10 Fluid suggestions for Twitter's redesign

This got me asking myself “what sort of changes would I hope to see from Twitter?” So here it is: my top 10 wish list for the new changes to Twitter.

1. Like Facebook and LinkedIn I would like to see how many people you are following and followers you have in common with a friend. 3rd party web apps like http://twtrfrnd.com/ have had a crack at this already but it would be great to see it integrated.

2. A feature that showed how many people had viewed your Tweet would be valuable. I use TweetReach a lot to see how far one tweet I send out has gone. TweetReach measures how many people your Tweet has reached by looking at the number of people who mention a phrase and adding all their friends together. It’s awesome to see that your comment got retweeted 14 times and so reached over 6,000 people. By having the TweetReach under the tweets on your profile page you would be able to see how much of an impact you are making.

3. I am sure I wont be alone with this one, I want twitter to get rid of auto DM (direct message). I find that it’s impersonal and salesy. Also for the same reason I would like to get rid of the ability to automatically send tweets when you’re offline, surely twitter is all about being personal and engaging.

4. When searching for people, if you are looking for a common name it can take you forever to find people and go through the results. I want Integration with Twitter search and the facility to make it easier to find people in your local area or people with similar interests that you want to follow. I would also like this function to give you recommendations of people you might want to follow.

5. I would like the option see the @replies to a tweet, in a feed format, even if I am not following the people replying, some conversations and debates happen spontaneously and don’t use hashtags and I would like to see peoples response.

6. When searching your own or a followers Tweet history, instead of having to click “more” a 100 times to reach a single tweet it would be nice to filter tweets on peoples profile pages by key words or day, week and month.

7. I really wish Twitter would give users more control over the styling of your profile background. It would be great to have more options with your background design, whether it be centred patterns than can be tiled both vertically and horizontally or more flexibility with colour options.

8. Better search functionality is a big one for me and again I need a quicker and easier way to search through my followers and I’m following. If like me lists were not introduced until after you had acquired 500 followers it can be a nightmare going through them to make changes.

9. Having your homepage laid out with a number of feeds may suit regular users more. To be able to filter conversations on topic and location would be great without having to use a dashboard such as Netvibes.

10. For people like me who require statistical feedback on social media campaigns, I would like to be given some form of analytics-style interface where I can track how my account is being used and viewed. The most common barrier to entry for most people is that they simply ‘don’t get’ Twitter - so if they could be shown some tangible metrics that demonstrate the benefits of using Twitter then this would surely encourage businesses in particular to embrace this wonderful free service.

We have seen from the redesigns of Facebook that there always seems to be an instantaneous backlash. You’ll never be able to please everyone; however the dissenting voices seem to have gone very quiet of late. I expect a redesign of Twitter will no doubt encourage a similar response but whatever happens I for one am really excited to see what they come up with.

@MichelleDigital