Posts Tagged ‘twitter features’

What does Twitter do with Our Conversations?

January 31st, 2009

conversation

What happens to a conversation on a microblogging platform such as twitter? If I have a conversation with you about chess and we exchange a few tweets, then what? The conversation is lost, not indexed or searchable in any way. What if twitter allowed for everyone who’s talking about the same thing to be a part of the same conversation? Right now twittter is like a global chat room and conversation occur on a 1-1 basis or on a many to 1 basis.

Twitter should add a feature that allows for the categorization or organization of conversations. If I want to jump into a conversation with 30 other chess enthusiasts, I should be able to do so, but I can’t. There is a lot of information that is flowing around on twitter but it’s not being utilized. We have to rely on third party sites and applications that allow us do do things with twitter that twitter doesn’t allow us to do. So what could twitter do with all of the conversations?

  • allow me to search conversations based on category and allow me to see who else is participating in the conversation
  • trend the most popular conversations/discussions on twitter, almost like a google trends
  • allow me to tag or bring in other people into the conversation that I think can add value and information
  • a possible business model could be to create a market place around conversations with related products and services
  • allow for conversations to carry over from one platform to another

What are your ideas?  What could twitter do with all of the conversations that are going on online that goes beyond just using twitter search to search for keywords?  What if twitter became something like socialmedian but with instant communication?  It seems like there is a unique opportunity to make the most out of the conversations online, what will twitter do?  what would you like them to do?

Twitter Suggesting New People to Follow, How They Should Do It

January 17th, 2009

Have you seen this?  I just found out about it a few minutes ago.  If you go to your twitter homepage and click on “find people,” you will see a tab for “suggested users.”

twitter suggested followers

This is an interesting feature to add, however the way it stands right now, there is not a lot of relevancy that is being put into calculating these new suggested people to follow.  Among the people twitter suggested that I follow are:

  • Britney Spears
  • Shaq
  • Jet Blue
  • ESPN
  • NPR

I’d actually like to now what twitter is using to calculate these suggested people to follow, where did these recommendations come from?  Is this just a default list that everyone else sees as well?

How They Should Do It

Why not allow users to manipulate variables that they look for in people to follow.  For example, I want to follow someone who loves chess yet is also interested in social media and technology; can twitter recommend me such a person?  I’m sure they can.

How great would it be if you can have a little interface that let’s you customize search fields, you input the data you want and then twitter sends you a list of people who match your query.  I should be able to follow every other “jacob” out there if I wanted to, or every other person who is interested in chess, or bamboo carving (kidding).  Recommending someone just for the sake of a recommendation doesn’t do much good.  Let’s say that I was having a conversation with you about laptops and then all of a sudden I say “you know who I recommend for under water basket weaving?…”  That’s what the twitter recommendation engine feels like right now.

However, if I had the ability to customize my recommended followers I would probably be much more likely to follow and interact with them, don’t you think?

What do you think about twitter and they’re recommended follower feature, would you like to be able to customize this option to find people YOU are interested in?

Thanks for reading!