Few suggestions to improve Twitter

I am a regular Twitter (but not an avid one) and generally find the service useful to stay up to date with what is going on in the world. However, there are a few things I would really like to see Twitter to take on in 2017.

Ability to view/follow other people’s curated feeds

I have found Twitter to be a wonderful medium to consume information. Be it articles, video, remarks, comments etc. on your topic of interest, Twitter has it all. However, for a new Twitter user and many times even for an experienced user, it is quite an effort to curate a quality feed to stay in the thick of things. Twitter has been trying to solve for this by giving recommendations of people to follow when a new user signs up but I don’t think this goes far enough.

I have read this from several sources and experienced it myself as well that Twitter is what you make of it. Your Twitter feed, apart from the ads, is essentially a manifestation of who you follow and it takes people months (if not years) and more to determine who they follow to optimize their feed.

Fred Wilson replying to a fellow VC, who was frustrated that Twitter is not doing much to improve the signal to noise ratio, that Twitter is what you make of it

As such, personally, one feature which I would like Twitter to add is the ability to view the feed of anyone else. This will enable me to experience what a good curated feed could looks like, identify tweeters who I want to follow based on their tweets and not spend significant time and effort to determine who to follow to curate my own feed. Several of the people I admire and share similar interests with, such as @benthompson or @fredwilson, follow 1000+ people and though Twitter shows me who they follow (though it requires lots of patience), I would love to see the content of their feeds and even follow it (given how much time they spend curating it) to avoid starting from scratch myself.

For new users, Twitter can even tweak their “people to follow” model by providing suggestions of “feeds to follow” which will immediately provide rich, high quality tweet content that people can start engaging with from the get-go. Over time, I expect people will adjust their feeds to their taste by following/unfollowing tweeters but this could be a worthwhile model to try out.

Build a Reddit style reply model

Twitter’s reply view. Note how the number of users in the tweet are falling off. It is unclear to me who is replying to whom at this point :(

Twitter’s reply model is broken. Just try expanding a Donald Trump tweet (for instance) and note how tough it is to follow the threaded conversation thereafter. Apart from clicking on “Show More” multiple times, it is difficult to visually figure out which thread you are expanding, which replies relate to which tweet and what thread you are following.

I think I have a workable alternate model here. Twitter could use reddit’s comment model to help users visualize all the replies (including sub replies) which are currently really hard to follow. Since reddit’s comment model takes care of multiple replies and multi-level replies, it could be an adequate fit for Twitter too given the parallelism. Also, since Twitter allows for retweeting and hearting replies (which could be used as proxies for reddit votes), Twitter can rank its replies threads based on that to show the most popular ones at the top.

This may not be the default reply view but I would be more than grateful if there is an option to switch over to this reddit style reply view for some tweets where I am keen to read alternate viewpoints or conversations and that have had large amounts of engagement. I have found some true gems in Twitter’s reply threads but, again, it takes time, effort and patience to navigate through it.

Ability to have a “Read Later” mode for tweets with link to articles/video

I am not sure if this is a unique request (and how common this behavior is) but I generally like to go through my entire Twitter feed (or as much as possible depending on my time), remember which tweets are linked to interesting articles (or videos) and then go back to them. The reason I do this is because I want to gauge the quality of all articles in my feed before choosing which to read vs. reading them on a first come first serve basis. However, the challenge in doing this is obvious. I have to literally remember which tweets were interesting and go back to them once I am done perusing my feed. I would love for Twitter to have a “read later” mode where I can quickly earmark tweets which I want to come back to later — currently I hack this using the heart button but that doesn’t seem natural. This can potentially also happen with an integration with Pocket or Instapaper if that is more common with users.

Another way to think through a solution here is whether Twitter can help surface tweets which I am more likely to engage with algorithmically — which has been something they’ve been trying. I have found this feature to be quite useful — especially their “While you were away” implementation — but not good enough (yet) to keep me from not perusing my entire feed.

Rich real time content experiences with Twitter

I might be rambling now but I feel that Twitter should also focus on creating rich in app experiences that focusses on its strength i.e. real time. Currently, this experience manifests itself in the form of tweets in timeline which are easy to miss (either buried in the timeline or you are not following the right people). Moments tries to solve this but I think it still misses the mark since it never really rises beyond tweets — and into content which is what users like me care about.

One way to realize this is through partnerships with online/mobile first publishers such as Buzzfeed, Vox, Cheddar TV etc. who can create exclusive content for major events unfolding in real time (where Twitter is strong) in exchange for Twitter driving large swaths of traffic as well as providing necessary tools (such as quick access to real time tweets; Twitter is uniquely positioned to be successful here) for content creation. The content itself could be a mix of text, images and videos etc. (and not restricted to just tweets) which users can view and potentially engage with. Though these partnerships might be expensive to setup, it could be worth a shot as it enables Twitter to abstract itself out from just tweets & timeline and morph into a platform for rich realtime content experiences — which even new users, with zero/very few follows and followers will also care about.