Admittedly I’m a bit of a noobie when it comes to Twitter. I registered a few months back, took a look around the site, and asked myself “What is the point?”. They sell it to you as a way to keep in touch with your friends in short, sharp tweets – but I already do that on Facebook. Within 30 minutes, I closed my account and forgot all about it. But now, I’m back! Here’s some thoughts…

Help users find people to follow

One of the big reasons why I came and went so quickly – I was (and still am) finding it extremely difficult to find people that I should be following. Right now, I’m relying on 3rd party applications to suggest people that may be of interest to me, such as Mr Tweet. Surely Twitter could be doing this is better, more integrated ways? It knows what I’m looking at, so must be able to build in some kind of recommendation engine? It was even difficult to find Tweeters that I knew existed. Thankfully Twitter have recently introduced the Find People functionality which greatly helps – how did they go so long without it?

Stop burying features

Why oh why do they hide the search functionality with a link right at the bottom of the page? This is arguably their most powerful feature, especially as its ajaxified (it notifies you of new results to your search). It really annoys me when I have to scroll for endless screens on my /home page to run a simple search. Add a search box to the UI!!

Improve the tweeting process

One of my biggest problems with Twitter led me to build my own tweet submitter, ezTweet. Twitter allows you to shorten your urls when you post which is nice, but it will only shorten them if your big url and tweet is less than 140 characters! WHY?? So, I’ve got to go off to tinyurl.com or similar – make my url tiny, and then go back to Twitter to submit my tweet. Very annoying! I want to use my 140 characters to the maximum, don’t limit me to that before you’ve even shrunk my urls for me!

ezTweet addresses this problem for me. It allows me to “tinify” my urls there and then when authoring my tweet, so I can guarantee a successful submit. It took me an hour to code (a tad more to make it a wordpress plugin). Come on Twitter! This is a simple usability thing to fix!

Why am I back?

Good question. Since my last visit to Twitter, I’ve become involved in some side projects, as well as progressed with my career. I’m trying to focus on embracing social media, and using it as a tool to promote myself and the projects I am working on. My friends and I would discuss the same problem I had the first time… “What is the point?”. My answer to this now is – it’s only good if you have something to say that you want to promote to people you don’t know. It makes sense this way, it gives you a reason to tweet your thoughts – the same as blogging!

Anyway, enjoy ezTweet – let me know your feedback and feature requests to make it even easier to tweet!

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 18th, 2009 and is filed under Social-Web, Technology, WordPress Plugins, ezTweet. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.