Holes in the Fabric of Twitter

(Written by guest contributor Tim Golen)

Twitter grows more popular each and every day and more and more users are discovering it and putting it to use. Since the beginning, Twitter has struggled to meet this demand and it has been a big challenge for them to not only meet the current demand that their users have, but also to provide additional value to those users. One of the reasons that I have been reluctant to use Twitter on an everyday basis is that it seems very inefficient to me. There are tools out there that provide more efficiency, but none of them are all-in-one solutions, which forces me to use two or three extra services just to feel like I’m not wasting my time on Twitter. I will be looking at several features that Twitter lacks, and I will be proposing solutions to overcome those obstacles.

One-Click Follow Button

The follow button is possibly the most important part of Twitter. It allows you to follow others, and it allows others to follow you. It makes an invisible social connection between two people. The problem is that there is no easy way to post a follow button on your website or blog that people can click on to follow you. There are currently three solutions to this problem.

You can provide a link to your Twitter page where people can click on the follow button. This is not desirable because it takes people off of your site, and it takes multiple clicks, which will decrease the chance that someone will make it through the entire process.

You can code your own button on your website to integrate with the Twitter API. This is not desirable because it takes a lot of technical skill and most people will be unable to do this.

The third option is to use the script that I found on this site: http://TwitPwr.com/oneclick/, which uses some invisible HTML features to do the follow feature. The downside to this option is that the button cannot receive a response from Twitter, so you won’t actually know if you successfully followed someone until you look at your Twitter account.

The solution that I propose is a simple copy-and-paste widget that you can place on any website with a minimal amount of technical skill and effort. When clicked on once, it will allow someone to be followed. If that person is already being followed, it will display that fact.

Autoresponder

This feature will only appeal to people who are Internet marketers at heart. An autoresponder sends someone messages according to a specific schedule, and typically there is no interaction between the parties. Many people frown at this type of activity on Twitter, claiming that it removes the social aspect of Twitter, and the messages are viewed as spam. There are some third party solutions that exist out there, but they are more like message schedulers than anything. The kind of solution that I would like to see would have features like auto-following people who follow you, sending follow-up email messages, sending direct messages, and @replying to people. As of right now, there are no all-in-one tools that can do these things.

Short URLs

With a message length that is limited to 140 characters, each character that you use in a status update is very valuable. When posting links in messages, many people use short URLs. There are several services out there that provide the ability to turn a long and confusing URL into a URL that is less than 20 characters, such as http://twitpwr.com. A proper solution would be to have this functionality built into Twitter.

Posting Images

No, you can’t post an image directly into a tweet, but you can upload an image and link to it. This brings up the problem of having to work with another service to handle the uploading of the file, and then a service that links to the file like http://www.twitpic.com. That seems like a lot of work to me. It would be much more efficient to be able to post images directly into a tweet (like an image text message), or for Twitter to provide an automatic service to integrate this functionality directly into their interface.

Conclusion

Twitter had many oversights when they began to expand their service, and they failed to plan for scalability and demand. They rely on hundreds of third party tools in order to provide a platform that is comparable to the relatively simple and comprehensive Facebook status update service. Twitter either needs to begin to expand the functionality of their current platform to take complete control over it, or they need to provide a framework for other developers to build solutions and integrate them into Twitter.