The Perfect Twitter Client
Hey, have you guys heard about this new thing called Twitter? Yeah, I know … it is great that our little geek way of staying connected at SXSW has really blown up. The reality is that Twitter has hit the main stream; heck my Local FOX5 news broadcast has commercials now advertising their Twitter account. When your Twitter account trumps your website, you know things are changing. With Twitter’s ever growing popularity comes with it a change in who is using the application and how they are using the application. For many of us, it is hard to adapt to the changing environment; so I ask for a change in environment.
I ask for the perfect Twitter client. I think Twitter does what Twitter does and that is great. But how I interact with that data and those relationships can be molded and crafted into the perfect little Twitter experience; but it’d have to be done through a client. I advocate through a client, because it is easier to create without Twitter directly and I know change within Twitter is often difficult.
What if I’d rather “Listen” than “Follow”
Imagine a client where you don’t directly follow anyone, but more so just elect to display tweets from select users within the public stream. Think the Instant Messenger days; I can add and remove you from my “buddy list” with no sense of guilt or worry. Sometimes user tweets are meaningful or important or of interest to you contextually around an event or date. Perhaps there is a grouping of people who I want to listen to during an event like SXSW but not at other time during the year. When you listen rather than follow, you have more control in the signal vs. noise ratio; you can turn down the distractions to better hear the quality. Think of it like a mute button for some!
I like Groups, you like Groups, lets have Groups!
Imagine if we could join groups, like the “SXSW” group and then other people could elect to listen to the tweets from that group. While at an event like SXSW, there is a lot of clutter to shift through, so image being able to just for that week tone down the voice of those not at SXSW and elect to listen to those at the event; of course with the ability to delete the users of no interest to you. This comes back to a volume control issue.
It’s me, not you – no it is you, but only sometimes
Imagine if we could create a list of terms to which we could elect to not view tweets if they contain those terms. Taking it a set further, imagine being able to pick from pre-created groupings of terms that we could ignore. Lets say that now we are post-election, you’ve had enough of all the politics; wouldn’t it be great to ignore tweets containing words like “Obama”, “Palin”, “GOP”, “Democrat” – but you can trump that by ensuring that words like “Inauguration” and “Clinton” still show in your stream”, because they still hold relevance to you. It would also be very powerful for those at work that want to isolate profanity in the workplace.
Rick Roll This! Censorship is awesome, when I am in control of the censoring
Imagine a client where not everything is a masked behind a TinyURL; where on hover of any URL we can see a tool-tip with the ultimate end destination. No more Rick Rolling for you my friend! Many of us don’t want to click on a YouTube link; many of us have jobs that send us little notes when the IT department notices we’ve gone to Facebook or YouTube. Just a nice little way to see where you are going before you get there.
In this social web, it is all about Ratings, lets rate some shit
We all love Pandora right? Because it finds music it thinks we like and continues to improve itself as we continue to tell it what we do and don’t like. Imagine a Twitter client where I can rate your Tweets – I might not be ready to “unfollow” you right now, but a system that knows after 5+ negative ratings, you get kicked to the curb. The reality is that we don’t know everyone we follow on Twitter, and that isn’t what Twitter is about – this isn’t instant messenger. We try our best to qualify a person to see if they are “worth following” – we do this by seeing what friends we have in common, what they say, how often they say it and what that little bio says about them. This is just a little tool set to your preference that helps automate the un-following process.
It is all about who you know, who the funk do you know?
Imagine if you could see who we have in common before following one another. I just want to see who you know that I know; think LinkedIn style. If you follow a bunch of web designers in my circle, then that might tell me you have enough of your shit together to be worth listening to on Twitter.
I’ll follow you if you follow me; wait, how do I know if you are following me?
Imagine if we could easily see if someone of interest is following us? Twitter makes it easy for us to know if we are following someone or not, but it is very difficult to find out if that person is following us.
I am no developer and have no ability to build such a client; but I’ve heard people bitch and complain enough to know many share my sentiment in that that above features would be a very very nice-to-have.
I hate feature bloat as much as the next fellow; however, Twitter is an ever changing environment. I just hope there are some people more smart and more talented than me out there building to help some of the early adopters adapt to this change in environment.
What are your ideas for a better Twitter experience?
Share, share share … I am curious what other features people would want to help us use Twitter better.
- November 13th, 2008
- 17comments
- I am a proud member of the 9rules network
I agree 100% with all of this as I’ve been recently brainstorming a client and all of these issues you addressed are on my list. I am still debating what platform to build it on? I’m curious to know what others would prefer. Web based? AIR? Native App?
I am 100% with you about the “listen-only” and groups features. Sometimes I love what people have to say about events, but hate the flood of irrelevant tweets later on. I also agree about feature bloat, so if Twitter would just add those two things, I’d be so happy.
Also, I need a big damn search bar at the top of the page. I do not like having to sniff around for a tiny link just to search everyone’s tweets.
Being able to follow someone, but “Mute!” them would be a great feature like you and Dan were talking about.
Twitter is the perfect example of keeping an idea simple, and letting the users adapt the app themselves through the way they use it. The great thing is that all these requests could be done through a third-party twitter client.
