Ya gotta love Scoble when he decides to offer up constructive criticisms slash suggestions much like he did today in his post about Twitter’s numbers going flat.
He quite rightly pointed that any attempt to track Twitter numbers are bound for failure because a large portion of the users of the service don’t go anywhere neat the Twitter web page. In fact I wouldn’t be surprised if that over time Twitter’s number look like they are decreasing. In both cases it boils down to the simple reason that the largest number of Twitter users are using some third party client like Seesmic or TweetDeck.
All that aside though Robert offers up a bunch of ideas that he thinks would help Twitter gain new users. Here’s just a few of them to give you an idea.
4. Add comments to each tweet. 5. Make the new retweet feature more useful by showing much more information about each retweet. 6. Improve search so that it has some usefulness. 7. Integrate a game into Tweeting, like Foursquare has. Give out badges for good behavior. 8. Greatly expand the bio. Or, just scrap the bio and make a deal with Google to integrate Google Profiles ( here’s mine ) into Twitter. Make it easier to search for people and companies. 9. Get rid of the follower counts. They are a game that increases noise. 10. Get rid of the suggested user list and, instead, point people to Listorious or something like it, which would let people find groupings of people using Twitter (with a preview). 11. Give us a private Twitter that we can share just with our friends (and make it easy to choose where Tweets go). 12. Give us a much better direct messaging capability. Right now that’s very lame, even compared with the very lame Facebook capability. 13. Give us a major UI update. Time to take Twitter into 2010 and stop making it try to fit into a 2006 mindset.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not faulting Robert’s suggestion as many of them are good one. The only problem is that everything he is describing already exists.
It’s called – Friendfeed .
