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Tell DLS: Twitter - what would you change?
We recently posted a piece about whether a URL should really count towards your 140 character limit. We also posted yesterday about Twitter's new re-tweet model and this set me thinking about what I like and don't like about Twitter and what i'd change.
Although Twitter's roots are in SMS - hence the 140 character limit - i'd love to see a standard for tweeting longer content. I would love to be able to tweet, say, 420 characters (i.e. 3 x 140) and have the Twitter systems able to deal with that. For people on SMS it could read (1/3), (2/3) etc, but the Twitter site itself and client applications could display the full message 'reconstructed'.
Ånother feature I would like to see on Twitter, which would probably need to be implemented by client developers, would be a spoiler tag. I read my Twitter feed very frequently, but one example of where this is inconvenient is when i've timeshifted some sport (e.g. F1!) and my tweets read like a running commentary! If my clients could support a spoiler tag, where I had to 'click to reveal' the content (and of course my friends were disciplined enough to use it) then that would solve the problem! I imagine a tweet would look something like "#f1 #spoiler Hamilton and Button just got taken out at the first corner!' - and all content after the #spoiler tag is hidden until I click.
As it is I just try and avoid Twitter until i've watched the event.
They are a couple of things I'd love to see to improve my Twitter experience, but i'm really interested to hear what Twitter fans here on DownloadSquad would change about the service.
Feel free to share in the comments, and don't forget you can follow us on Twitter via @DownloadSquad.
Comments
13
Subscribe to commentsBugMeNotSep 23rd 2009 4:33PM
I would make the posts less useless...
I guess Twitter would then be a failure though, so I dunno!
WesSep 23rd 2009 4:42PM
I'd probably scrap the site, it's pretty darn useless.
skalpaSep 23rd 2009 4:43PM
He said "Twitter fans".
So people who thinks what should be changed about humanity is actually the fact there exists "Twitter fans", stay out of this one....
TheCrusherSep 23rd 2009 5:58PM
Man, for the love of give us 160 characters. It's just those 20 characters I need to make sense in life.
RGSep 23rd 2009 6:08PM
LOL, comment of the week
LarsSep 23rd 2009 6:17PM
I wish Twitter would at least consider taking on some of the benefits once offered by the now defunct Pownce: longer posts than 140 characters, better page designs (to these eyes anyway), the ability to post links as you do in Facebook, an event invitation feature that if widely used could relieve many of us of eVite, and if I recall correctly the ability to comment on posts without creating a new post. Pownce was apparently too good to be true.
ctralka828Sep 23rd 2009 7:38PM
I wish Twitter would let you stay logged in on multiple computers, like every other website out there. I can use Facebook for example in my room at college, and then check it in the library, and when I get back to my room, I'm still logged in. Why can't Twitter do this?
quantaSep 23rd 2009 9:19PM
I wish Twitter gave me threaded views of replies.
Actually there are a lot of usability gaps that can be filled that I'm currently using troynt's Greasemonkey script to take care of.
KorangulationSep 23rd 2009 11:53PM
Would be nice if we talked less about twitter here. Just sayin'
LalloSep 24th 2009 12:12AM
I would like to see a Save feature for tweets you want to save, but not have anyone view. I now Favorite tweets only to come back to them because I was using my phone at the time.
BlaqueSaberSep 24th 2009 12:24AM
ENTER
I'd like the enter button to send the tweet rather than create a new line which is useless
ATTACH
Attaching files much the way POWNCE used to let you do
URL
Don't penalize us for url's let us have a separate line for them
STREAM
Let me "off-shoot" my stream to have a private tweet session with one or more of my followers from time to time
Duncan MaileSep 24th 2009 9:02AM
Report as spam button. I swear I would have about 2 followers if it wasnt for spammers
JimFSep 24th 2009 11:56AM
Don't count @reply names or #hashtags in character counts.