweeters get relegated to web-only status.

An additional option is the "track" feature. By tracking myself I can see responses to my posts from people that I'm not following at all. But those posts only go to my mobile phone, not to the web.

Something else that Twitter desperately needs is the ability to reply via email to a direct message. Come on guys, it's not that hard to do. Rather than a no reply address it would be trivial to implement something like, say, a one-use-only reply address that expires after a fixed period.

Now the good thing about Twitter is that the API is open and published. There are all kinds of clients already available and presumably someone is working on things like this. But it would be nice if the facility could be built into the back end rather than an add-on.

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Tags: twitter