Last week, Twitter announced a new milestone – over 100 million active users are now registered with the service. While “40% of Twitter users simply log on to read Tweets from others,” I’m left wondering about what’s next for those who actually publish messages on the platform?
As the company matures, I’m sure that there is a lot of debate over how Twitter should evolve. Charles Arthur from The Guardian raised a good point over whether Twitter should focus on being a “media company or a technology company?”
If they go the way of a media company, helping organizations and individuals to publish their own content and messages in real-time, there are some tools that I’d like to see developed.
I’ve put together a wish list of things that might useful to publishers:
- Enabling people to publish their messages in Rich Text Format. It’s currently difficult to emphasize certain words unless you put them in quotation marks or ALL CAPS.
- Making the hashtag experience less awkward. Perhaps hashtags shouldn’t actually be visible in the Tweet but included somehow on the back-end of a message, just like “meta data” in HTML code? That would also allow more room for your messages, when being limited to 140 characters (another limitation that might need to be altered).
- Making discussions around an event or location easier to find and participate in the conversation. Toronto startup Crowdfield may be on to something with their location-based conversation discovery app. If there are multiple conversations happening simultaneously at a conference or location, it can be confusing to follow just one hashtag at the same time. How does one decipher one conversation from another? There’s got to be a better solution for this.