Last week, Twitter announced a new milestone – over 100 million active users are now registered with the service. While “40% of
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.