Thanks for the comments guys — I suspect a lot of people are looking for their particular sets of “features” I need a bad ass app that perhaps is a bit bloated but where I can maybe pick and choose what I want to keep the bloat down?
I was thinking WordPress style; where the base application is pretty simple and straightforward; bloat removed — but built in a way to have much much much more power for personal preference than the base.
I native apps work best for Twitter; especially when talking about the iPhone.
that was spot on. I couldn’t agree with you more. As everyone would mute me when I’m in a contrarian mood and I’d mute you during happy hours. :)
Alas perfection is never attainable but just implementig a few of your ideas would be of great benefit to the twitterverse.
FWIW, present.ly has at least two of those features — groups, and an easy way to see who’s following you.
Full disclosure: it’s an Intridea product. But you guys at nclud might love it: http://www.presentlyapp.com There’s also a free version that’s probably big enough for your firm.
I think Michael echoes my opinion on this perfectly - keep it simple and let the users develop a way to manage the noise.
This is something I’ve wanted to see in a twitter client since day one. Such features have been especially handy, as you pointed out, during the debates when some followees took to live-tweeting their entirety. Anything containing an interesting link or tidbit of information or anything else was buried under a pile of jokes about John McCain’s age.
Alternatively, it would fun to see a client tailored for those who recognize they have a Twitter problem. Something where you can impose your own limits on how many tweets (so you’re not so spammy) or @ replies (so you don’t use as IM). I don’t know, call it Twittervention or something (sadtrombone.com). Just saying…
Joe, Thanks for sharing … time to check it out.
part of me agrees and part of me doesn’t. The neat thing about Twitter is the overarching simplicity of the whole thing, and I feel like adding groups etc would in many cases compromise that ultimately great vision.
Then again, I really would love the ability to only “listen” to certain users that I follow. I guess I could even put together various “listen” filters - that would act like groups, except they would be strictly client-side - so that I could create one specifically for SXSW and one explicitly for my personal friends and etc. Maybe each filter also spawns its own RSS feed, if you’re into that sort of thing.
There’s definitely room for The Killer Twitter App. I’d probably do it in flash. I was poking around with the API a bit for AS3, and it seems doable. If only I could find some time to play with it…
(edit: BTW, I’m Mykola. Who are you?)
I agree, I want to keep Twitter simple and elegant … but using the API, there is definitely room for a killer app.
I am mringlein on twitter.
client side definition of groups or whatnot would probably be a good way to go. However, I think it would be valuable to easily be able to synch your client data between multiple machines for those who use twitter on more than one computer.
Flash/flex front end would be a fine way to go. I’m not sure the language of choice would really make much difference so long as the UI remained drop dead simple and usable; even with all these handy new features.
I mostly use “SocialThing” right now for all my microblogging, but a more useful tool that could help me not only filter out the signal from the noise, but to also help me find interesting/useful tweets to read would be great.
I’m almost always finalcut
I know I am guilty of at least two things: Overtweeting (when it’s slow at work :( forgive me) and sometimes getting caught up in chat. But I don’t want to be rude and not reply most times and plus I adore my Twitter pals. Just sayin’. ;)
So what if … to eliminate chat sessions you could choose by a quick click that your “@” reply is “private” to only that person? Somehow only they “see” the reply. Then you don’t have to worry about clicking to another Twitter window to message them, nor do you have to log into another app to either chat with that person or email - especially if you have no further contact info for that Twitter pal.
Automatically, if/when the other person replies, the string of “@” replies between both people should stay private until one chooses to make it visible to all.
Or like your ratings idea … maybe there could be a limit on “@” replies between people in the form of a counter just as a reminder that you’re about to overchat your welcome on Twitter.
I mean that I follow a lot of friends or people whose work interests me, but that some of them are very frequent posters whose posts aren’t very interesting. I don’t want to “unfollow” them, but for the purposes of casual twittering I’d love to get their stuff to not show up in my general feed.
It’s actually a main reason why I don’t use twitter more - as it stands if I don’t check it twice a day I get a page backlogged, ya know?
Mykola Yes! totally feel you there… Being able to filter out those kinds of people would be very useful… Which you can do from tweetdeck if you set up groups (main reason i started using it) but it would be nice if it was an option to configure directly from twitter…
I forgot my biggest feature request!!!
When our perfect client goes mobile, for the love of god … you know I am on the mobile, so when you encounter a URL from Flickr, Facebook, etc. … redirect me to the mobile version of those websites!!!
It would be so easy and make my viewing experience so much better, not to mention much quicker.
Hey, great post. Some friends and I had some very similar ideas, particularly with regard to filtering and muting.
Fortunately, they’re much smarter than I and we were able to build twalala a (not yet fully-featured) web-based twitter client that allows you to filter out what you do and don’t see in your twitterstream.
Based on the quality of the comments found here, we’d love it if you or your readers would take it for a spin and let us know what you think, particularly how we might improve it. (We’re currently working on feature parity, and are missing some key elements.)
Thanks.
@sondernagle
TJ,
Thanks for sharing … I will definitely check this out and pass along the link to Twalala